Offer help with no strings attached

Dear Carolyn: My 29-year-old, unmarried daughter is under-employed and without health insurance. I’d like to help her by suggesting that I pay for half the cost of insuring her. Would it be reasonable to ask in return for an agreement to quit smoking and decrease the amount she drinks?

I believe she is in need of counseling, as she is also in a long-term relationship in which the man constantly lets her down in significant ways. She would gladly go to counseling if she had help paying for it. – Anonymous

I get why you’re asking this. You’re poised to hand over a lot of money to your daughter, and you’re uncomfortable with stepping in to improve her health while she’s still actively damaging it. From that perspective, asking her to meet you halfway would seem like a reasonable thing to ask.

But your daughter needs help, not judgments and strings. The smoking and the drinking are dominoes that need to fall, but they aren’t the first ones in line. First in line, always always, is her own desire to change.

If she’d “gladly go” to counseling if she had the money, then that first domino has already tipped. The best thing you can do as a parent – and by “best” I mean potentially the most productive, and therefore the most reasonable – is make sure that first domino actually starts your daughter’s chain reaction toward reclaiming herself.

The best way to do that is to pay for half of her insurance without strings attached, because good counseling will address the root causes of her problems, which will then give her the tools to take on the alcohol, cigs, boyfriend, employment, and broken self-image in whatever order she’s ready to take them on.

If after the first year she shows no signs of putting her insurance to good use, then you can revisit the strings.