Intergenerational Assistance with Home Ownership: Understanding the Relational Development of Financialized Subjectivities

ABSTRACT

Recently scholars have turned their attention to the role of intergenerational financial assistance in facilitating entry into home ownership for young adults. This practice has been identified as a means through which intergenerational inequalities may be translated into intragenerational inequalities. However, the question of what this form of financial dependence on family means for both young adults and their parents has received less attention. This article reports on the findings of a study conducted with 15 related donor-recipient pairs (30 in-depth interviews in total) in the UK in 2019. Drawing on these findings, we show that the provision and receipt of intergenerational financial assistance does not simply reflect family practices, but instead plays an active part in developing and conveying them. We ultimately contend that the practice of giving and receiving financial transfers shapes individuals’ broader orientations to the property market, and to financial decision-making and planning.

KEYWORDS:

• Family finance
• financialization
• home ownership
• intergenerational transfers
• young adulthood

Introduction

In the years following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the UK, along with many other advanced economies, has witnessed a retrenchment of welfare provision and a subsequent accentuation of asset-based forms of welfare. Asset-based welfare prompts individuals to accept responsibility for their own financial needs by investing in financial products and assets which can later be tapped into as a source of financial support, essentially representing an individualization of responsibility for managing economic risk (Doling and Ronald 2010; Prabhakar 2019). Due to historically high rates of owner-occupied housing tenure and stable upward trends in property value, housing has been a primary asset in asset-based welfare arrangements in the UK (Doling and Ford 2007). However, in recent decades, changes in labour and housing markets, alongside reduced state support, have created unfavourable conditions for young adults seeking to become homeowners. More recently, and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, continued inflation has kept the Bank of England base rate high, resulting in increased borrowing costs for first time buyers. Moreover, while UK property prices have seen a decline in the last year, average prices nevertheless remain around £40,000 above pre-pandemic levels (Halifax 2023). As a result of these longer term trends and recent economic shocks, the distribution of housing wealth is distinctly generational at present, with almost three quarters of adults over the age of 65 owning their homes outright (up from just over half in 1993), while adults in their mid-30s and 40s are three times more likely to rent than 20 years ago (ONS 2020). Similar dynamics have been reflected in broadly comparable national contexts such as the US and Australia (Arundel and Ronld 2021).

In response to the increasing importance of home ownership in so-called “asset-based economies” (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2021), growing difficulties for young adults trying to enter the property market, and intergenerational inequities in housing wealth, increased scholarly attention (particularly in Europe) has been directed towards intergenerational familial assistance with entry into the property market (see Manzo, Druta, and Ronald 2019; Cook 2021; Ronald and Lennartz 2019; Wang and Squires 2023 for international examples). This research has focused on both direct monetary transfers and in-kind forms of assistance including extended co-residence in the family home, with the latter representing a form of assistance that is more likely to be provided by working class parents who are unable to provide cash (Wong 2019). While some of the existing research has considered motivations for giving, prevalence of assistance, and the impact of intergenerational assistance on family relationships, no research has yet considered how giving and receiving financial transfers may shape individuals’ broader orientations to the property market, and to financial decision-making, and little research has considered how decisions to either give or receive assistance interact with and shape (rather than simply reflect) familial norms and practices. We seek to address this under-researched area by responding to the following research questions: how does giving or receiving financial assistance with first-time home ownership interact with the development of financialized subjectivities? And, how do decisions to either give or receive assistance shape familial norms and practices? The significance of our approach lies in the fact that we address financialization through a relational lens, considering how it is transmitted through and bound up with the norms and expectations of family life.

Intergenerational Assistance with Home Ownership

Finch and Mason’s (1993) classic study of the normative obligations informing the provision and receipt of family support in the UK set the tone for much subsequent work on intergenerational financial assistance. Finch and Mason (1993) asked their participants to respond to vignettes detailing a range of scenarios and involving a range of family relationships. They found that there was some consensus on the factors that should be taken into account in the process of making normative judgements about whether to assist family members financially, but that there was little consensus in the specific conclusions that the respondents arrived at. They did, however, identify more favourable views of assistance in cases concerning what could be deemed a “worthwhile” expense – a housing deposit or medical bill, as opposed to a holiday.

