In the summer of 1996, when I was 16, some of my friends found jobs at our local mall in Jacksonville, Fla. We all came from upper-middle-class families, so working was about building character and earning spending money, not because of financial necessity.<\/p>\n
I loved music, so I floated the idea of working at Blockbuster Music, a now-defunct record store, while riding in the car with my mother, an Iranian immigrant. When she heard this, she pulled off the road, parked the car and angrily lectured me.<\/p>\n
My mother said I should instead pursue internships and other activities that would support my studies and career goals, not distract from them. Making money wasn\u2019t important yet.<\/p>\n
Shellshocked, I dropped the subject. My Iranian mother\u2019s ideas about the way the world worked often clashed with my American upbringing.<\/p>\n
I understood that academic success was the means to a job that would bring me financial success. For my mother, however, education was<\/em> a success. Until I had the necessary degrees, she would support me financially. But I also understood that the longer you study, the longer you delay your earning power \u2014 a greater measure of status in American society.<\/p>\n For my mother, and many Iranian parents with means, this trade-off is worth it. But if education does not translate into a well-paying job \u2014 as my Ph.D. in English literature doesn\u2019t \u2014 their children can find themselves stigmatized by prolonged financial dependence.<\/p>\n Aspects of my experience resonated with a number of Iranian Americans I spoke to. Farnoosh Torabi, a personal finance expert and an author, heard the same expectations around education from her parents. Ms. Torabi, 43, said her parents had expected her to go to graduate school no matter what she planned to study. She ended up getting a master\u2019s degree in journalism.<\/p>\n Jason Rezaian, a writer for The Washington Post, received financial support from his grandfather. He also knew that his father, who owned a Persian rug business, would do his best to support him if necessary.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I tried to go get a loan from a bank when I needed money at some point, my dad would have done terrible things to himself,\u201d Mr. Rezaian, 47, said.<\/p>\n Most research about immigrant groups and personal finance focuses on filial obligation, in which children are expected to support their parents, said Kevan Harris, an Iranian American sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Less studied, he said, is the opposite: immigrant parents supporting their children well into adulthood.<\/p>\n My mother, an anesthesiologist who made $250,000 a year at the peak of her career, probably invested more in my education than in any other expense except our home. She paid for private school and my undergraduate and master\u2019s degrees, and subsidized my meager teaching stipend while I completed a doctoral program.<\/p>\n She attributes her desire to support me not just to our family history but to Iranian culture in general. \u201cThis is my child,\u201d she said. \u201cI have money. And then, as long as I am alive, I am responsible.\u201d<\/p>\n More sporadic support came from my American biological father, who earned far less as a county clerk. He wanted me to enter the work force earlier and consider a more lucrative degree.<\/p>\n At 34, I received my degree but had neither a job in a cutthroat academic market nor a Plan B. I had fulfilled my mother\u2019s expectations of earning an advanced degree \u2014 a scholarly path I genuinely loved \u2014 but it did not create the financial independence I felt I needed to be a valuable member of society.<\/p>\n Financial independence was not something I desired, because I felt controlled by my mother\u2019s money. It was only when I compared myself with the American ideal of successful adulthood \u2014 having a well-paying job \u2014 that I felt like a freeloader.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say I don\u2019t want to make a good living. But my mother\u2019s financial support has allowed me to reinvent myself as a freelance writer without worrying about making ends meet. Single and childless by choice, I have lived with her and my stepfather since I received my doctoral degree.<\/p>\n When adults live with their parents in America, it\u2019s usually seen as a temporary circumstance, but multigenerational households are common in many immigrant cultures. Mr. Rezaian, who lived on and off with his parents into adulthood, said it was common among Iranian American families \u201cto see somebody who\u2019s, you know, a fully formed, fully capable, employed adult living with their folks.\u201d<\/p>\n A survey from the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans, a nonprofit, shows that 86 percent of Iranian Americans hold at least one college degree and that one in five Iranian American households has an annual income over $100,000. Still, many Iranian Americans work to support themselves when they\u2019re younger or decide not to pursue a college degree.