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My name is Joshua Sheets. I am your host. Today on the show, I want to answer a listener question. Corey writes in and says, "Joshua, what are your predictions "about the future developments or changes "in filial responsibility laws, "considering the aging population "and changing family structures? "Also, do you have any thoughts "about how to consider planning for siblings, "relatives, or parents who may need "additional help in old age?" Well, these are two questions.

My answer to question number one will be rather limited. My answer to question two will be more expansive. The first question is, "What are your predictions about the future developments "or changes in filial responsibility laws?" Short version is, I don't have any predictions. I don't know very much about them.

It's my understanding that filial responsibility laws are laws that exist in something like half of the United States. I don't know about international, how many countries around the world have these kinds of laws. But a filial responsibility law is a law that requires, using the power of the court, requires children, especially children with resources, to care for parents or other family members if those other family members are destitute, don't have the money to care for themselves, so they don't become a burden on the state.

And that's about as far as my knowledge goes. These laws do exist. What is unclear to me is basically how widely enforced these kinds of laws are and what the practical impact of them is. In my own home state of Florida, these laws do not exist. And I just don't know how widely used they are in the states that have these on the books.

And so I can't comment on that. And I couldn't find any information in thinking about or looking for that that really gave me any kind of insight to it. So I'm not gonna comment on what I think will or won't happen from a legal perspective. It would seem to me that at this point in time, we have a couple of trends, but, and those trends are opposing.

So the reason that you're asking the question is, well, we have aging population. What are we gonna do if all of our old people are destitute? Well, that's true, but there's also a cultural trend towards intense autonomy, where basically people believe that they should be able to do what they want, when they want, how they want, with whom they want in any way whatsoever.

And anything that infringes in any way on them doing what they want doesn't seem to be acceptable in the common culture. And so it's hard for me to see any kind of democratic system at the moment where significant levels of support would emerge for politicians who are promoting those laws and trying to change that.

So I couldn't see anything significant changing there without a good lot of convincing from that perspective. I support the idea of filial responsibility laws. I think that laws and actions that require parents to care for their children are right and just and appropriate. And to me, I think that children have a natural and equal responsibility to care for their parents.

I am sometimes shocked and amazed at the lack of this in our society, but I guess I shouldn't be, because at their core, people are basically selfish. And the idea then that people would continue to behave in a selfish way shouldn't be particularly surprising. But I can't see laws like that getting a wide degree of support in our time.

I think the biggest problem with laws like that is the same frustration that I have with the divorce court system of how do you determine what is an adequate level of support? And having provided counsel to, financial counsel, to many people who have gone through divorce and experienced court settlements, I'm uniquely sensitive to the fact that when the divorce court judge prescribes a certain level of child support or alimony payments as required from a divorcing spouse, that often doesn't correlate to that person's moral responsibility.

And so let me give you just a practical example of this that I hope is thought-provoking. As a father, I have a moral duty to provide for my wife and for my children. That is my duty. I have an obligation to do so. I must do everything that I am capable of doing to provide for my family and so that they are able to experience safety, security, full bellies, et cetera.

But even as I say those words, what that actually means is something that we can widely debate. So for example, what does it mean to have a full belly? Well, I could fill up their bellies with rice and beans, or I could fill up their bellies with steak. One of them is vastly more healthy than the other, and yet costs vastly higher dollar amounts.

So should I be required to feed my children steak three times a day, or is it adequate to have steak once a day or once every other day and have rice and beans once a day or once every other day, et cetera, in order to balance things out? When somebody wants the best for his children and wants to provide, he'll do everything that he's capable of.

But now imagine that a ham-handed judge comes in and says the level of duty that is required of you as a father is that your children have to have food and it has to fit these certain requirements. Okay, that becomes very difficult because what is normal is that throughout the course of our lifetimes, we have certain periods where we can provide more and certain periods where we can provide less.

And so in a normal relationship with me and my wife and our budget and our children and our needs, et cetera, we can go back and forth and change our diet based upon our financial ability. But when the court comes in and says you have to do this, it becomes very heavy-handed, very ham-handed.

Similar things like providing shelter. I have a moral obligation, a moral duty, to provide shelter for my family. But what is the definition of shelter? Does that mean that they need to live in a house or is an apartment acceptable? If we live in a house or in an apartment, is it adequate that I put four children in one room or do I need four bedrooms for four children?

