Support Your Parents

Family is important. Everyone knows that. But to what extent can characters go to emphasize that? Maybe a song? Fight alongside them? No, some characters go beyond that - they want to support their parents financially for raising them in love and care (or not, depending on the story), and will do anything for that. The job that they work on may even be disgusting, but they will work nonetheless. Supporting a family is that important.

Usually it leads to:

• Good circumstances: When there are Good Parents, who do not have any problems with money, a child wants to support them anyway as a gratitude for all the love they received in their life.
• Bad circumstances: When parents, while being good, are Cutting Corners, a child wants to help their parents get out of poverty and live a life worthy of their good deeds.
• Dysfunctional Family: When parents are bad to the point where many would want to ignore them, they can either force a character to work for them, or child would support them despite all the hardships he would get as a result, because they are still his family.

An Immigrant's Tale stories may involve the immigrant in question sending some or all of their hard-earned money to their parents back home, as many immigrants have done in real life.

May cross with Former Child Star if the child actor's parents are financially supported by their child's fame.

Compare Jobless Parent Drama, a frequently used plot involving this motivation. See also Honor Thy Parent.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Boy's Abyss: At the beginning of the story, Reiji wanted to help a mother with his NEET brother, so a thought about leaving his small town never crossed his mind.
• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners: David joined Arasaka Academy at the request of his mother to become an influential man in the Night City. Unfortunately, that didn't end well.
• My Hero Academia: Ochako Uraraka wants to become a pro heroine so she can financially support her parents, as their failing construction business has left them poor.
• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Momoha's parents kicked her out of their home due to her providing them with financial support and them wanting her to be more independent. She's still sending them money by the time she meets Rentarou.
• Harem Royale - When the Game Ends -:
  • Liru wants to become mangaka in order to help her parents, brothers, and sister with money
  • Serika wanted to go to the university, so her mom and dad would stop cursing each other over money.

Comic Books

• Spider-Man: 15-year-old Peter got his job as a Daily Bugle photographer to support his Aunt May, who had raised him, after his Uncle Ben, her husband and the family breadwinner, was murdered.

Films — Animation

• Elemental (2023): Protagonist Ember spends her whole life training to take over her father Bernie's shop, even though she's bad with the customers and has a (literally) explosive temper. Ember wants to financially and emotionally support Bernie and her mother Cinder in their old age, specifically so Bernie can retire without worry, and so puts her own future on hold (to the point where she doesn't even consider other life paths) in the name of being a dutiful daughter. By the film's end, Ember learns that the only thing Bernie and Cinder truly want is for her to be happy—"The shop was never the dream. You were the dream." Bernie instead gives the shop to two younger friends of his and gets his peaceful retirement, while Ember finally begins to explore her own identity by taking up an architectural internship.
• Hercules: The adoptive parents of Hercules are simple farmers, who often struggled financially due to Herc's uncontrolled strength breaking things. In "Zero to Hero", after Herc starts gaining success for his heroic deeds, he gets his parents a bigger house.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Adventures of Buratino, as part of the titular character's Adaptational Nice Guy, his dream to get his father out of poverty is even more pronounced than in the book. When he's deceived into thinking that he can plant his gold coins to grow a coin tree, his first and foremost thought is that he'll be able to buy his father an entire theatre.
• The Goonies:
  • The Goonies decide to try to find One-Eyed Willie's treasure, despite the dangers, in order to save their parents' homes from foreclosing to make way for a golf course. Mikey even mentions how the foreclosure is killing their parents, adding to their motivation. Downplayed, since not moving would also have the benefit of keeping The Goonies from moving away from each other. On both fronts, they succeed.
  • Discussed near the end of the film, when Mikey apologizes to his dad for saving their own lives over getting the treasure. His father assures him he'd rather have Brand and Mikey safe than be rich.
• In Hustlers, Dorothy drugs and robs wealthy men at the strip club she works in partly to provide for her grandmother, who raised her after she was abandoned by her parents. She pays off her grandmother's debts, moves their family into a beautiful mansion, and gifts her expensive jewelry for Christmas.
• In Margin Call, when Will Emerson is asked how he can spend a salary of two and a half million dollars, he lists his expenses for the last year, including sending 150.000 dollars to his parents.
• In Superman: The Movie, Lois's first meeting with new hire Clark Kent has her snark at him, sarcastically suggesting he's the kind of guy who would send his paycheck to support his aging mother. Clark doesn't see any irony in the suggestion because that's exactly what he does.
  Clark Kent: Excuse me, Mr. White. I was wondering if, if, uh, perhaps you could arrange for half my salary to be sent to this address on a weekly basis.
  Lois Lane: Your bookie, right?
  Clark Kent: My what?
  Lois Lane: Don’t tell me: he sends a check every week to his sweet, grey-haired old mother.
  Clark Kent: Actually, she’s silver-haired.