<\/p>\n Many Iranians come to the United States in pursuit of higher education, a pattern that began in the 1950s when the Iranian government encouraged study abroad so Iranians could apply their expertise to a rapidly modernizing country. Mr. Rezaian\u2019s father received his M.B.A. from Golden Gate University in San Francisco in the 1960s.<\/p>\n Mr. Harris\u2019s father met his American mother while studying microbiology in the United States during the 1970s, as a second wave of student immigration arrived in the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and, later, the Iran-Iraq war. Ms. Torabi\u2019s father also arrived during that time to get his doctorate in physics.<\/p>\n While Mr. Harris, Ms. Torabi and I followed in our parents\u2019 footsteps and received graduate degrees, Mr. Rezaian and his brother, an I.T. entrepreneur, left school after they received their bachelor\u2019s degrees.<\/p>\n \u201cIf either one of us had adhered to this notion that we had to keep going to school, I don\u2019t think we would have gotten as far as we have in our lives,\u201d Mr. Rezaian said.<\/p>\n However, he believes that his father, now deceased, always regretted that neither brother attained a graduate degree. \u201cIt\u2019s just an indication that someone is cultured, someone is worldly,\u201d Mr. Rezaian said. \u201cAnd that still matters to Iranians.\u201d<\/p>\n My mother\u2019s nebulous fear that co-workers and shoppers at Blockbuster Music would woo me away from my studies is, at heart, an immigrant parent\u2019s fear that a culture she doesn\u2019t understand will corrupt her child. Ms. Torabi\u2019s parents did not fear her working, but they did instill in her what she considers healthy fears around financial insecurity and debt.<\/p>\n They paid for her undergraduate degree \u2014 in part because she agreed to attend Pennsylvania State University, which charged less tuition than other schools that accepted her \u2014 but warned that if she got into credit card debt they would not help her. The only acceptable debt Ms. Torabi could have would be from investing in a master\u2019s degree, \u201cbecause that is the degree that\u2019s actually going to place you in your career,\u201d they told her. When she did borrow for her master\u2019s degree, her parents helped her make ends meet as she got her career started.<\/p>\n Ms. Torabi credits these fears with motivating her to pursue financial independence and success, something she expands on in her forthcoming book, \u201cA Healthy State of Panic.\u201d Her younger brother went even further, turning down his parents\u2019 offer to pay half his rent after college.<\/p>\n \u201cHe didn\u2019t want to feel he was needing to consider their desires when it came to making a professional or a personal decision,\u201d Ms. Torabi said.<\/p>\n She understands why many American parents are hesitant to provide too much financial support for their adult children.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s this fear in American culture that you\u2019re going to spoil your kid,\u201d Ms. Torabi said. \u201cI would raise you another fear: Imagine you don\u2019t help out, and instead they get saddled with $100,000 in debt.\u201d She suggested that parents who could support their children financially now consider doing so if it helped them achieve a better quality of life, rather than waiting to leave them that money in their inheritance.<\/p>\n \u201cThis idea that we\u2019re run out of the house when we\u2019re 18 is so opposite of how most Iranians are raised,\u201d Mr. Rezaian said. Noting that no one he knows is truly financially healthy at the moment, he added, \u201cWe\u2019re entering an era already where some of these more traditional Iranian-type values probably make more sense.\u201d<\/p>\n As an Iranian American, I straddle two very different \u2014 often aggressively oppositional \u2014 worlds. Holding contradictory truths is central to my understanding of myself, and this perspective applies to my financial life, too.<\/p>\n I am both grateful for and ashamed of my mother\u2019s financial support. I don\u2019t sweat the everyday bills, but I fear for my financial future. I have never equated my worth, or the worth of my work, to the money I earn, but that also makes it easier for me to accept unsustainable wages.<\/p>\n Though I always loved English and history more than math and science, I spent my high school years saying I wanted to be a doctor like my mother or, failing that, a lawyer or a businesswoman. What I meant was, I wanted to achieve the kind of job that brought financial capital and its corollary, social capital. Without my mother\u2019s financial support and encouragement, I would never have pursued my love of literature. As Ms. Torabi pointed out, my mother\u2019s love and money made it possible for me to focus on what made me happy.<\/p>\n \u201cYour mom is who we all want to be,\u201d Ms. Torabi said. \u201cWe all want to be able to support our children so that they can go do what they want to do and give them a financial leg up. The reality is that your mom was way ahead of her time, and you are a product of good parenting.\u201d<\/p>\nImmigrant Parents Supporting Adult Children<\/h2>\n
Cultural Over Financial Capital<\/h2>\n
Different Financial Fears<\/h2>\n
Holding Contradictory Truths<\/h2>\n