Are Parents Really To Blame

Life is very hard now, depending partly on where you live. DD and her husband both have degrees and supposedly good jobs. They bought a one bedroom flat 11 years ago and they are still stuck in it with two children. (They have managed to split the bedroom into two. DS, having had debt problems when he was younger has never built up any savings and now pays over £900 amonth rent for the onebedroom flat he shares with his girlfriend and son. We own our house but are resisting the temptation to release equity so that our children can get the maximum value out of the house when we are gone. We provide free child care when needed and help out financially when we cxan.

The real problem started when they relaxed the rules on mortgages. When we bought our first house you could only borrow one and a half times one person's salary. Once they started including both pertner's salaries and lending many times the annual income there was no limit to the price you could put on a house. In the 18 years since we bought this house the price has quadrupled which is ludicrous! Wages haven't quadrupled.

Sorry - DD!!

The DGD are still at primary school and are not allowed to sip or even spit wine

Sometimes very ordinary jobs can be the opening to a bright future. DGD worked in a restaurant when she was at Uni; they sent the staff on a wine appreciation course and she was offered an opening to train as a wine taster/buyer.
She didn't take up the offer (despite me saying that it sounded brilliant!!).

My DGD graduated four years ago but couldn't get a job immediately. She migrated south to live with her dad and stepmother, doing bar work and cleaning jobs until she finally got a job in the field in which she had trained. Throughout Uni she worked in a newsagent's and then in a takeaway and in the holidays did maintenance jobs for her landlord. As a teenager, she delivered newspapers and served in the shop. She never asked me for anything but I enjoyed taking her out to lunch every month and then paying for some supermarket shopping. Her mum was in no position to finance her; my DS and his wife helped her with driving lessons and practice - she passed her test first time. I am a pre-boomer and my sons are post-boomers. I don't think any of us fit into any category!

My pension is just over £400 per month

Ankers, pension pots and equity release are the cause of a lot of rows. I know this from experience. The AC see them as an interest free cash bail out but it's rarely paid back and the word no deeply offends.
I remember a friend once refused his son a loan and told him to go and borrow from a bank. The son asked why he couldn't borrow from dad and dad replied 'because the bank will make sure you pay it back'.

Very good points nina1959.

^If you have not gone to uni, if say you are working in the care industry, you could not suddenly leap to say working as a radiologist.
I think I do understand that Ankers hmm but these are graduates complaining that they cannot get jobs, houses etc.^

Yes, but I did specifically ask you if you were talking about those who did not go to uni, or those that did for that very reason. And you said both.

Jalima, the AC are very shrewd. If the parents are going to leave an inheritance their attitude often is why not give it to them now by doing an equity release on their home.
The guilt trip on parents for this reason is causing the resentment but equity release is a very complex matter.
The way social care is going, parents may need their equity for future care.

What? For how long...? What an entitled little madam she sounds!
Reading between the lines I wonder if she may have a chip on her shoulder - she sounds as if her parents are separated, mum with whom she lives? is working as a childminder and perhaps cannot help but dad has done quite well for himself and refuses to help her.

Not all families are like that.
Likewise, not all 'baby boomers' had an easy time of it but knew that hard work at jobs they perhaps did not enjoy that much could bring rewards - ie being able to pay the rent and eat.

I do a job where I come into contact with a lot of mothers, many of them in their 50's, and they lament often about the fecklessness of their AC.
One lady told me last Christmas that she was spending 2,000 a month paying her daughter's bills, (mortgage, loans, etc). She was frightened she was going to run out of money. She's a widow so the money she was using was what her husband had left. Daughter had moved in with her because she'd left her job due to a bad back but refused to sell her house. Instead she fully expected her mother to pay her bills while still keeping her home, car, etc.
She asked me what she should do and I said STOP! Her daughter must either sell her house or get a job. This was an extreme but I hear a lot of similar stories.

If you have not gone to uni, if say you are working in the care industry, you could not suddenly leap to say working as a radiologist.
I think I do understand that Ankers but these are graduates complaining that they cannot get jobs, houses etc.

Now - perhaps if they had trained as radiographers and not screenwriters, costume and performance designers they might be in with a chance of a job somewhere
One trained as a lawyer, I think. Now I know a young millennium who trained as a lawyer and, when she could not get a highly paid job straight away, she went to work for CAB (paid) and gained a lot of valuable experience.

It's a horrible article in a nasty paper designed to pit generation against generation. Meanwhile our schools and hospital are chronically underfunded.

We need to stop blaming each other and start paying more attention to what's going on.

Our posts crossed ChristineFrance! I second your last paragraph as well as the rest of your post.

Ana, I raised an eyebrow at that comment too.

The comment also assumes Londoners do not need nurses, teachers, nursery workers, office workers, bank clerks, postmen/women shop assistants, street cleaners, paramedics, workers in hotels and restaurants, etc etc etc.

