Kelly Ripa & Mark didn’t plan on supporting kids post-college but ‘times are hard’

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Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos have three kids: Michael, 25, Lola, 21 and Joaquin, 19. Lola and Joaquin are in college and Michael graduated from NYU in 2020. Apparently, Kelly and Mark told their kids they would support them financially for the bulk of their expenses through college but once they graduated, they were on their own. However, given the job market, Kelly said things have changed. When Michael’s job became a pandemic casualty, she and Mark extended his financial grace period because times are hard right now.

Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos will always be their kids’ biggest supporters.
On Friday’s episode of Live with Kelly and Ryan, the mom of three, 52, opened up about the difficulties of “adulting” as her kids join the workforce, sharing that her oldest son Michael, 25, had a hard time with his post-college job.

“Adulting is hard nowadays. It’s very hard for kids. Job opportunities aren’t what they were. The economy is driving this trend.” said Ripa. “I know that Michael graduated college in May of 2020 and he had a writing job lined up which evaporated because the pandemic shut down the production and it just never came back.”

“So, you know, we gave him a grace period of an additional year to find other job opportunities because it’s hard,” she said of her and her husband Mark Consuelos.
Ripa went on to explain why she feels it’s a “unique time right now to have kids in college.”

“I said to them, these are years that you won’t get back and this is a time where we won’t mind supporting you financially as long as you work — as long as you maintain a job for your add-ons, as I call them,” she shared.

“The bells and whistles; the stuff that they want — as long as you work for that, we will cover the core expenses, but once you graduate, that’s over,” she continued. “Because we were married at 25, you know what I mean? And we feel like because we didn’t have safety nets, we got something cooking.”

[From Yahoo]

I appreciate Kelly’s stance on her kids having a job in college to pay for entertainment and to become financially independent following college. I also understand a parent feeling obligated to help their kid who graduated college into a bad job market. Of all the things I can fault Kelly for, her work ethic is not one of them. I think her kids were raised with both parents working hard and doing what’s asked of them. That said, I kind of have to laugh at feeling sorry for poor Michael losing his writing gig straight out of NYU and struggling to find his next one. I mean, there are other jobs out there he could possibly pick up in the meantime. This is what nepotism babies don’t get. They think struggling means having their guaranteed spot in a writers’ room disappear due to a worldwide pandemic and having to spend their parents money until the next spot opens up for them. While the rest of us graduated from college working two or three jobs waiting tables, slinging drinks or loading trucks at night. Then our days were spent trying to convince employers those degrees they insisted we have would float us until we got the experience they were looking for. Kelly’s right, things are tough out there. But hopefully she and Michael understand that it’s a little tougher for some than others.

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