How does providing financial and practical support to young adult children impact upon their parents’ present-day lives and future plans?

Family financial support of young adults has occupied growing scholarly attention over recent years yet remains disconnected from literature addressing the intensification of parenting, which focuses primarily on children. In this article we seek to connect these bodies of literature in order to consider how providing financial and practical support to young adult children affects their parents’ lives and future plans. We present the findings of an interview-based study with 30 parents of young adult children living in Australia. Firstly, we consider patterns of support that our participants provided to their children, finding that financial and practical support was extensive across our sample. Secondly, we consider how supporting young adult children affects parents’ lives, finding that our participants were reluctant to discuss the negative effects that supporting their children may have on them in the present. In relation to the future, the majority of our participants anticipated providing financial support to their children and had factored doing so into their retirement planning. Drawing together these findings, we argue that the parenting of young adult children represents a continuation of aspects of intensive parenting commonly associated with childhood and adolescence and conclude by highlighting some areas for future research.