If I live in a house or an apartment, but then I go and I spend months in an RV, am I providing shelter? Or if I live in a tent in the woods because that's all our budget will afford, is that adequate? And so again, in a normal situation, we have the ability to adapt and to adjust and normal loving parents look and say what's best for my children, I wanna do that.

And there's a constant balancing that we do of the needs, the interests, and the obligations that we have for all members of the family. Now, when you go to divorce court, the judge comes in, looks at your resources in terms of income, and then just simply, basically prescribes a certain number and says this is the amount of money that you must pay for child support or this is the amount of money that you must pay for alimony.

And while, so set aside child support and alimony, child support I think is definitely a moral obligation that should be imposed by the force of law. Alimony may or may not be a moral obligation depending on the circumstances of the divorce. But let's focus with what's simple, child support.

Well, certainly, fathers and mothers should be required by society and by the courts to provide for their children. But once again, is it a number? And how do we know that number is enough, et cetera? So when the courts have to get involved in imposing a law, it becomes very, I don't know a better word to use than ham-handed.

It's like, okay, it's directionally right sometimes, but lots of times it's not, and it doesn't allow for the normal kind of ups and downs of life. So now I think about what would happen if there were a requirement to provide for parents and with filial responsibility laws, and how would that actually be implemented?

Again, I don't know how it is implemented right now in the states that have these on the books, but it would become very complex. What is the level of support that I must provide for my parents? I think that it's perfectly reasonable for me as a son to have a house with a room in it for my parents and provide for them a room that they can stay in and then welcome them into the family.

That, I think, is an ideal scenario for a family. It's probably best if there's a little bit more separation, a separate wing of the house, or a little building on the backside of the garden is better, or a separate apartment within the house, some kind of separation, I think, is the best ticket to quality family relationships.

But how big does the room have to be, et cetera? So I guess my commentary is just that it becomes, it's easy to see what should be done in broad terms from the perspective of responsibility and moral duty. It's not so easy to put that into legislation. The other issue I would see with things like filial responsibility laws is that it would be very hard to see those laws enforced across state lines, and especially in a country like the United States, because those are state laws, they're relatively easy to leave from, relatively easy to cross state lines into another state that doesn't have those laws on the books.

And then in what way, what jurisdiction does a state-level government have to be able to pursue you to satisfy their claim upon you? So I'm in favor of the idea, but I don't have any predictions, nor do I really wanna be involved in any kind of movement of putting those things on the books.

We should shame people who do not support their parents. We should, because we have, with building cultures of things that we praise and admire and things that we shame, those cultural-level influences are very effective and appropriate. And so we should do what we can do personally and culturally, and we should not hold up as examples of anything positive, men and women who don't honor their parents, care for their parents, and we should shame very, as robustly as possible, those who do not fulfill their responsibility for their parents.

But in terms of turning that into law, I'll leave that to smarter people than me to think about how to handle those issues. I just don't wanna be involved in that. While I'm in favor of the responsibility, I don't wanna be involved in it from a legal perspective. So now, thoughts about how to consider planning for siblings, relatives, or parents who may need additional help in old age.

Definitely. At its core, this is a problem that is extremely simple to solve if you have a strong foundation of relationship. In all interactions between human beings, the nature of the relationship between human beings either makes things easy to do or hard to do. And so if you have a good relationship among siblings, if you have a good relationship with parents or relatives or other family members who may need additional help in old age, it's relatively easy in the context of a strong and healthy relationship to find appropriate solutions.

Human beings can work together marvelously when they have strong, loving relationships filled with mutual respect, mutual love and affection, and good communication skills. And so those are the fundamental things that we should always be building. And we should be building those things from the earliest of ages with our children, with our parents, across in every direction, and then we should be seeking to enhance them as much as is possible.

And I think that this is something that we can all do. We all have a role to play in this where we can improve relationships. No matter how difficult our relationships currently may be, and in many cases, they are strained and they are difficult, we can all work together to improve them.

And if that is present, then all of the specific planning ideas of where are you gonna live or how are we gonna provide care, et cetera, are relatively simple. If those good quality relationships are missing, or if the relationships are strained to begin with, then we run the risk of all kinds of stuff being legal battles and there's distrust, et cetera.

