Yeah I think a lot of people learned their lesson the hard way. But it might be a spouse who is really bad with money, not just children. An awful lot of relationships get strained this way.What? Parents giving adult children money? It is very common these days. Boomers have accumulated a lot of wealth. Even where their children are successful themselves, they want to help out their kids financially. If they have enough money, there is no harm in doing so. Otherwise, it is left until they are dead and they will get no joy out of helping their children out then.
But the big change that I am seeing is boomers are much more measured in the amounts that they are giving. During the Celtic Tiger, parents were borrowing money to help their kids out to get property. I know of plenty of cases where the parent bought the property for the child and gifted it to them, repaying the debt themselves! I don't see any of that now.
Its surprising the number of older parents of adult children who give in to those children when it comes to money and especially with regard to property. Quite a few of the apartments in the last rental I had were by then being occupied by the adult children of the landlords, at what I can only imagine was quite a loss given that market rents on same would have been nearly 2k a month and some of them didn't seem to have been working at all.