Money as love and control: parents and adult children

“My parents bought us the flat. And now they have a key.”

A thirty-two-year-old says this half laughing, because the picture really is funny: a mother who unlocks the door on a Saturday morning, brings soup and rearranges the kitchen while she is at it. But the laughter fades quickly. Because a key is not just a key. It is proof that the flat was a gift that never quite passed into his hands. And every time he wants to say “please call first”, another voice speaks up: “How dare you, after everything they have given you?”

In families where money is not scarce, it is often talked about less than elsewhere. It doesn’t need counting, so it seems not to be an issue. Yet that is exactly where money often takes over a role that words should have: it says “I love you”, it says “I worry about you” and sometimes also “I am still the one who decides”. In this post I want to write about how love and control become intertwined between parents and adult children — and how both sides can untangle one from the other without breaking the bond.

When money speaks instead of words

Financial help for adult children is not the exception but the rule. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 59% of American parents with children aged 18 to 34 had helped those children financially in the past year. I don’t have a comparable figure for Slovenia, but anyone who knows the Slovenian housing market knows that many young couples would never get a home of their own without their parents’ help.

So help in itself is not the problem. The problem arises when money becomes a language — the only one in which a parent dares to say what they feel, and the only one in which a child knows how to measure their own worth. Then something happens in the family that resembles a couple’s recurring arguments: one thing is being talked about, another is meant. The talk is about the nursery bill; the meaning is “do you still need me?”.

Karen Fingerman and her colleagues, studying what they called intense support of grown children, found an interesting duality. Grown children who received a lot of support from their parents — financial, practical and emotional — reported better psychological wellbeing and greater life satisfaction. Parents who felt their children needed too much support, on the other hand, were less satisfied with their own lives. Support is neither good nor bad in itself. What decides it is what we carry with it.

A gift with a string attached

I have found it helpful to distinguish between a gift and a gift with a string. A gift is given. Once it passes to the other person, it is theirs — they can use it as they wish, even in ways the giver would not. A gift with a string stays pinned to the giver. Nobody has said explicitly that anything is expected in return, but both sides know it is.

The strings are rarely crude. Rarely does anyone say “I’ll pay your tuition if you study law.” Far more often they are quiet:

• An expected visit. A weekend in the seaside house your father bought is not an invitation but an obligation.
• A right to an opinion. Whoever paid for the wedding claims a say in who is invited and where you will live.
• Control over spending. “Not that I’m criticising, but another new car?”
• Gratitude as a standing tax. The expectation that the child will show, again and again, that they know how much they have received.
• Decisions that become hard to make. Moving abroad, changing jobs or leaving a partner the parents “support” — all of these become possible only at the cost of the relationship.

The strings are not always malicious. Often they are an expression of fear: a parent who built everything themselves fears that without their support the child will fail. Or they cannot imagine how they could be present in the child’s life other than through money. But the child doesn’t see the fear. They only see the string.

The invisible ledger in a family

Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, one of the founders of family therapy, described something he called invisible loyalties. In every family there runs a kind of ledger of entitlements and debts — who gave what to whom, who went without, who owes. This ledger is written down nowhere, yet everyone feels it. When it is more or less balanced, the family is a place of trust. When one column keeps filling and the other doesn’t, a feeling arises that someone owes someone something forever.

Money is especially dangerous in this ledger because it can be measured. Love can’t be counted; a flat has a price. A child who has received a great deal may feel that their debt can never be repaid — and that it must be paid off in obedience, visits or never disappointing. A parent, meanwhile, may unconsciously expect that the care they invested will one day be “returned” as a closeness the child cannot give.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we would say that old, unprocessed feelings are carried over into new relationships. A parent who grew up in want and never received anything without conditions may, with no ill intent, give the way they were given to: with a bill attached. That is why in therapy we often look one generation further back, at how money and love worked for the grandparents. I have written more about what we carry forward from our family of origin in Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?

Differentiation: being yourself without leaving

The key concept for understanding why some people accept financial help lightly while others feel suffocated by it is differentiation. Murray Bowen described it as the ability to stay in contact with your family while keeping your own thoughts, feelings and decisions. A differentiated person can accept their parents’ help without handing over their will. And they can also turn the help down without having to break off the relationship.