So my hope is that we can build relationships. What are some things that we can do in advance? Well, the first thing is, let's deal with our children, 'cause I'm right in the middle. I've got children and I've got parents. So the first thing that I observed growing up as a child was to observe how my own parents fulfilled their filial duty to their family members, to their parents.

So the first thing that we can do is set an example with how we care for our own parents. My father, when faced with his aging parents, said, "I will care for you "and I'll work with you in your old age, "but you're gonna have to come to me in Florida "rather than my coming to you out in Colorado," where they were living at the time.

And so while my grandparents were significantly young, young enough to do it, then they moved from Colorado to Florida in order to be near my father. And so that he could care for them in their old age. And that was, I think, a great idea. I think grandparents generally want to be where their children and grandchildren are.

That's often the thing that disrupts people's retirement plans is they say, "Well, I wanna live in this particular place," and then their children move around the country and they wind up following their children. So you should discuss these things as much as possible and make your own plans in advance.

So my father moved his parents across the country to be near him. Now, they weren't dependent on him. They had a separate home. They had their own income sources, but they were near him. Then as they started to grow older, my father built a house, a large house, that would be able to integrate his family together.

So he built a separate apartment within the house for his parents and he built, and it was large enough for his children as well. So that he was able to get everybody under the same roof. And so once again, this was a good, productive financial relationship, meaning that it wasn't that my grandparents were freeloading.

They paid a fair amount of money from their resources. But of course, my father bore the primary risk and the primary decisions and the primary responsibility, et cetera. And then as my grandparents aged and needed care, then my parents provided the care for them. And as grandchildren, we were able to do that as well.

And I think it was a great scenario. There are a few things I would do differently. For example, I think my grandfather should never have retired. That was a big mistake that we made. And because when he retired, he got sick and old and got dementia. Whereas if he'd never retired, I don't think he ever would have.

But you live and you learn. So we had a good relationship. So the point is in watching that as a child, it becomes part of the family culture that this is the proper way that you care for aging parents. And so now, there's no doubt in my mind that every one of my siblings and I will and would, without a problem, provide exactly the same thing for my own parents without any kind of frustration or anger or resentment, et cetera.

This is what we do for our parents. And so that's something that you have to take in mind is that if you want your children to feel a sense of filial responsibility towards you, not only preach that and make it clear that that is an obligation that we have, it's a moral duty that we have, but just simply provide the example.

Another thing I think we can do is be thoughtful about how and when we interact with institutions. One of the great concerns that I have about much of the modern parenting practice is that we, in many cases, excessively use institutions to do work that is probably better done within the family or within the community.

And as such, our institutions become strong and mighty and powerful, while our communities become weaker and weaker, and our families become weaker and weaker. So I think that before we institutionalize our own children, we should stop and ask ourselves, am I creating a culture where institutionalizing people is the normal course?

Because if that's the case, there's a good chance that my children are gonna turn around and institutionalize me when I am old and need help, rather than doing something within the context of the local community or the local family. I do not enjoy going to retirement homes. Over the years, I have had various relationships with people who have lived in these homes.

My mom has, for many years, run a weekly Bible study in a local retirement home. And anytime I go into one of these homes, I look around and I see people whose physical needs are provided for. They have a bed to sleep in, they have a nurse who's caring for them, they have food, medication, et cetera.

And yet, their emotional life is a barren wasteland. And that saddens me immensely, because when you spend time in most of these institutions, you discover that the people within them are physically alive, but it's very difficult to see them thriving in life. And it doesn't have to be that way.

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- Talk to your doctor and visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. - I don't want to wax nostalgic for times gone by. There's a massive danger of that because history is never one thing and basically you can pick what you want from history and make the point.

I think it's impactful though if we think about the concept of local communities, local families, as is in some cases, or has been in some cases, more common in localized agrarian societies. The specific lesson I want to draw is this. When communities were more local in nature, there was always useful and helpful work for old people to do.

No matter how old you were, you could still sit on the front porch and shell peas for supper. No matter how feeble you were, you could still be present and watch the baby playing as long as there were appropriate safety and let others know if there was something that was needed.

