Money Matters, Especially When It’s Time to Leave Home

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H.L. Mencken once astutely noted, “When someone says it’s not about the money… you know it’s about the money.”

There are numerous challenges associated with launching your young adult toward self-reliance. One of those challenges has to do with understanding your relationship with your child, of course, but another one has to do with understanding your relationship with money.

Successful parenting at this stage often entails recognizing how your relationship with your child and your relationship with money are in constant conversation with each other—a conversation that can promote or stymie the emergence of independent adulthood, depending on its candor and depth.

This post, and several that follow on the same theme, will help you to engage in this conversation more thoughtfully and insightfully—not only with your young adult but also with yourself.

Money does indeed exist simply as currency—most fundamentally, it is a means of exchange for goods and services, taking a form that enables it to be stored or disbursed.

But money is much more than that—the way in which it is earned, shared, saved, invested, and spent is a profound and enduring marker of issues that are essential to the human condition.

Money is highly personal and means different things to different people—it functions as a stand-in for love, for power, for justice, for freedom, for fairness, for security, for success, for safety, for commitment, and for countless other indicators of human relatedness.

Here are some common examples of how this can play out within a family:

• Money can be requested, offered, or accepted as an expression of love… or of hate.
• Money can be withheld or given or spent heedlessly as an expression of anger, hostility, disappointment, or resentment.
• Money can be actively or passively demanded of one family member by another family member in an effort to exact retribution or revenge or to engage in extortion.
• Money can be supplied by one family member in an effort to restrict another family member’s growth.
• Money can be supplied by one family member in an effort to spur another family member’s growth.
• Money can be given in ways that make a family member feel good or that make a family member feel patronized or diminished.
• Money can be administered or withdrawn in an effort to demonstrate who does and who doesn’t have power within the family.
• Money can bring family members closer to each other or alienate them from each other.
• Money can be offered to a family member out of genuine love, as a substitute for love, or to relieve the guilt of not feeling loving enough.

It is for these reasons that knowing more about how we focus on money—and what money symbolizes for us—can enhance our relationships not only with our children but also with our partners and ourselves.