For all of the conversation this week about Mitt Romney’s views on federal income taxes and personal responsibility, his insistence that “I have inherited nothing” may be the most thought-provoking.

His comment, which was among those he made in the video of a fund-raiser that Mother Jones magazine posted Monday, has inspired a few skeptical reactions, given his privileged background. But leaving the breadth of his advantages aside, the comment speaks to an often unspoken distinction among families that can determine who gets ahead, who gets along and who merely scrapes by.

Some parents help their adult children financially, while others cannot or do not.

This living inheritance comes in many forms. It exists along a range from the free room and board for a 23-year-old intern to a stay of years for a 43-year-old single parent who has lost a job or recently divorced. The contribution can be as small as a first month’s rent or as large as the 25 years of payments that many parents now make on college loans they took out so their children would not have to.

The less help you have as an adult starting out, the harder you have to work to make the next geographic, career and economic step up. If you lack that help, any and all mistakes (and there will be plenty) often have much bigger consequences. And the lack of any family help can have a compounding effect on the millions of people who have negative net worths well into adulthood thanks to their student loan debt.