09/18/2026
Did you know?
In Louisiana, feeding your parents is not only the right thing to do. It is the law. ⚜️
Civil Code article 229 says that children are bound to maintain their father and mother and other ascendants who are in need. Not encouraged. Bound. It is an obligation a court can enforce, and it has been sitting in the Louisiana Civil Code from the beginning, carried straight over from French and Roman law along with everything else that makes this state legally strange.
Forty nine states do not have this. In common law America the general rule is that an adult child owes a parent nothing at all. A handful of states have filial support statutes that go almost entirely unused. Louisiana wrote it into the Code as a basic family obligation, sitting right alongside the duty of parents to support their children, because the civil law tradition never accepted the idea that a family is a set of separate individuals who happen to share a last name.
The obligation runs both directions between ascendants and descendants, and it is proportional. It is measured by what the one actually needs and what the other can actually give. It is not a blank check and no judge has ever treated it as one.
In practice it almost never reaches a courtroom, and that is the interesting part. It does not have to, because down here it was already going to happen. The back bedroom got made up. The grown daughter moved home. Somebody's mother spent her last four years at her son's kitchen table being fussed over by three generations at once. The law was largely writing down what people were doing anyway.
That is what the Louisiana Civil Code actually is once you get underneath the Latin. It is a very old argument about what we owe each other, still binding, still on the books.
Somebody took care of somebody in your family, and nobody ever had to file a thing. 🌿
