According to the 2020 census, there are approx 67 million boomers in America today. The generation, born between 1946 and 1964, is creating a tidal wave of retirees. An estimated four million boomers will reach the age of 65 by 2027.
The effects of this mass retirement present countless economic and health challenges that virtually no one seems ready to face. Who will take care of the countless aging boomers who don’t have enough savings to meet their basic needs? As the children of boomers are finding out, some states have a solution to this that strikes many as downright annoying.
29 states have “filial” laws that force adult children to care for their elderly parents.
At this point, the numbers don’t lie. Boomers had it surprisingly easier than virtually all generations before and after them, having come of age and lived most of their lives in a stable economy where wages, housing costs, commodity prices and inflation were moderate compared to today.
However, this has not resulted in the generation being ready for retirement. ONE 2024 survey 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.
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So who is going to take care of all these rapidly aging boomers without a safety net? Well, in 29 states, their Gen X, millennial, and Gen Z kids can be forced into the job whether they can afford it or not.
They are called “son laws”, after the Latin derived word for son or daughter, and they require an elderly person’s children to pay for any medical expenses not covered by Medicare or insurance. These are often staggering amounts for those who need long-term care such as nursing homes.
Family laws require adult children to pay for everything from basic necessities like groceries to mental health care.
The states with branch legislation 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, Virginia, West Virginia, Utah Tennessee, Virginia, Virginia, West Virginia, South Dakota, Virginia, Utah Tennessee, Virginia. Puerto Rico also has child laws.
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The details vary from state to statebut child laws do not apply to everyone or every situation. Generally, children’s laws come into play when an elderly person is poor, on Social Assistance for Basic Needs, does not qualify for Medicaid or Medicare help with long-term care, or it is determined that their children can afford to pay for their nursing home bills.
It’s important to note that experts say these laws rarely go into effect. But many also expect the tsunami of boomer retirees to change this because of their insufficient savings and the strain they will put 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 pensionswhich is now almost entirely a thing of the past, was a common benefit of jobs. Roll it up and the boomers present a challenge orders of magnitude more difficult than those before them.
Many children of boomers are outraged that they may be subject to these laws.
Dive into the topic of childish laws on social media and the anger of millennials, Gen Zers and many younger Gen Xers in the so-called “sandwich generation” is palpable.
“The boomer generation has literally had every single public benefit handed directly to them,” a TikToker named Clare, known as @lacroix_goth on the appsaid in a video on the subject. “And they pulled up the ladder behind them as they moved up.”
She’s not wrong. The Boomer generation has repeatedly voted for politicians who have presided over the erosion of virtually every feature of the American economy that used to protect workers, the middle class and the elderly, including retirements.
The top among them is the introduction of the 401(k)which has almost entirely replaced pensions with pension plans tied to the stock market, whose draconian deregulation by Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton (all of whom were elected by landslide boomers) means that 401(k)s are vulnerable to the whims of Wall Street. That means they can be completely wiped out 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 bloated 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 about $80,000 for a house. That $80,000 is now worth more than $230,000, and that only takes inflation into account, not the dizzying swelling of house prices that have average home price in 2026 of nearly $500,000. And boomers didn’t even have to struggle with credit scores to get a mortgage!
It’s hard not to feel, now that they’re older, that the boomers threw away all their advantages. It’s even harder not to empathize with struggling young people like Clare, furious that it might fall to them to make up the difference, especially given boomers’ continued support as a voting bloc before politicians determined to drain Social Security and Medicare, the only safety net many senior citizens themselves have.
Still, if past is prologue, boomers will blame this mess not on themselves and the politicians they enabled, but on their “lazy” and “entitled” children who “just won’t work hard.” Buckle up (and maybe call an estate planner), children of boomers; it’s going to be an uneven decade or three.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers topics in culture, mental health and human interest.
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