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When love is pushed to the limit it leads to suffocation. That is the moral of this paper which describes the case of the altruistic parent who adjusts his/her working life partly in order to give his/her child the best possible living conditions. When parents’ work and children are totally exchangeable in production, this behavior drags down wages. If hourly wages are rigid, jobs are rationed and young people become the first victims of this rationing. We will show how this mechanism is at the root of endogenous fluctuations between unemployment and full employment when the productivity of older workers is negatively influenced by the duration of previous unemployment. We will also examine political support for minimum wage when the productivity of young workers is exposed to a vagary: the minimum wage, job offers to older workers, and youth unemployment all rise when there is an increase in parental altruism.