Responsibilities to Parents?

One of the things which has been at the forefront of my mind is the question of my obligation to my parents. To what extent am I supposed to provide for them? Furthermore, what happens if they start living beyond their means and make what I deem to be irresponsible financial decisions? Am I obligated to subsidize such decisions or provide some form of safety net?

My parents can be loosely considered as being part of the previous generation of the so-called baby-boomers. They've adopted a great deal of the values of that particular generation: work-centric, goal-oriented, spiritual, and a strong sense of independence. Unfortunately, the strong sense of independence led my parents to divorce, with me ending up in a single-parent household under my mother with my father making quite hefty child support payments. Getting older and never remarrying, my mother has adopted a singles lifestyle with a strong sense of independence which in many cases exceeds her financial reach. Even though she's on a lower-middle class income, she recently spent a summer traveling across the country living in and out of some spendy four-star hotels. That coupled by a lifestyle supported by decades of cheap money over the years, means that she's constantly using financial instruments to leverage a lifestyle entirely unsuited for her income level.

Having grown up in such an environment, my values are in many ways counter to the previous generation. I don't put my independence and personal happiness as the priority of my life. Instead, I maintain a steady upper middle-class job, live well below my means, drive a car a third lower in cost than my mother's, and heavily contribute to retirement- all in an effort to mitigate costs and provide some buffer for when I settle down and have children. A lot of the thinking is that I need to be in a position not to be a burden to my future children.

So what are my obligations to my parents? As far as I've remembered, my parents have always placed their happiness well ahead of their children- never really investing or saving up for their offspring's post-secondary education. My mother, who came to realize that her travels drained her savings has started asking for money for unexpected expenses such as home repairs and will be asking for funds to support her future travels. Am I obligated to provide for her?

First Post

I'm hoping to write a bit more. After finishing graduate school, I found myself with less venues and opportunities to write at length about the state of my life and the world as I see it. Sure, there's facebook and twitter, but those tend to be more for short opinions and quick social status updates. Hopefully this will give me some space to write at reasonable length about random topics from life after leaving the ivory towers of academia, to ideas on the direction of technology, and to some philosophical essays. -CiVi