When John Bonadeo called Social Security about collecting his own benefits, the representative asked whether he had any children under 18. That question unlocked a gusher he hadn’t known existed. Bonadeo, now 72, a semiretired general contractor, and Betty McDonald, 69, a retired Secret Service agent in Del Mar, Calif., had adopted six children in their 50s. The youngest was 2. His filing came with an additional roughly $600 a month for the children. McDonald told the Journal they were really floored. The family needed the money while the kids were still young.
There are more older parents than there used to be, and they are learning — sometimes by surprise — about the dependent benefit. Once a parent or grandparent with a dependent files, a child generally can collect up to half of the full-retirement-age benefit until 18, or 19 if still in high school. The agency doesn’t market it widely. Households headed by someone 65 or older with a child under 18 have more than tripled from 2000 to 2024, to about 410,000, census data show. Children collecting on retired workers’ records grew about a quarter over roughly the same span, to 323,000 as of December 2024, though the count has fallen in the past few years.
The trade is months for the child versus a larger check for life
Americans can claim between 62 and 70; the check generally rises the longer you wait, and fewer people have been claiming at 62. The dependent benefit complicates that. File earlier and the child gets more months before aging out; wait and the parent’s own check is larger for the rest of life. Elaine Floyd at Horsesmouth walked the Journal through a couple both 62 with an 8-year-old, full-retirement-age benefits of $3,800 and $2,500. Filing at 62 pays the child for 10 years versus two if both wait until 70, but cuts the parents to $2,676 and $1,760, with the child at $1,900. If the husband lives to 88 and the wife to 91, waiting still projects about $2.78 million versus $2.26 million — roughly $520,000 more. A family maximum, generally 150% to 188% of the parent’s full benefit, caps the total; the parent’s own payment counts first. Phillip Nieburg, 82, of Charlottesville, Va., filed between 62 and 63 so two younger children could collect just under $1,000 a month into college accounts. Boston University’s Laurence Kotlikoff notes a couple can stagger: the lower earner files early, the higher earner waits.
Our read
Retirement (M10): this is a claiming-age problem with a child’s name on it, not a loophole. Full retirement age is 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later; claiming at 62 is a permanent reduction. The dependent benefit can still make filing earlier the right cash-flow move for a household with a minor at home — and it can still be the expensive move if the parent lives a long time. The paper’s own example is the honest one: the child gets a decade of checks, or the parents get a larger lifetime total. You run both.
If you have a child or grandchild under 18 and you are inside the claiming window, ask the agency the question Bonadeo was asked. Then put the two paths on one page — months for the child, the reduced check, the family maximum, the survivor math — before anyone files. That is a fifteen-minute review with a statement, not a guess on the phone.