It is well known that parents have a legal obligation to financially support their children at least through the age of 18 or graduation from high school, whichever comes later. A less well known topic concerns whether adult children have a reciprocal obligation to support their aging parents.
The familial support obligation, as it is known, arises in the Athenian law and is mentioned in Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England in 1775. A Pennsylvania statute obligates a child of an indigent parent to “maintain or financially assist” that person. A child is excused from any such obligation if he does not have “sufficient financial ability to support” his parent or where the parent abandoned the child for a period of ten years or more during the child’s minority.
The amount of liability “shall be set by the court.” The appears to be no definition of “indigent” for purposes of the statute however common law standards may be found in the law. In the 1994 case of Savoy v. Savoy, the Superior Court affirmed an obligation of a son to pay $125 per month for his mother’s medical care expenses where his mother had Social Security benefits which were inadequate to meet her reasonable care and maintenance.
Therefore the obligation to provide financial support appears to be a two-way street. One would hope that the instances of a lawsuit to compel support from a child would be limited.
— Bill Brennan