And so there was always a place in those kinds of societies for multi-generational usefulness. In our modern industrialized society, we have fractionalized, we've divided our lives and we've all become professional persons. And thus, most of our identity comes not from who we are as a person or our involvement in the community, but rather, especially in American culture, it's drawn from our professional identity.

And so we go off in the day to our professional jobs and we do our professional work. We send our children off to professional teachers to professionally instruct them and prepare them for their professional work. And once our parents become professionally useless, we don't know what to do with them.

And basically, we expect them to sit around and watch TV all day. And that is not something to look forward to. It's why I'm so against the concept of retirement, meaning a withdrawal from useful work, not specifically meaning that somebody can make whatever choices he or she wants to make about earning income.

And so we should be very careful before we establish the precedent that our parents are going to become useless and we should look for ways to integrate them because they're not useless. They have a lot to do. And it's really important that our elders continue to have a useful and important role in the community.

But in order to accomplish that, we need to be proactive about identifying the great things about our technologically advanced societies. I would not want to go back myself, but also recognize what we've lost and bring it back in because we are living in a world and in a time where there's so much that we can do if we just simply do it.

So let's nurture relationships and let's build relationships. And then let's nurture communication in those relationships. So how can relationships be improved? I think just loving people is the key. And I don't mean that in kind of a loosey-goosey way. I mean, in putting it into practice. There are psychopaths in society.

And if you have a psychopath for a relative, clearly you should be careful. And there are good reasons to cut off relationships entirely. But in general, the basic thing that harms any human relationship is selfishness and unwillingness to love. When you love another person, that means that you lay down your life for that person.

You do what that person desires. You seek the best for that person. You believe the best about that person. You ascribe to that person the best motivations that you can possibly come up with. You give to that person. You think about what that person likes. And you treat that person the way that you would like to be treated if you were that person.

And when we do that and we suppress our selfishness and our egocentric lifestyle and we focus more on what's in it for other people, relationships improve. They may not be great. Other people may never acknowledge it, but they can improve. And so the most practical thing is to improve relationships.

In the context of relationships, if we are men and women of virtue and moral uprightness, then we can move to communication. And so one of the things that we should do and must do is communicate. Communicate about our dreams and communicate about our family members' dreams. Understand what our family members want and understand what we ourselves want and interact with them in such a way that we can learn what we need to learn about their situation so that we can plan together.

So much of the time, if we just talked about our interests and talked about our shared visions, we could work together. Especially in the American culture context, we have a great strength and a great weakness in our cultural identity. The great strength is the power of the individual. Being a very individualistic society, we believe that individuals can succeed.

And we believe that individuals should succeed based upon their own behaviors and their own merits. And that is powerful because the basic level of success, the basic level of get up and go, the level of independence and autonomy that is culturally present among US Americans broadly is higher than any other place that I have been or seen or studied.

But the flip side is we get so accustomed to our high individualism that we forget about working together. We forget about the power of having shared visions, shared goals, and working together in a symbiotic relationship. And I don't see why it has to be that way. Maybe it does, but I don't see why it has to be that way.

As I see it, what we want to do is we want to encourage intense, powerful, motivated individualism, and then collaborate together in a symbiotic, synergistic relationship. And we want to help one another and encourage one another. And so if we communicated about things and we started to work towards a shared vision among families, then I think we can accomplish far greater goals.

What I don't think works is the infection that we have in much of modern society that basically the purpose of life is personal pleasure and happiness. Obviously, we all enjoy pleasure and happiness, but if we can't build some kind of shared vision that goes beyond personal pleasure and personal happiness, I don't see how family members can work very effectively together.

And this, to me, seems a cancer that is undergirding much of our modern lifestyle. We look at the world through a lens of how is my happiness improved? How am I gonna be happier? And happiness is elusive and not particularly achievable as a goal. It's a byproduct, not a goal.

And when pursued directly, it very rarely comes to fruition. When individuals pursue individual happiness, then they pass everything through this lens of saying, am I happier without you or am I happier with you? This is a cancer that is eating away at many modern marriage relationships. Instead of husbands and wives coming together to build something that neither one of them can build individually, that is a family, they come together often, unfortunately, under the erroneous idea that somehow being together will cause them to be happy.