While Finch and Mason’s (1993) research explored and measured respondents’ perceptions of normative obligations, more recent research has focused on recipients – and in a limited number of cases donors – who have experienced intergenerational financial assistance, often questioning its impact upon family relationships. For instance, in their UK-based study of parents’ provision of both material and financial assistance to their adult children who were living independently, Heath and Calvert (2013) found a blurring between what was considered a gift and what was considered a loan. For their participants, assistance was often initially extended to them in the form of a loan, and over time expectation of repayment diminished, or repayments were refused. Rowlingson, Joseph, and Overton’s (2017) UK-based study of intergenerational financial giving also revealed the complexity of, and blurring of boundaries between, gifts and loans. In their study, participants said that they did not generally like to ask relatives for financial gifts – or accept them where offered – but where people did ask for help, it tended to be in the form of a loan, rather than a gift. However, over time, loans effectively became gifts if people did not pay them back. These findings are notable predominantly because they suggest that the meaning of transfers is not necessarily fixed, and may instead be renegotiated over time. However, it is important to note that both Heath and Calvert (2013) and Rowlingson, Joseph and Overton’s (2017) work nevertheless echoed Finch and Mason’s, finding a lack of normative consensus around the provision and receipt of intergenerational financial assistance. Similarly, Heath (2018) has found that even within families in which adult children make competing claims for assistance, the provision of this assistance often depends on notions of deservingness and worthwhile expenses, with support for purchasing property appearing to occupy a distinct category of assistance.

The latter finding is also reflected in Druta and Ronald’s (2017) UK-based research on transfers intended to aid entry into home ownership. The authors found that assistance of this type occupies a relatively unique position, with parents being more willing to give substantial amounts for home purchase than they were for any other purpose. For Druta and Ronald, transfers for the purpose of aiding entry into the property market occupied a unique status because they were viewed as an “ideal gift” that allowed the donor to augment, rather than detract from, the recipient’s independence. Research using quantitative data has confirmed some of the claims of small-scale studies, finding that home ownership status is “strongly associated” with the receipt of an intergenerational transfer, with the receipt of financial resources valued over £15,000 associated with a 220 percent increase in one’s odds of moving into owner occupied housing (Suh 2020). It is important to note that the question of how families arrive at consumption decisions and choose to allocate resources across family members has also been pursued in the economic literature (see Himmelweit et al. 2013 for discussion).

Notably, the norms and practices supporting intergenerational transfers appear to be specific to one’s context (at the micro and macro level), as international research has revealed markedly differing outcomes. For instance, financial transfers are less likely to take place, but typically involve larger amounts in Southern Europe and are more likely to take place with smaller amounts in Nordic countries, with Continental European countries falling in between the two (Albertini and Kohli 2013). Albertini and Kohli (2013) have claimed that this is due to differing welfare state regimes, a claim that supports our framing of this topic within a context increasingly marked by an individualized, asset-based approach to welfare and growing reliance on the family (a dual tendency that has been addressed by Cooper 2017), as well as our focus on UK-based studies in the preceding review.

While existing research has addressed the way in which intergenerational financial assistance is negotiated, how it impacts upon family relationships (through the study of reciprocity), and how expectations of repayment may change over time, there is relatively little consideration of how these decisions to either give or receive assistance interact with and shape (rather than simply reflect) familial norms and practices. This omission is a clear gap in existing research which we seek to address, and we do so by turning to research on financialization.

Financialization, Negotiation and Family Practices

A growing body of literature has identified housing as a central aspect of financialization, a concept referring to the increasing dominance of financial actors, practices and markets in everyday lives (see Aalbers 2016). On a micro level, the financialization of housing can be situated within what has been termed the “financialization of everyday life” (Langley 2007). While this term is used somewhat amorphously in the literature to encompass a range of conceptual approaches, we draw particularly on literature addressing cultural shifts associated with financialization (Hillig 2019). This literature considers the adoption of financialized subjectivities in response to the penetration of financial logics into more and more fields of everyday life (Pellandini-Simanyi 2020). Financialized subjectivities are associated with a willingness to take individual responsibility for one’s future financial welfare (as opposed to, for instance, relying on state support in later life), and to engage in rational calculation as part of their everyday life and practices. Notably, this vision of a financialized subject aligns with the individualized, asset-based approach to welfare that we have already identified. Previous research addressing housing market decision-making has shown that engaging in financialized housing markets can prompt the development of financialized subjectivities (see Aalbers and Christophers 2014). For instance, in their study of renters and owner-occupiers in the highly financialized property market in Melbourne, Australia, Gorter and Jacobs (2020) found that members of each group understood housing as an asset, and enacted this view by positioning themselves as neoliberal investor subjects engaged in the rational calculation of risks and rewards in pursuit of speculative forms of investment.

However, while the research outlined above has considered how families (rather than just individuals) make decisions within highly financialized housing markets, this research appears to carry with it a view of family relationships as separate from processes and practices of financialization and their attendant shift in subjectivities. Indeed, implicit in such approaches is a view of financialization, and the associated creep of financialized logics into a growing number of seemingly “private” spheres of life, as a unidirectional process in which one is affected on an individual basis and may then turn to the family for assistance and for shelter from such demands. Absent from such a view is consideration of how financialized logics and the conditioning of financialized subjectivities may be enacted within and through (rather than simply upon) families.

