According to the 2020 census, there are approx 67 million boomers in America today. The generation, born between 1946 and 1964, is causing a tidal wave of retirees. An approximate one four million boomers will reach the age of 65 in 2027.
The consequences of mass retirement bring numerous economic and healthcare challenges that virtually no one seems ready to meet. Who will care for the countless aging boomers who haven’t saved enough to meet their basic needs? As boomer children are discovering, some states have a solution to this that seems downright infuriating to many.
29 states have child custody 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 every generation before and after them, because they came 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, this has not meant that the generation is ready for retirement. A Study from 2024 found that two-thirds of boomers don’t have enough assets to survive the average retirement age of 20, and in 2022, the Federal Reserve discovered that 43% of boomers have no retirement savings at all.
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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
They are called ‘children’s laws’, after the Latin word for son or daughter, and they require an older person’s children to pay for any health care costs not covered by Medicare or insurance. These are often staggering amounts for people who need long-term care, such as nursing homes.
Children’s laws require adult children to pay for everything from basic needs like groceries to mental health care.
The states with juvenile 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 child laws.
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The details vary from state to statebut children’s laws do not apply to everyone or every situation. Generally, pediatric laws come into play when an older person is indigent, is on social assistance for basic needs, does not qualify for Medicaid or Medicare long-term care assistance, or if it is determined that their children can afford to pay their nursing home bills.
It’s important to note that experts say these laws rarely apply. But many also expect the tsunami of retiring boomers to change this, due to their inadequate savings and the strain they will place on state and federal social services such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
For context, the generation before the boomers, the silent generation, is not alone the smallest in 100 years due to the effects of the Depression and World War II, but they also came of age a time when pensionswhich are now almost entirely a thing of the past, were a common job perk. Put that together, and the boomers present a challenge orders of magnitude more difficult than those before them.
Many boomer children are outraged that they may be subject to these laws.
Delve into the topic of child laws on social media and the anger from millennials, Gen Zers and many younger Gen Xers in the so-called “sandwich generation” is palpable.
“The boomer generation has literally every public benefit handed over directly to them,” says a TikToker named Clare, known as @lacroix_goth in the appsaid in a video on the topic. “And they pulled up the ladder behind them as they went up.”
She’s not wrong. The boomer generation has voted again and again for politicians who have presided over the erosion of virtually every feature of the American economy that once protected workers, the middle class and the elderly, including pensions.
Chief among them is the introduction of the 401(k)that has almost completely replaced pensions with stock market-linked retirement plans, whose draconian deregulation by Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton (all elected in landslides by boomers) means that 401(k)s are vulnerable to the whims of Wall Street. That means they can be completely wiped out in one day, as happened to my boomer mom in 2008 when the Great Recession hit.
But many boomers still have a safety net in the form of the younger generations’ other bugaboo: their staggeringly inflated homes, as Clare also angrily noted in her video.
For context, in 1985, about halfway through the boomer generation’s adulthood, boomers paid an average of about $80,000 for a home. That $80,000 is now worth more than $230,000, and that’s only taking into account inflation, not the staggering housing price growth that has caused its effects. average home price in 2026 at almost $500,000. And boomers didn’t even have to contend with credit ratings to get a mortgage!
Now that they’re older, it’s hard not to feel like the boomers have lost all their advantages. It’s even harder not to empathize with struggling young people like Clare, who are outraged that it’s up to them to make up the difference, especially considering that the continued support of boomers as a voting bloc for politicians determined to undermine social security and Medicare, the only safety net many seniors even have.
But if the past is prologue, boomers will place the blame for this mess not on themselves and the politicians they enabled, but on their “lazy” and “entitled” 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 twenty years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers topics in culture, mental health and human interest.
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