Boomers wanted to help their kids. Instead, they're getting resentment

It’s time to challenge the conventional wisdom around baby boomers, millennials and Gen Z. At the risk of sounding slightly conspiratorial (I’ve already had four cups of coffee), plenty of headlines will have you convinced that these generational cohorts are locked in an epic battle of good versus evil, whether that’s the liberal underdogs versus the conservative rich, or a face-off between a hard-working, traditional generation and spoiled, unrealistic liberal youngsters. 

But like all sorts of tribalistic feuds, things aren’t as black and white in most Americans’ everyday experiences. As I wrote about earlier, new insights from Savings.com show boomers as largely sympathetic to younger Americans’ financial plight, rarely viewing their own millennial or Gen Z offspring as lazy or entitled, and often willing to help their adult kids — quite generously — cover financial odds and ends. 

In that piece, though, I didn’t get into the real resentment between the generations — particularly the ire that millennials and Gen Zers feel toward boomers. After all, how could there not be tension when they are locked in a more intimate financial relationship than any recent generation? Millennials and Gen Zers' present-day hardships are so directly correlated to boomers’ past gains; at the same time, they’re more dependent on their boomer parents than any other generation has been. It’s a socioeconomic and psychological cocktail that, experts explained, has calcified as a sort of baked-in resentment against older generations — but one that, when you consider things from their perspective, might be understandable.

Millennials and Gen Zers, no doubt, are on track to spend what are supposed to be a person’s prime working and earning years in a highly volatile economic and workforce environment, with flat earnings and stratospheric housing prices. Median household income has barely risen since 2000, according to the U.S. Treasury, rising 15% over that period compared to housing’s 65% hike. If you were able to afford a house around the early 2000s, you were made “relatively wealthy,” Albert Saiz, faculty director of the Urban Economics Lab at MIT, told Salon. “But people who are coming into the economy don't have that wealth, and they have to save harder and work harder to get there.”

Meanwhile, when boomers were in their 20s, 30s and 40s, they enjoyed higher relative incomes and were more likely to own their homes, amassing more long-term wealth than most younger Americans likely will. That alone would be enough for younger Americans to feel entitled to some of their parents’ earnings. But the underlying fundamentals make things a little stickier. As the writer Sean Illing put it for Vox in 2019, describing the underlying argument behind Bruce Gibney’s 2017 book "A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America," boomers “have committed ‘generational plunder,' pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created.”

It’s a potent economic fog to navigate, and younger Americans can point out the pollutant in a lineup. Add in conservative boomers’ framing of younger Americans as lazier than their more more traditional, hardworking predecessors — to say nothing of the scores of boomers who do, genuinely, believe that millennials and Gen Zers are indeed entitled brats — and it’s hard to deny that such a recipe would create anything other than a brewing, bitter resentment. 

Younger Americans “too often” feel their parents "overlook" their very real financial challenges, and feel their parents can’t “come to terms with the fact that their lives aren’t a bed of roses,” Dr. Michael Kane, a psychiatrist specialized in family medicine, told Salon in an email response to the Savings.com survey. 

“This shift in thought is revolutionary, and transforms the existing parent-child dynamic,” he added. It introduces “heightened emotional and financial stress that was not witnessed in the previous generations.”

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin, a financial therapist, podcaster and author of "The Financial Anxiety Solution," said younger Americans don’t necessarily resent their parents, or boomers more broadly, for having financial security. “It’s much more of a frustration of an unwillingness for their parents to say, ‘Yeah, things are different,’” she said. 

Melissa Cox, a certified financial planner at Future Focused Wealth in Dallas, said younger Americans “often look at their parents’ relative financial comfort and think, ‘Why is it so much harder for me when I followed the rules?’” 

“It creates this quiet storm of guilt, pressure and unspoken expectations,” she said. And that gulf can “cause frustration and struggle, complicating family relationships and increasing the difficulty of free and healthy communication” about money, as Kane put it.

To that end, Bryan-Podvin stressed the importance of having financial conversations though perhaps from a more psychotherapeutic perspective than makes the mainstream. 

“We think about the way that the brain works — if we get something that is vague or uncertain or unclear, our brain fills in the gaps for what was missing, and our brain fills in the gaps in a negative way,” she said. “So, even if it feels anxiety-provoking to have a financial conversation with somebody else, being really clear prevents somebody else from filling in the gaps with something that isn't true, or is worse than they anticipated.”  

“Having these open and honest conversations really is about honoring the dignity and respect of this relationship,” she said. “Having that clarity is so powerful, and I think that also helps to dial down the overall tension and resentment.”