29 States Have 'Filial Responsibility Laws' Requiring Adult Children To Care For Their Elderly Parents
With the coming tidal wave of Boomer retirements, many of their kids are deeply resentful of these laws.
YAKOBCHUK VIACHESLAV | Shutterstock According to the 2020 Census, there are more than 76 million boomers in America today. With the generation having been born between 1946 and 1964, that means a tidal wave of retirees — an estimated four million boomers — will hit the age of 65 every single year through 2027.
The impacts of that "graying" of this enormous generation present myriad economic and healthcare challenges — ones that pretty much nobody seems ready to meet. As children of boomers are finding out, some states have a solution to this that strikes many as outright infuriating.
29 states have 'filial' laws that force adult kids to care for their elderly parents.
At this point, the numbers do not lie — boomers had it astonishingly easier than pretty much every generation before and after them, having come of age and lived most of their lives in a stable economy in which wages, housing costs, prices of goods and inflation were moderate compared to today.
However, that has not translated into the generation being ready for retirement. A 2023 Georgetown study found that two-thirds of boomers do not have enough assets to sustain them through the average 20-year retirement, and in 2022, the Federal Reserve found that 43% of boomers have no retirement savings whatsoever.
So who is going to take care of all these rapidly aging boomers with no safety net? Well, in 29 states, their Gen X, millennial, and Gen Z kids may be forced into the job, whether they can afford to or not.
They're called "filial laws," after the Latin-derived word for son or daughter, and they require an elderly person's kids to pay for any healthcare costs not covered by Medicare or insurance — which are often staggering amounts for those who require long-term care like nursing homes.
Filial laws require adult children to pay for everything from basic necessities like groceries to mental healthcare.
The states with filial laws on the books are Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia. Puerto Rico also has filial laws.
The details vary from state to state, but filial laws don't apply to everyone or every situation. Generally, filial laws come into play when an elderly person is indigent, on social assistance for basic needs, doesn't qualify for Medicaid or Medicare assistance with long-term care, or it is established that their children can afford to pay for their nursing home bills.
It's important to note that experts say these laws rarely come to bear. But many also expect that the tsunami of boomer retirees will change this, because of their inadequate savings and the strain they will place on state and federal social services like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
For context, the generation before the boomers, the silent generation, is not only the smallest in 100 years due to the forces of the Depression and World War II, but they also came of age at a time when pensions, now almost entirely a thing of the past, were common benefit at jobs. Roll that together, and the boomers present a challenge that is orders of magnitude more difficult than those before them.
Many children of boomers are furious that they may be subject to these laws.
Dip into the subject of filial laws on social media, and the rage on the part of millennials, Gen Z'ers, and many younger Gen X'ers in the so-called "sandwich generation" is palpable.
"The boomer generation has quite literally had every single public benefit handed directly to them," a TikToker named Clare, known as @lacroix_goth on the app, said in a video about the subject. "And they pulled the ladder up behind them as they moved up."
She's not wrong — the boomer generation has, again and again, voted in favor of politicians who have presided over the erosion of pretty much every hallmark of the U.S. economy that used to protect workers, the middle class, and the elderly, including retirements.
Chief among them is the introduction of the 401(k), which has almost entirely replaced pensions with retirement plans tied to the stock market, the draconian deregulation of which by Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton (all of whom were elected by boomers in landslides) means 401(k)s are vulnerable to the whims of Wall Street — like being wiped away completely in a single day as happened to my Boomer mom in 2008 when the Great Recession exploded.
But many boomers still have a safety net in the form of the other bugaboo of younger generations — their staggeringly inflated houses, as Clare also angrily pointed out in her video.
For context: In 1985, the rough midpoint of the boomer generation's adulthood, Boomers paid an average of around $80,000 for a house. That $80,000 is now worth more than $230,000 — and that's just factoring in inflation alone, not the staggering bloat to home prices that has the average home price in 2024 at more than $500,000. And boomers didn't even have to contend with credit ratings to get a mortgage!
It's hard not to feel, now that they're elderly, that the boomers frittered all their advantages away. It's even harder not to empathize with struggling young people like Clare, outraged that it may fall to them to make up the difference — especially given boomers' continued support as a voting bloc for politicians determined to gut Social Security and Medicare, the only safety nets many senior citizens even have.
Still, if the past is prologue, boomers will place the blame for this mess not on themselves and the politicians they've enabled, but on their "lazy," "entitled," "ungrateful" children who "just don't want to work hard." Buckle up (and maybe call an estate planner) children of boomers; it's going to be a bumpy decade or three.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.