The Bank of Grandma and Grandad: What You Actually Owe Your Adult Children

A story crossed my desk recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. A grandmother, writing anonymously on the forum Gransnet, described a year spent quietly propping up her daughter’s young family – taking them into an outbuilding on her own property after they returned from a month-long overseas holiday confessing to $9,000 of debt, paying to install a bathroom for them at her own expense, offering childcare so the couple could work their way back to solvency. Nine months in, her daughter announced a second, planned pregnancy, and when the grandmother’s reaction wasn’t jubilant enough, she was screamed at and called selfish for not wanting to take on two small children full-time while her daughter returned to work.

I want to sit with that story for a moment, because underneath the drama is a question I think a great many of you are quietly wrestling with, minus the outbuilding and the shouting match: how much do you actually owe your adult children, financially, and where does generosity end and your own retirement begin?

You are, statistically, not alone in this

Here’s what the research actually shows, and I think the numbers themselves are worth sitting with. One Australian survey found that 94 per cent of grandparents provide some form of monetary support to their family each year – yet strikingly, 79 per cent of those same grandparents didn’t describe themselves as someone who “financially supports” their family at all. Which tells you something important right away: most of you are already doing more than you’d admit to a stranger, because it doesn’t feel like a loan or a gift when it’s your own daughter standing in your kitchen looking exhausted.

More broadly, Australian research from the Institute of Family Studies found that around one in five people receive occasional or regular financial help from family in a given year, with support flowing overwhelmingly from older generations to younger ones. Half of all survey participants actively endorse the idea that families should support one another financially in times of genuine need. This isn’t some fringe behaviour. It’s close to the cultural default.

What’s actually being asked for

If you’re wondering whether your own situation is unusual, it almost certainly isn’t. The most commonly requested forms of help, across the research, cluster around a fairly predictable list: everyday living costs when a family is doing it tough, help with a home deposit or getting into the property market at all, education costs, and – increasingly, and this is the one that catches grandparents most by surprise – regular, ongoing childcare that quietly functions as financial support even when no money changes hands directly. Two in five grandparents provide childcare for grandchildren under 13, and that figure climbs to nearly two-thirds when the grandchild is 10 or younger. Every hour of free childcare is, in effect, money you’ve chosen not to charge for.

Interestingly, Australian grandparents lean toward gifting rather than lending compared to some other countries – we’re more likely to simply hand money over than to formalise it as a loan with an expectation of repayment. There’s something quite telling in that. It suggests many of us would rather absorb the loss outright than have the awkward, ongoing conversation about repayment terms with our own children.

The part nobody wants to discuss: protecting yourself

Here’s where I want to say something that might feel unromantic, but I think matters enormously. Australia is currently in the middle of what’s been described as the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in the country’s history, with an estimated $3.5 trillion expected to pass between generations by 2050. Family lawyers report a genuine, growing trend of parents and grandparents insisting on a formal Binding Financial Agreement before handing over significant money, specifically to protect that contribution if a relationship later breaks down. A decade ago, this would have seemed distrustful, almost insulting, to suggest to your own child. Increasingly, it’s simply considered sensible.

I don’t think wanting a written agreement, or even simply calling something a loan out loud rather than letting it drift into an unspoken gift, makes you ungenerous. It makes you someone who has worked for decades to build what you have, and who is allowed to want some clarity about where it’s going.

What I actually want you to take from the Gransnet story

That grandmother wasn’t selfish. Nothing in her story suggests otherwise. She had already given an outbuilding, a bathroom renovation, nine months of childcare and enormous emotional labour, and the one thing she declined to commit to in advance was full-time care of two small children indefinitely, on top of everything else, while genuinely exhausted. That is not a withdrawal of love. That is a boundary, arrived at after a year of extraordinary generosity, not before it.

If you’re navigating something similar right now, here is the only real test I’d offer you: are you giving because you genuinely want to, and can afford to without quietly resenting it six months from now? Or are you giving because saying no feels like it would make you the villain in a story you never agreed to be part of? The research is clear that helping family financially is normal, common, and often deeply meaningful for the person doing the giving. What it doesn’t say, anywhere, is that the giving is supposed to be unlimited, undocumented, or offered under duress. You’re allowed to be generous and still have edges.

Have a question for Bess? Write to her at [email protected] with “Dear Bess” in the subject line.