A less differentiated relationship has two typical forms. In the first, the child accepts everything, strings and all, and gradually loses the sense of which decisions are theirs. In the second, they cut themselves off: they refuse every euro, move away and end contact, because it seems the only way to remain themselves. From the outside these two paths look opposite, but in truth they are two sides of the same fusion. Both mean that, next to the parent, they cannot be close and independent at the same time. I have written more about these two extremes in Fused or cut off: two ways a relationship loses its balance.

The years between twenty and thirty-five are especially important for this separation — and that is precisely when financial help is greatest. No wonder things get stuck there. I describe how the process unfolds in Between 20 and 35: why this is the key time for becoming independent from your parents.

What is happening on the parents’ side

In conversations about this, parents can quickly become the villains. That would be unfair. Most parents who give with strings attached don’t do it because they want control, but because they don’t know how else to stay important.

Among affluent parents who built their wealth themselves, I notice a few recurring motives. One is the fear that an easy life will keep the child immature — and so, paradoxically, they supervise a little more with every transfer. Another is loneliness: once the children grow up, money is one of the few things that still brings them home. A third is an unspoken sadness that the child lives differently from how they imagined, and that money cannot change this — yet they try anyway.

Where parents manage their wealth through a family business, money and relationship are even more intertwined. The child is not only a child but also a future successor, employee or shareholder. Every conversation about whether they will take over the company is at the same time a conversation about whether their father still loves them if they don’t.

Here a question opens up that parents rarely hear, yet it is essential: what would remain between us if there were no money? If the answer is “I don’t know”, that is not a verdict. It is an invitation to build the relationship on something else as well.

Here is a short dialogue that shows how this sounds in everyday life (composed, not a real person):

Mother: “I saw you went on a trip again. I’m glad for you, but didn’t you say you were saving for nursery?”
Daughter: “Mum, how do you even know we went on a trip?”
Mother: “It’s on the account we share. I just worry.”
Daughter: “I know you worry. But when you go through my spending, I feel like I’m still in secondary school. Could we split the account? I’d like you to help me, not to watch over me.”
Mother (after a silence): “I didn’t know you felt that way. I thought it was helping you.”

In this short exchange something important happens: the string becomes visible. The mother is not wicked and the daughter is not ungrateful. Both have just said out loud, for the first time, what goes on between them when money moves from one account to another.

Gratitude and resentment at the same time

People who have received a great deal from their parents often carry two feelings that seem incompatible: gratitude and resentment. They are grateful for the security the support has given them. And they resent that it came with a sense of never being entirely free — or that what they have achieved is not really theirs.

Many suppress the resentment because it feels shameful. How can you resent someone who paid for your flat? But suppressed resentment doesn’t disappear. It shows up as irritability at innocent questions, in avoiding family lunches or in sudden outbursts over trifles. Sometimes it shows up as guilt that won’t go away. Whether it is guilt that tells you something or guilt that simply keeps you in check, you can explore with Healthy guilt and toxic guilt: how to tell them apart.

If a parent uses guilt deliberately — “after everything I’ve given you” — this is already the pattern I describe in When others keep you in guilt: recognising emotional blackmail. Mostly, though, it is not planned blackmail but a confusion of two languages: the parent speaks in the language of money, the child hears it in the language of worth.

Gratitude and resentment can exist side by side. Once you allow that, neither has to hide from the other any more.

Exercise: a map of the money strings

You can do this exercise on your own if you are an adult child, or as a parent who wants to look at their own giving. Take half an hour and a sheet of paper.

1. List all the flows of money. What goes from your parents to you (or from you to your child)? A flat, tuition, help with nursery fees, a joint account, a car, holidays, a position in the family business.
2. For each one, write down what has been said. Is there a clear agreement? A time limit? A condition? Was it really meant as a gift?
3. Write down what is unspoken. What do you feel is expected in return — visits, obedience, gratitude, silence on certain subjects?
4. Rate the weight. Give each flow a number from 0 (completely light) to 10 (smells of reins). Pick the one with the highest score.
5. Write one sentence. For that flow, write a sentence with which you could name the string out loud — without accusation. For example: “I’m grateful for your help with the flat. I’d like us to agree on when you come over, because it matters to me that this is our home.” You don’t have to say it. It is enough to have it.