In order to explore this topic we draw on two key conceptual developments in family sociology. Firstly, we draw again on the work of Finch and Mason (1993, introduced above) to consider the role of negotiation in family interactions. Secondly, we draw on Morgan’s (2011) approach to the study of family life, which focuses on “family practices” in order to make visible the everyday “doing” of family. Morgan’s focus on the everyday practices through which family life is enacted is of utility in the present article, as although the specific act of transferring funds for property is out of the ordinary (on this see Druta and Ronald 2017), negotiation of the meaning of the funds and their role in family relationships is quickly folded back into the mundane, everyday rhythms of family life. The ongoing meaning and subjective impact of such transfers can therefore perhaps be understood best by approaching them on this footing. Drawing on these approaches, we focus on the negotiation of family assistance and responsibilities as specific family practices. In so doing we consider how financialized subjectivities may be enacted within and through families in the process of giving and receiving financial assistance with home ownership. We use this approach to demonstrate that intergenerational financial transfers, and the practices through which they are transmitted, do not simply reflect family practices. Rather, they have the potential to disrupt and reshape them.

Methodology

Our qualitative interviews with 15 related donor-recipient pairs explored participants’ lifetime housing experiences, the nature, timing and impact of intergenerational financial support, and (for the donors) their experiences of buying and selling property. We also investigated participants’ future housing aspirations, as well as their general attitudes to the use of housing wealth and some of the differences between generations. We recruited first-time buyers in the UK who received intergenerational financial assistance and the parent or older relative who assisted them. These donor-recipient pairs were recruited to the study with the support of a professional recruitment company and each participant was given £40 as a “thank you” for taking part. Recipients were recruited first, and were asked to identify their donor so that they could be invited into the study. This meant that the majority of donors were the relatives (rather than in-laws) of the recipient who was interviewed. It also meant that, in cases in which donors were in relationships, the donor who was invited to participate in the study was the individual who the recipient deemed most likely to be willing to do so. Fortunately, this process resulted in a reasonable gender distribution across both the donors and recipients (see Tables 1 and 2), and enabled us to achieve our minimum 40/60 split within both the recipient and donor samples Interviews were not conducted with donors’ or recipients’ partners due to concerns about feasibility within the parameters of this particular study, and with recruitment of related donor-recipient pairs already proving challenging. However, previous research has shown that couples perspectives may differ significantly regarding money matters (Rowlingson and Joseph 2010), demonstrating that interviewing couples is an important avenue for future research on intergenerational financial assistance. Our aim was to recruit a maximum variation sample (Mujere 2016) in order to consider the manifestation and implications of intergenerational assistance across key social divisions, specifically socio-economic group/social class, ethnicity and gender. For socio-economic group, we aimed to recruit at least 40 percent of participants in professional and senior management and non-manual occupations (ABC1) and at least 40 per cent in skilled manual and unskilled occupations or unemployed (C2DE) across both donors and recipients. We recruited pairs who had given/received at least £500 for the purpose of assisting with entry into property ownership, an amount that was chosen to avoid precluding less wealthy donors. We also focussed our sampling strategy on post-2012 property buyers, in order to capture the experiences of those buying in the context of post-GFC financial regulation (FSA 2011). Our final sample of 30 interviewees was geographically confined to the Birmingham and West Midlands area, a methodological decision which was informed by Coulter’s (2017) work on the enormous diversity in local housing markets across England and Wales. Specifically, Birmingham presents significant diversity in relation to housing stock, affordability and tenure type. For example, the proportion of households owning their home (either outright or with a mortgage) is lower than the proportion in England and Wales more broadly (52.7 and 61.5 per cent respectively) while a higher proportion live in socially rented or privately rented housing (23.5 per cent in Birmingham in socially rented properties compared with 17 per cent in England and Wales, and 22.6 per cent in the PRS in Birmingham compared with just over 20 per cent in England and Wales (Birmingham City Council n.d.; Iceni 2022)). The sample was relatively diverse in terms of other key socio-economic characteristics (for an overview see Tables 1 and 2 below).

Table 1. Overview of recipients.

ID	Age	Gender	Occupation	Ethnicity	Children	Relationship status	Amount received	SEG
R1	29	M	Primary school teacher	White British	1	Married	£25,000	A
R2	25	M	Air import clerk	White British	0	Engaged	£10,000	C1
R3	28	M	Car lease manager	White British	0	De facto	£14,000	C1
R4	26	M	Retail sales manager	White British	0	Engaged	£20,000	B
R5	28	F	Dental engineer	African Caribbean and White British	1	Engaged	£5000	C1
R6	26	M	Secondary school teacher	Black British	0	Single	£20,000	A
R7	26	F	Secondary school teacher	White British	2	Engaged	£14,000	A
R8	27	F	Nurse	White British	0	De facto	£4,500	A
R9	28	M	Sales recruitment	White British	1	De facto	£3,250	C1
R10	29	F	Secondary school teacher	White British	2	De facto	£3,000	A
R11	25	M	Engineer	White British	0	Engaged	£10,000	C2
R12	38	F	Sales assistant	Black British	0	Single	£7,000	DE
R13	25	M	Design engineer	White British	0	Engaged	£12,500	C2
R14	26	F	Call centre worker	British Pakistani	2	Married	£39,000	DE
R15	30	M	Picture framer	White British	0	De facto	£3,000	C2

Table 2. Overview of donors.