Literature

• In Brig Scarlet Flamingo, Amelia works from dawn till dusk to support her paralyzed impoverished mother and later joins a pirate crew to get enough money from the plunder for her mother's medical treatment.
• In The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino, even when he's being completely irresponsible in other ways, Buratino wants to find a way to buy a new coat for his father (who sold the old one to buy Buratino's schoolbook).
• In Tress of the Emerald Sea, a portion of Tress' meager earnings from washing windows goes towards supporting her parents and her younger brother, as her father was injured in a mining accident and her mother is barely able to turn a profit with her knitting business.
• In Poor Liza by Nikolay Karamzin, Liza works hard to support her mother, especially after the latter becomes too infirm to work herself.
• In the Folktale "The Old Man and His Grandson" as collected by the Brothers Grimm, a family reluctantly supports their aging grandfather but makes him sit separately from the table and eat scraps from a wooden bowl, because his hands are too unsteady to eat without spilling. They finally have a change of heart when their young son starts carving something out of wood, explaining, "I'm making a wooden bowl for father and mother to eat from when I am big."
  • In other variants of the story, the grandson is sent to get a blanket for the grandfather to sleep in the corner, but tears it in half telling his father, "I will need the other half for when you are old!"
  • An Asian variant has the even darker twist of the son building a basket to drown his father who has become a drain on the family's resources, only for the grandson to innocently remark, "Be sure to bring the basket back when you're done, so I can use it when Father is old!"

Live-Action TV

• Extraordinary Attorney Woo: This turns out to be the motivation behind Min-woo's ruthlessness in his attempts to secure himself a permanent contract from his internship. As he explains to Su-yeon during their trip to Jeju his family is poor, and his father is sick. As such he feels the responsibility to get a good paid job and be able to support them.
• Suits: Mike Ross gets in trouble more than once while trying to get money through less-than-legal means to support his grandmother, who took him in when his parents died, due to her health issues.
• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel:
  • Midge's childhood home was owned by Columbia University since her father worked as a professor there. When he decides to leave Columbia in Season 3, her parents lose the apartment and have to move in with their annoying former in-laws, the Maisels. When Midge earns enough money to buy back the apartment from Columbia, she asks her parents to move in so they can be back near their friends and grandkids and stop fighting with the Maisels. Instead of being grateful, they insist that they tell their friends that they bought the apartment back and invited Midge to live with them since they are embarrassed by the thought of their daughter supporting them as a single woman in the early 1960s.
  • In Season 5, a Flash Forward in Season 5 to the 1970s reveals that the now world-famous Midge is secretly backing her mother's failing matchmaking business because it makes her mother so happy and she only has so many years left. This forces Midge to do more on-the-road gigs, keeping her away from her growing children.

Music

• In "Bodak Yellow", Cardi B mentions not having time to relax because she's too busy working to pay her mother's bills.
• Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" has the singer mention that her mother left her father due to his alcoholism, which in turn left him too sickly to work. The singer dropped out of school to take care of him because nobody else would.
• The song "To My Parents" by Anna Clendening contains the lyrics "Sorry that I couldn't buy you that house upon the hill, or take care of all your medical bills".
• Ingrid Michaelson's song "You and I" includes a fantasy where she and her lover make enough money to buy their parents homes in southern France.

Theatre

• Legally Blonde: Implied with Emmett, who "grew up in the Roxbury slums, with my mom and a series of bums." Now he's a law student at Harvard, and says, "I know it'll all be worthwhile when I win my first lucrative trial and buy my mom that great big house out on the cape."

Web Animation

• Minilife TV: Melvin the Ninja lives with a relatively poor family and competes in tournaments to earn money to support them. The Minilife Chronicles episode "The Ninja" centers around Melvin competing in a tournament to help his mother pay her bills.
• Pop Cross Studios: In this video depicting famous video game characters as members of the Suicide Squad, Min Min is depicted as the Heroic Bastard of a Struggling Single Mother in Central City, born from a one-night stand she had with Plastic Man. Whilst Min Min and her mother were close, they often struggled to make ends meet running their small ramen restaurant and having a child only strained her mother's wallet more. By the time she was 13, Min Min's mother's restaurant had fallen on hard times, and Min Min decided to help her make money by competing in an underground fight club called the Ultimate Smash, once she'd learned how to control her stretchy arms. Initially, she was a massive crowd-pleaser and earned enough money to pay her mother's bills. But then her manager ordered Min Min to use her powers to assist in the theft of a gold shipment, otherwise he'd take away her helmet and she'd never be allowed back in the Ultimate Smash again. Reluctantly, she agreed, only for the Flash to show up and arrest her. Now, Min Min serves on Task Force X out of desperation to get out of jail and make it up to her mother for her shady work.

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