And then when they find themselves less happy together, then they say, well, maybe I'll be happier if I'm not with this guy. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. But generally speaking, if you weren't happy with someone, you're probably not generally gonna be happy without them. Let me be careful because I don't wanna say that there are not relationships that genuinely are damaging, there often are.

What I mean is that knowing what makes you happy is vanishingly difficult. And then being able to put a plan in place to make yourself happy is very, very difficult. We're living in a society that self-reportedly describes itself as incredibly depressed. People are popping pills all day left, right, and center, and yet we live in a society in which it's never been easier to pursue your own happiness.

It's a fool's errand. If we set aside the pursuit of our own happiness and we focus instead on a higher vision, a love for a neighbor, a building of dynasty, a building of community, a transformation of the world around, serving the unfortunate, loving the unloved, et cetera, we find ourselves happy in the midst of circumstances that previously would have thought ourselves miserable in because we find a deeper level of joy and meaning.

And so families can often do this much more effectively if there's a shared vision. And what we often seem to lack in our modern society is any kind of shared vision. This week on Twitter, somebody made a comment something like about, you know, what's the point of, let me find the comment, standby.

Comment is this, from dollarsanddata, great account by the way. Building generational wealth is extremely overrated. If overcoming hardship is what made you successful, why would you make life so easy for your offspring? My answer is this, because the money is only a necessary first step to spreading ideas and culture to better the world.

Americans myopically believe money is a goal rather than a means to the goal. And so I see this very broadly in American society. People think that money is the goal. And so anything that enhances the money, well, of course, you know, that's great, but money is just a necessary step to accomplishing those bigger, more important goals that go far beyond money.

And so when you think about this in the context of family, if you have a shared vision, something where you're working together over the course of generations, it can draw your family together. Now, this doesn't necessarily have to be something that sounds great to other people. Maybe it's your family's potential that you may forever end homelessness on the earth or whatever, you know, blood pressure problems or cancer or something like that.

That's wonderful. But for many people, it's just simply a vision of that's much simpler. Here's our family business and we're having children and enjoying relationship together and building community together, et cetera. But those things matter. If we build a shared common culture and we work together in it, then siblings and relatives, family, parents, et cetera, we can all go farther ahead together.

And that's what family should be. But in order to get there, we have to communicate about those things. And we have to seek to build a shared vision to the degree that it is possible. We want to build a shared vision. I believe that it's possible to a significant degree.

Maybe not the highest ultimate degree. There's too much individuality among all of us, but I believe that it's largely possible. Check back in 30 years and I'll tell you how I'm going. In the context of strong quality relationships and good communication, we can solve most of the other problems.

So then the next element of communication, in addition to those big grandiose ideas of common vision and et cetera, is just simply create, have open, honest conversations about things that matter. In some family relationships and in some families, I am amazed at how little of substance is said over the abundant family get-togethers.

You can go to family get-together after family get-together after family get-together, and you can find so little of actual substance shared because everyone is so intent on not offending one another or not betraying who a person really is that we just pass through the sphere of each other's presence and never interact with someone on a deeper level.

But it only takes one person to start that change, to start communicating about things that matter. And so what things would matter? Well, one would be asking questions like, dad, mom, what's your vision for your older years? And then listening or talking about money. A huge thing that we can do, especially those of us who are parents, is voluntarily open up to our children about our wishes and about our money and communicate about them.

One of the standard pieces of advice that I always implement when talking with retiree age people is to say, are you consistently communicating with your children about your finances in detail? Because generally your children are going to feel a sense of reserve and caution and a lack of wanting to meddle in your affairs.

And so they're often not going to bring up the subjects. But you as the parent can improve the communication by consciously saying, children, I want to bring you into my life and tell you where I am and how I'm doing and talk with you about this stuff. And you can create a culture of communication with them.

And this is something that's helpful. They need to know the details so that you can work together on those details. You can start at either end. I've always appreciated that when changing your life and lifestyle, you can start at either end. You can start with a big grandiose vision of goals and vision and things you want to achieve.

Or you can also just start with cleaning up your to-do list. Either way works. If you clean up your to-do list effectively, then in time you can get onto the dreams and the goals and the vision. You start with the dreams and the goals and the vision, sometimes you can sit down and fix the to-do list eventually when your vision is strong enough.