ID	Age	Gender	Occupation	Ethnicity	Children	Relationship status	Relationship to recipient	SEG
D1	70	M	Facilities manager	White British	2	Married	Father-in-law	C1
D2	55	F	Retail assistant	White British	3	Widowed	Mother	D
D3	51	F	Hairdresser (semi- retired)	White Irish	2	Married	Mother	D
D4	53	M	Operations manager (security)	White British	2	Married	Father	B
D5	51	F	Coffee shop manager	White British	2	Married	Mother	C1
D6	56	F	Medical sales rep	African Caribbean	3	Married	Mother	B
D7	75	M	Retired	White British	4	Married	Father-in-law	A
D8	56	M	Transport operator	White British	2	Married	Father	C2
D9	52	F	Business owner	White British	2	Married	Mother	C1
D10	43	M	Project manager	White British	2	Widowed	Uncle	C1
D11	57	F	National leader of education	White British	2	Married	Mother	A
D12	67	F	Cleaner	African Caribbean	2	Single	Mother	D
D13	57	M	Police officer (Sergeant)	White British	2	Married	Father	A
D14	48	F	Call centre worker	British Pakistani	2	Single	Mother	D
D15	54	F	Receptionist	White British	2	Widowed	Mother	C2

The interviews were conducted in June-July of 2019, following receipt of ethics approval from the University of Birmingham’s research ethics committee under the protocol number ERN_19–0322. Participants provided written consent prior to the interviews, and all interviews were conducted by telephone and recorded, with the prior permission of participants, and subsequently transcribed. Telephone interviewing has been used successfully while addressing sensitive and personal topics such as money matters, with researchers finding that it allows participants a greater sense of privacy than face-to-face interviewing (Oltmann 2016). It was chosen for our study on this basis. Where possible, the participants were interviewed on the same day. However, where this was not possible, interviews did not reflect a greater degree of similarity between responses, and in several cases, the participants did not appear to be aware that we had already spoken to their donor or recipient. The order in which participants were interviewed (donor or recipient first) varied, and we did not use information obtained in one interview in the subsequent interview due to ethical considerations regarding participants’ privacy and confidentiality.

We applied the framework analysis method (Spencer, Ritchie, and O’Connor 2003) to code and categorize our data into potential themes. We collated all the relevant coded data extracts within the identified themes and grouped them under a smaller number of broader main themes including “housing histories”, “intergenerational assistance” and “meanings of home ownership”, using thematic charts. While the themes emerged from the interview data, our identification of themes within the dataset was sensitized by existing research on the topics of intergenerational financial assistance and family sociology. In particular, themes related to gifts and loans, responsibility and reciprocity and a focus on practices were informed by existing scholarship. Each row in the matrix represented an interviewee while each column contained data from their transcript relating to the particular theme/sub-theme. Organising the data in this way enabled us to explore the range of responses and the differences and similarities across cases, not only at the individual case level but also within and across categories. It also enabled us to systematically, and rigorously, move along the analytic hierarchy, from describing patterns in the data to presenting explanations for them.

Findings

Motivations for Giving

Most of the donors in our study cited the desire to mitigate new life course risks associated with the failure to accumulate assets as a key motivation for providing intergenerational financial assistance. However, the ways in which donors acted on this motivation was shaped by their specific family circumstances. For instance, Jayne (D2), 55, had lost her husband when her three children were teenagers and she sought to mitigate the impact of her husband’s death on her son by assisting him with securing a property:

I wanted to help [son and partner] really. I think, cause like you say it’s not easy nowadays and I thought, you know, the more the deposit they put down would help with the costs and it’s just… and I know it sounds silly, it felt like it was something of their Dad as well, because of the… see we worked hard in this house it was, you know, we financed it, we repaired and we bought it and we both worked hard and I just felt like, with him passing away, a gift of him as well.

Jayne wanted to provide her son with financial assistance both because “it’s not easy nowadays” and due to the loss of his father. However, while she was keen to use part of the life insurance payment that she had received after her husband’s death to help her son to buy his first home, Jayne’s son, Tom (R2), found it difficult to accept the money due to its source, and to the fact that after providing assistance of this type to him and his two younger siblings his mother would not have any assets and funds for retirement beyond her home and a modest pension. When asked how difficult he felt it was for his mother to give him the money he replied:

It wasn’t difficult for my mum to give it to me. It was quite difficult to accept it, ’cause I wanted the money that my dad left to be for her.