Many people discover in this exercise that the heaviest flow is the one they thought was entirely innocent. And that the sentence they write is the first one they have ever managed to think about it.

How to talk about it

A conversation about money between parents and adult children is one of the hardest there is, because it touches the two most sensitive subjects at once: love and autonomy. A few things help:

Start with the gratitude you genuinely feel. Not as a tactic, but because it is real. A parent who feels their help has been seen can more easily hear that it also has a price.

Talk about yourself, not about them. “When you go through my spending, I feel controlled” is a sentence that can be heard. “You always control me” is a sentence that sets off a defence.

Separate the help from the relationship. Sometimes the most freeing thing to say is: “I’d like us to see each other even if you never gave me anything.” It tells the parent that their place in your life does not depend on money.

Be ready for less. Setting boundaries sometimes means that part of the support falls away. If you are determined to cut the string, ask yourself whether you are ready to carry the consequences. If you are not, that is no disgrace — it simply means you need a little more time or a different route. The tool Sentences for setting boundaries can help you with the first steps.

If you are a parent, the most important question you can ask yourself is: am I giving so that my child can live their own life, or so that they will live the one I think is right? Both are human. But only the first is a gift.

When the subject is tangled up with the balance of power in a couple — for instance when one partner’s parents’ money shapes the decisions of both —, it makes sense to talk about it as a couple too. I write about this in more detail in Money and power in a couple: when one partner earns most.

In therapy it often turns out that a conversation about money opens the door to conversations the family has never had: about what it was like when the children were small, who was at home and who wasn’t, what money was making up for. Once that conversation gets going, money often loses some of its weight. Not because there is less of it, but because it no longer has to carry everything nobody ever said.

Where this view falls short

I wouldn’t want this post to be read as a claim that all parental help is suspect. It isn’t.

Sometimes help is simply help. Young people in Slovenia leave the parental home later than the European average, and for many, housing prices are out of reach without support. Accepting help is not a sign of immaturity, and offering help is not a sign of control. Many families manage it with ease — and this post is not about them.

Cultural context matters. In some families and cultures, the intergenerational weaving of money and care is normal and nobody experiences it as control. Differentiation does not mean everyone must separate from their parents financially. It means being able to decide for yourself even while connected.

Legal and financial questions are not a subject for therapy. How to arrange a deed of gift, inheritance, ownership or succession in a family business is a matter for a lawyer, a notary or a financial adviser. Therapy can help you start talking about it without a fight — it cannot and must not replace the experts for those decisions.

Where there is abuse, the answer lies elsewhere. If a parent or partner uses money to intimidate, to exert total control or to threaten, this may be economic abuse. In Slovenia, help is available on the SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence, 080 11 55 (in Slovenia), and in an emergency call the police on 113 (in Slovenia).

What therapy can offer

When a family or couple gets stuck on this subject, it is sometimes easier with a third person in the room who is not part of the ledger of entitlements and debts. My role is not to judge who is right, but to help everyone hear what the other is really saying — beneath the level of money. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

With this subject a longer session is often useful, in which we draw a genogram together and look at how money has travelled through the generations. I offer such a session under the name A Look into the Past. Many people see for the first time that their father did not give with strings because he wanted control, but because all his life he had been waiting for a gift without conditions.

What to remember

• Financial help from parents to adult children is common and is neither good nor bad in itself — what decides it is what travels with it.
• The difference between a gift and a gift with a string lies in the unspoken expectation both sides feel.
• Gratitude and resentment can exist side by side; once you allow that, you don’t have to hide one from the other.
• Differentiation means you can accept or decline help without losing yourself or the relationship.
• Legal and financial questions belong with a lawyer or notary; therapy helps you to be able to talk about them.