And so either form of communication works. You can start with the dollars and cents and that leads into the big picture vision. Or you can start with the big picture vision and it'll bleed back to the dollars and cents. But you need to open up with communication and start talking about those things that matter.

Then you can bring in questions such as, what would it look like if we worked together on these things? How could we improve our family dynamic if we worked together? Financially speaking, I think it's obvious that parents and children should work together. So for example, I think it's stupid how we handle family relationships in the United States where we often kick our children out at the age of 18 to force them to go and struggle for years on their own instead of working together and supporting them in some productive way.

As with anything, there is a flip side. We don't wanna enable a basement dweller who's irresponsible, et cetera. But if we can create positive character and we see people working hard, then we can support our children so much. And I think there's a massive disconnect between what the wealthy often do and those who don't.

In my work of consulting with people, many times of significant wealth, I've noticed that so many times, wealthy people are grateful for the ways that their parents helped them get ahead, for the fact that they went to an elite school and they graduated debt-free, for the fact that their parents helped them get their first house or various things like that.

It's so impactful when your parents help you get ahead if you are responsible. So we need to be very careful not to turn out deadbeats or enable deadbeats. But if we're working with people who aren't deadbeats, then we should work together and support one another. And so let me give you just a simple example that I've thought of a lot over the years.

If you wanna have grandchildren, one of the ways that you can do that and make it more possible for your children to have children is help them with housing. So why is it that so often there's a empty-nester couple rattling around in an enormous house while their children are scraping by in a tiny apartment somewhere, trying to figure out how they're gonna shoehorn another baby into the extra closet?

Now there are, of course, some good reasons why that happens. But in general, this is, to me, a kind of obvious example of what would be the power of working together. Why is it that the parents shouldn't or wouldn't or won't move into the apartment themselves and say, "Here, children, you guys need the big house now.

"We'll pass it along." Well, usually it's due to those more fundamental factors that I've talked long about. How do we integrate people together? Do we have shared vision, et cetera? Is that a desire that we have? Do we wanna see our families grow? Do we wanna enable this behavior that's appropriate?

Or are we focused on living in a fancy-looking house? I leave it for you as a brain worm. If you wanna have grandchildren, then raise children who get married and wanna have children, and then parents move into the apartment and give the children the big house, and do that down through the generations, and you'll create a family that is powerful and large and growing, rather than one in which everyone is in his or her own silo trying to do it all ourselves and having a very inefficient time of it.

There's much more that could be said, but I think these are the most important things to be said. The specifics of where are we gonna live, how are we gonna work out the bills, who's gonna take care of parents, family schedules, nurses, no nurses, housing, rooms, et cetera, those are up to each individual situation to find something that's appropriate.

I am glad to know that, at least a few years ago, I read an article that said a big trend in new housing development is to develop housing that incorporates living space for multiple members of the family in it. I think that's great. And I really appreciate how I think that this is, I really admire cultures where this is culturally expected.

I think a lot of times the cultural expectations, especially on Asians and Latin people, et cetera, is often high and that comes with its own problems. But I admire so much that it's so common in Asian households to have multi-generational families. And to me, as long as we can deal with the boundary stuff appropriately and healthily, that just seems such a wonderful trend to me.

And I'm glad the housing and whatnot is reflecting on that. To me, though, at its core, if we just focus on improving relationships and enhancing communication in those relationships, and then building as much shared vision and common purpose as is possible, and to emphasize, we're not all gonna go out and change the world together and be solving poverty in Africa together.

That's not a realistic goal. But building a shared vision of what we want the next decade to look like and working together to the degree that is possible, given our individual unique perspectives on the world, that will enhance it. And if you want to do something to help the planning opportunities for siblings, relatives, or parents who may need additional help in old age, focus on relationship and communication.

Because in the context of good relationships and strong communication, details will be easy. Without good relationships, the best possible, and strong communication skills, then all those specific decisions will be very difficult. So to me, that's the most important thing for us to focus on. Thank you for the question.

It's thought-provoking. May we be those who set an example based upon the way that we live, live with vision so that those who come behind us can go farther than we and put into practice the things that we know to do. So it's not all just a fantasy, but it comes into reality.

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