For Jayne and Tom, the experience of providing and receiving financial assistance was tied up with their efforts to continue on with personal and family life after the loss of their husband/father. They each expressed that they wanted the other to have the money, as in this case the money appeared to represent or act as a proxy for paternal care. The provision and reluctant receipt of the money as “a gift of him” motivated in part by the work that Jayne and her late husband had put into their own home turned the financial assistance into a legacy of home ownership and security that was bound up with their own experience of family life.

However, despite the strong sense of care underpinning Jayne’s desire to assist her son with financing his first home, the provision of this financial assistance was nevertheless motivated by ideas about deservingness. For instance, she did not tell Tom about the money that she had set aside for him from his father’s life insurance payment until he had demonstrated that he could successfully save money:

This is gonna sound really dreadful but, the other two knew, but I wouldn’t tell Tom because he wasn’t always brilliant with money and saving. His girlfriend was, but he- he did get better, and his girlfriend actually knew about it. When looking for a house. Yeah, she said, “Can I tell Tom about that money now?” And I said, “Yes, you can.”. (laughs)

Tom understood his mother’s intention clearly, stating:

[Mum] didn’t just want to give it me in case I wasted it on whatever. (laughs)

Significantly, money was used in this instance to both demonstrate care and compensate for the loss of Tom’s father, and to strategically encourage the performance of a financialized subject who could demonstrate behaviour associated with responsible financial management. Seemingly instrumental and affective motivations were enacted alongside each other, and Jayne’s choice to strategically withhold information from her son in order to encourage him to engage in saving behaviours did not detract from the emotional significance and resonance of the decision to provide funds from her husband’s life insurance to assist her son with entry into home ownership. Importantly, this example demonstrates that the cultivation of a financialized subjectivity – illustrated through the ability to save money and prioritize home ownership over other expenses – was not simply a prerequisite for receiving financial assistance. Rather, Jayne used the strategic withholding and provision of assistance to nudge Tom to cultivate this subjectivity.

Deservingness and Responsibility

Deservingness and the ability to adopt and display a subjectivity that aligned with responsible self-management appeared to be criterion for the provision of financial assistance across the sample. For instance, Alison (D6), 56, who provided her son Lyle (R6), 26, with financial assistance with his first property, stated:

If you can help family, or if we could at least give our children more than we had, or better than what we had, then … that was our aim. But we’d only do it if we saw them helping themselves … If they were wasting money, and literally had no responsibility, then we wouldn’t do it. Because we see Lyle as trying to help himself. And we support that, and we see him trying to grow and better himself.

Alison’s desire to “give our children more than we had” did not appear to contradict her accompanying desire for her children to “help themselves”. Rather, for Alison, providing assistance to her children was directly contingent on them proving their deservingness of these funds.

It appeared that the need to demonstrate self-sufficiency was clearly communicated to Lyle as when he was asked about why his parents provided him with financial assistance he replied:

If I was sitting at home not doing anything I know for a fact they wouldn’t have said, okay here’s money we’re gonna help you get a house. But because, you know, I’m out the house at seven every day, in the morning, and I’m getting back at, you know, half five, six … So, for them to say, well, okay you’re working hard so we will help you to get on the property ladder, was again another big factor.

Lyle’s statement that his parents’ perception that he was working hard was a “big factor” in their decision to provide him with financial assistance resonates with Alison’s need to demonstrate that he would not “waste [the money] on whatever”. Indeed, Lyle identified his parents’ knowledge of his long working days – as opposed to “sitting at home not doing anything” – as central to his parents’ decision to help him. Taken together, Lyle and Alison’s experiences suggest the need for recipients to perform hard work and good saving behaviour as a means of demonstrating deservingness. Moreover, Lyle’s knowledge that this performance was necessary suggests that his parents’ expectations that he would demonstrate deservingness was clearly conveyed and implicitly understood as a condition of financial support. Lyle’s performance of deservedness and self-sufficiency denoted a financialized subjectivity, and this appeared to be a requirement for Lyle’s parents to deem him responsible enough to receive support. Interestingly, Alison helped Lyle to own his own home in part because she had already done so for his twin sister, who attempted to buy in an area that Alison and her husband deemed “unsafe” and was given additional money to help her to buy in a preferred area. While Alison expressed the desire to treat her children equally, doing so appeared to ultimately be contingent on her assessment of their deservingness.