We're not talking about people able to do those jobs, jobs which require quite a lot of training and a reasonable education, we're talking about young people starting out and whether or not they are able to live in London and find a decent job and whether their parents can and should help them.

My experience is that most parents do help their children quite a lot. A few don't. I think so many of the youngsters are spoon fed in school and told that they don't need to do anymore than the standard reading for the course (my own told me the teachers said so!) which teaches them to do the minimum. Many exams now are alternative choice/tick box and the schools bend over backwards to get everyone through. I'm afraid I don't think the huge increase in the number of grade As at A level or first class degrees is to do with a sudden growth in intelligence!

Youngsters are also told that university is everything and that a degree should be vocational and that graduates earn more and they will definitely get a job in the field they have chosen as their degree subject. Setting them up for disappointment.

I really hate the endless assumption that all baby boomers went to university. They didn't, a tiny percentage did. I left school at 16 and went to a college of FE for a couple of years. I did do a degree as a mature student many years later while I was working and had a young child!!

Yes of course Baby Boomers ( I hate that term ) are to blame for all the ills of the world from Brexit to terrorism and all points in between.
We did have a different life and were lucky enough to be able to save for our future. We didn't have a crystal ball to see how things would turn out forty or fifty years later.
The great majority of parents I know help their children financially and with child care. As others have said young people now seem to have a great sense of entitlement, not all of course and expect things to fall into their laps without much effort from them.
I do agree that too many people were encouraged to go to University and degrees gave become devalued. Similarly trade skills were also undervalued and young people lost great opportunities.

They could release equity from their homes to provide for us...

What? For how long...? What an entitled little madam she sounds!

Not all baby boomer parents are in such a fortunate position anyway.

Ankers That is certainly not my experience of "baby boomer" parents ...that may be the experience of those particular "millennials" but there could be many reasons for parental choices with regard to their grown up children.
Come to think of it when I left teacher training college there was a glut of teachers around, at least 200 applicants per job and it took me nearly two years to get a permanent post!!!... different generations, different problems. I did not blame my blameless parents for the lack of government planning re teacher training ....so why should baby boomers be blamed for government removing student grants for instance

Cheryl from Glasgow says
^'They think once their child is at university their responsibility ends and they kick us out and let us get on with it — but there's no jobs anymore. We don't have a fraction of the opportunities they had.

'I have graduate friends whose parents will let them be homeless rather than be a 'strain' on their own comfortable lives. They could release equity from their homes to provide for us, but all they care about is being better off.'

I dont think that that is typical behaviour of parents though? Or is it?

I would say the biggest problem facing someone trying to get a better job is that in larger organisations the preliminary stages of application are all computerised now. If you cannot tick the right box on the form you will not be put forward to the next stage where you might actually speak to a human being who will be able to assess if you have the right qualities even if you don`t have exactly the right experience.
Very often employers actually tell applicants they don`t want to see CVs in the early stages - so applicants don`t have the opportunity to sell themselves. You might have worked extremely well in a lower paid job which you had to take in order to pay the bills - but that won`t help you get a better paid job

I think the "baby boomer" generation undoubtedly had it easier as a generation (as opposed to individuals ..it didn't feel easy to me at the time!!) but I cannot see that the circumstances the "millenial generation" find themselves in is therefore the baby boomer generations fault!!! What on earth is the point of setting one generation against another...and different parents, different millenials, different people deal with the challenges facing them and their children in different ways!

When our DS was a year old we moved out of London to Bristol so we could afford a house with a garden for him instead if the flat we were living in. We left behind our family and friends but felt it was worth it. The interest rate then was 17%

Good point avidreader
I take exception to someone's comment that no one has to live in London. So where do we go then ?, those of us born and bred in London , our friends and family and jobs in London. Not everyone in London is on ridiculously high wages.
The comment also assumes Londoners do not need nurses, teachers, nursery workers, office workers, bank clerks, postmen/women shop assistants, street cleaners, paramedics, workers in hotels and restaurants, etc etc etc. Some public sector salaries offer an Inner/Outer London allowance it that does not cover the difference.
Even to commute into the city to do any of these jobs involves expensive season tickets (bought out of taxed income) perhaps another 3 hours added on to the working day and still high housing costs. If the job involves anti-social hours, the commuting option becomes even less viable.

And I expect they get depressed and go shopping or drink or get into drugs as a way of making themselves feel better about a mundane existence.

Thankfully it could be a lot worse. Their parents do try and keep them on the straight and narrow. In some ways, the area has a lot going for it.
But they definitely feel, a lot of them do, that they are rather treading water. Especially when they see some of their old mates come back to the area to visit family and catch up with some of them.

But what can they do? Yes, they can leave everyone and go and do the same sort of job somewhere else.And rent[it would take them years and years to get together a house deposit]. A few do.

Azie09. No I have not come across her before. She and her work sound very interesting. A few too many large words for me!

In my opinion, those that do go, are fortunate to be brainy, and that is how they leave[generalisation].It does make it a lot easier.