This study aims to increase our understanding of the risks associated with chronic parental illness on university students’ life satisfaction, psychological distress, and compulsive self-reliance. A questionnaire that included several carefully selected instruments and demographic items was administered to a sample of 282 students from a large public university in the southwestern United States. The findings indicated a significant difference between individuals coping with chronic parental illness and those not coping with chronic parental illness in regard to the three psychosocial outcome variables analyzed. Furthermore, attachment to mother was found to be a moderator between parental health and life satisfaction; however, resiliency was not found to be a moderator. Lastly, ethnicity had a significant main effect on life satisfaction and psychological distress. These findings suggest that students who have a parent with a chronic illness tend to experience additional distress and parent-child attachment may play a role in the successful coping of parental illness.