Ideas about deservingness and responsibility were important to some of the donors to the extent that they offered different levels of financial support to their children. Rose (D12), 67, provided her daughter with £15,000-£17,000 for her deposit and repairs to her new home, but did not provide any financial support to her son because she felt that she could not trust him to use it for a worthwhile expense. Rose’s view of finances was also shaped by her cultural background. While discussing why she provided this level of financial support to her daughter, despite having limited means and continuing to work part time as a cleaner to cover her living expenses, Rose stated:

I wanted her to own. Because, you know, I got this thing about living within your means. You can’t do a thing that you shouldn’t.

This statement called back to Rose’s earlier discussion of financial advice provided by her Nan:

There’s a saying, she says, “Never hang your basket where you can’t reach it.” Basically it’s a saying meaning, you shouldn’t try to get yourself into debt.

While three of the donors identified with cultures other than British, the way that culture informed their family practices was also shaped by the fact that two of them were divorced and currently single, and had ex-husbands who did not have a relationship with their children. These circumstances meant that both of these donors (who were women) were very close to the children to whom they provided assistance, and both provided sums of money that left them in vulnerable financial positions. Notably, both of these donors made reference to culture while explaining their decision to provide financial assistance to their daughters – Rose with reference to the above proverb, and Namrah (D14), 48, with reference to how property is viewed relative to other assets in Pakistani culture. Interestingly, explanations of this type – and any reference to her African Caribbean background – were absent from Alison’s discussion of her decision to provide financial assistance to her son, Lyle. This may have been because unlike Rose and Namrah, Alison’s decision to provide assistance did not place her in a financially vulnerable position and thus required less justification. In contrast, Rose and Namrah appeared to use culture-based explanations as justification of their actions that abstracted them from the level of individual decision-making and therefore seemingly obscured them from judgement. This reading is reinforced by the fact that both identified their decision to provide financial support to their daughter as disadvantageous to them at some point in their interview. On this point, when asked if she was concerned about the future in relation to her own financial situation, Namrah stated:

Yeah, definitely. Definitely because I’m, I’m like I haven’t got any, hardly any savings now at all.

However, she followed up this statement by minimizing her own financial concerns in comparison to those of her daughter:

Yeah, it does, it does concern me now but I’m, I’m on my own now so I can start again, whereas, you know, my daughter’s got two children. (23)

This attitude directly shaped how Namrah’s daughter Jinani (R14), aged 26, viewed the assistance that her mother provided. When asked how difficult it was for her mother to provide her with financial assistance Jinani responded:

She wouldn’t give me the money if she didn’t feel like she was financially stable enough to give it to me.

Family expectations and financialized expectations were wound together for Fred (D13), age 57, who helped his son, Scott (R13), 25, with £12,500 towards the deposit to buy his first property. When asked how he felt about Scott buying his first property in his early 20s Fred replied:

Very, very proud. Amongst his peer group of his age group I mean, still lots of people his age they can’t get on the property ladder, his mates he’s got at 28 and 29 and they’re still living at home and they can’t get on the ladder, ‘cause they can’t get the deposit.

While Fred’s pride in his son initially appeared to be due to his achievement of home ownership at a relatively young age, further discussion suggested that this pride equally stemmed from Scott’s orientation towards home ownership, which mirrored that of Fred:

I know I’ve influenced my son, who got onto the property market at 21 himself the same as I did. And he already says … his goal is to have a portfolio of properties one day himself … He’s very focused to it.

Fred had a “portfolio of properties” from which he earned rental income, and his pride in his son appeared to be due to both his entry into home ownership, and his uptake of a view of property as investment and stated goal of accumulating more properties. Notably, while Fred and Rose’s children’s orientations towards the property market – and to financialization by extension – appeared to be shaped by their different family ethos (as conveyed by their parents), they were also undoubtedly shaped by their different socio-economic positions. Rose was a single mother who had bought her former “council house” through the UK government’s Right to Buy scheme, worked in a manual occupation and could not afford to retire fully, while Fred had retired comfortably and had a range of income streams from rental properties, occupational pensions, and other investments. The aspects of a financialized subjectivity that they each appeared to value and emphasize – avoidance of debt on the one hand, and an orientation towards investment and entrepreneurialism on the other – were clearly divided along class lines. Moreover, these cases also reflect notable gender differences which intersected with these classed divisions. Rose provided financial assistance to her daughter so that she was “taken care of” and assisted with renovations so that her daughter’s house was liveable. In contrast, Fred appeared to assist his son in part due to the desire for him to have a competitive advantage over his friends and associated a sense of pride, rather than duty, with this decision. The gendered dimensions of financial assistance were shaped by both the gender of the donor and that of the recipient, meaning that the dynamics between fathers and daughters differed to those between fathers and sons, and the same held true for mothers. While extensive consideration of these gendered differences lies beyond the scope of this article, the gendered norms and values that colour these specific dynamics are an important area for further research.

Negotiating Reciprocity

While negotiation of both the status of the transfer and its meaning took place at the time at which the transfer occurred, in many cases this process of negotiation also continued after it was concluded, highlighting the way that intergenerational transfers continue to act as a space in which familial norms and practices are enacted and shaped long after money has changed hands. The clearest example of this was provided by Lyle and his mother. When asked whether the money that he had received from his parents was a gift or a loan, Lyle stated:

It’s a gift … But I will make payments, obviously.

When asked what he meant by this, Lyle referred back to financial assistance that his parents had provided him with buying a car, which was also presented as a gift:

I guess it was the same sort of conversation with the car. My parents made it clear that obviously they’re gonna give us this money and I think we had a conversation where, you know, we agreed that I would pay it back. But they made it clear that I would only ever pay it back once I am in a position to pay it back, so they will never be, you know, knocking on my door asking.

Ambiguity or change in the status of money exchanged between family members has been found in other studies (Heath and Calvert 2013). However, while discussing this arrangement Lyle generalized this approach to giving and receiving money to something that “all of our family would do”, suggesting that this specific approach reflected familial practices:

It’s something that all of our family would do, we’d all make sure we give back what we feel like we owe. So, when I’m ready I will. They know that I will make payments whenever I can.

When his mother was asked about the status of the money that was provided to her son she stated:

We’ve given this to Lyle as a loan. In all fairness, I don’t think we’ll ever get it back.

Alison then went on to say that she and her husband had framed their assistance as a loan as a way of managing their children’s financial expectations:

The reason why we make sure it’s a loan is because we don’t want them all saying, “Oh, well we want £25,000 as well, well and we want 25.”

However, Alison does not anticipate, or indeed expect, to be repaid, stating that “we probably won’t ever look to get that money back”. Alison appeared to frame the money as a loan as “a test” to ensure the independence and honesty of her children:

I think [it’s] also a bit of a test, that if [children] kind of decided, actually, I’m not going to give it back to you, then that would be fine, and we wouldn’t have argued. But then again, it should have taken a degree of trust … it would have implications that you can’t be honest and whatever.

This honest, albeit complex, discussion of the role of money in trust and performances of independence contrasted markedly with the sentiment that “money shouldn’t change things” which was often stated by members of the sample, evidencing a potential space of tension between normative ideas of money and family relationships and the lived realities of negotiating family practices. While demonstrating a complex performance of trustworthiness, this example also demonstrates an effort to maintain the boundaries of acceptable behaviour within the familial relationship and calls attention to the challenge of managing the contradictions inherent in turning to the family in order to meet the expectations of individual accumulation. Indeed, the way in which financial assistance was provided and the expectation of repayment (or lack thereof) that accompanied it appeared to be intended to reinforce Lyle’s status as a financialized subject who was financially independent and responsible.

Boundary Work and Limiting Reciprocity

While the negotiation of family practices was made visible in the participants’ discussions of giving and receiving financial assistance, discussions of reciprocity and its limits suggested that assistance of this type altered family practices, leaving participants to negotiate new boundaries in their relationships. For instance, Nikita (R12), age 38, felt that her mother “had a free for all” since providing her with financial assistance:

She has a key, and she just turns up and not tells me she’s coming … I think because she’s kinda given me the money I can’t say, “Mum, kind of give me a heads up if you’re coming round.”

This experience aligns with the work of Manzo, Druta and Ronald (2019) whose Italian study found that, for their participants, acceptance of intergenerational assistance with home ownership often carried with it an acceptance of the rights of parents to continue to exert influence over their lives and residential space. Indeed, when Nikita’s mother was asked whether she saw her daughter a lot since assisting her with buying her home she unreflexively replied “of course, she’s only 10 minutes down the road”. This casual response suggested that, for Nikita’s mother, dropping in without warning was now an expected family practice due to the proximity of her daughter – something that was important to her when she helped her daughter to choose which property to buy. Notably, this practice may also be informed by a sense of ownership on the part of parents who financially assisted their children with property ownership.

While receiving financial assistance appeared to change the family practices of some of the donors and recipients, several of the recipients were also cautious to maintain limits on the extent of their reciprocity, appearing to anticipate that the existing family practices had been unsettled and needed to be restated. For instance, while the idea of providing care and help in later life as a means of reciprocating the financial assistance was raised by several of the recipients, the extent of this care was often subject to careful limits. Jonathan (R1), 29, stated:

If when they’re older they need support financially and things then, you know, of course we’re going to do what we can. You know, we don’t earn that much but, you know, we’ll give what we can. Obviously we want to make sure they have kind of a good life. They’ve looked after us so I just feel like it’s fair in return to look after them, you know? It doesn’t necessarily mean, it doesn’t necessarily mean 24 hour care, but it might mean, you know, ensuring someone’s there to check up on them and … that kind of stuff. And just, you know, making sure they get to live the rest of their days I think with kind of a little bit of dignity and happiness.

Notably, Jonathan sought not to separate the exchange of money from their family relationships, but to place limits on the reciprocity that they felt was owed to his father-in-law on the basis of the size of the financial assistance. Indeed, in justifying that they were not obligated to provide “24-hour care” in part because Jonathan and his partner “did not earn much”, he drew considerations of money to the forefront of this discussion, and used the relative size of the assistance and his own financial capacity as the rationale for family behaviour. He thus drew on a financialized form of calculation in which he weighed his earnings against the size of the assistance provided by his father and used that to rationalize the level of help that he felt obligated to provide. Notably, Jonathan’s father-in-law Steven (D1), aged 71, did not desire or anticipate any assistance from Jonathan and his partner, indicating that his restrained sense of reciprocity matched with the expectations of his donor.

However, this was not always the case. When asked about whether she anticipated providing care to her parents later in life, Steph (R8), 27, stated:

My mum’s made it very clear, she expects to come and live with us. Like in a jokey way, but she’s not joking. She’s like, “Don’t you ever put me in a nursing home”.

When asked whether there was some truth to her mother’s “jokes” Steph clarified “yeah, she’s being serious”. However, when asked how she felt about the possibility of her parents living with her and her partner, Steph stipulated that she would only be willing to go forward with this type of arrangement if it was a matter of necessity rather than preference:

If there was a caring requirement, then they could come and live with me … but if it’s just ‘cause she wants to come and live with me, then no.

The careful boundaries that were drawn by Jonathan and Steph, and which Nikita struggled to maintain, ultimately suggest that assistance of this type has the potential to disrupt normalized family practices, leaving members of families to redraw these boundaries.

Discussion

Returning to the question of how giving or receiving financial assistance with first home ownership interacts with the development of financialized subjectivities, we find that recipients of intergenerational financial assistance are often prompted by their donors to cultivate and demonstrate this type of subjectivity in order to be deemed responsible enough to receive assistance. Although several of the donors intended to provide assistance to their recipient because they had done so, or were planning to do so, for their other child or children, the provision of this support nevertheless remained contingent on the recipient’s performance of responsibility. The motivation to provide assistance was therefore commonly twofold: the desire to mitigate new life course risks associated with the failure to accumulate assets, and the degree to which the recipient was viewed as deserving according to highly financialized criteria. Notably, in some cases financialized subjectivities were actively shaped by the donor through, for instance, the strategic provision and withholding of assistance. It thus appears that far from simply being a prerequisite for receiving financial assistance, financialized subjectivities can also be cultivated and shaped through this process.

While the theme of financialization was reflected throughout the data, the character of the participants’ family practices was shaped in distinctly classed ways. This dimension of family practices was most visible when donors were discussing their motivations for providing assistance to their children. The desire that almost all of the parents expressed to mitigate the risks that they associated with not entering into the property market is characteristic of normative approaches to parenting which are risk-focused and extend parental responsibility well into young adulthood (Furedi 2008). However, several of the middle class parents focused on the opportunity and competitive advantage that property ownership represented for their children, emphasizing the fact that their children had entered into home ownership earlier than some of their peers and were planning to accumulate investment properties. This orientation is typical of middle class parenting styles (Lee et al. 2014). In contrast, the working class parents almost uniformly focused on the desire to avoid the risks associated with missing out on getting onto the “property ladder” and imagined home ownership in relation to notions of security rather than those of investment. This is significant because it demonstrates that parents’ desire to mitigate life course risks is not expressed uniformly, and may manifest in classed, as well as gendered, ways.

In this article we have drawn on Finch and Mason’s (1993) concept of negotiation and Morgan’s (2011) concept of family practices to focusing on the negotiation and “doing” of family, rather than on static norms. We have taken this approach in answer to Finch and Mason’s finding that there is a lack of widespread consensus on whether parents or other older relatives should financially assist their adult children, with norms only emerging with any solidity in relation to which factors one should consider. This finding has been confirmed in the work of several subsequent scholars (Druta and Ronald 2017; Rowlingson, Joseph, and Overton 2017). In addition to identifying the relational way in which financialized subjectivities are developed in the context of intergenerational financial assistance with home ownership, we have also used our focus on practice and negotiation to consider how the practices of family life are not only reflected in, but are actively reshaped by the experience of giving and receiving this assistance. The destabilization of family practices, and the subsequent need to reshape them, was made visible in the negotiations that recipients were engaged in while trying to define the boundaries of their relationships following receipt of the transfer. The sense that reciprocity of some form was needed provoked the recipients to articulate the limits of this reciprocity, or to bemoan their failure to do so in one case. Interestingly, in this process of renegotiation, much like in the process by which the initial transfer was negotiated, there appeared to be some consensus between the recipients on the factors that should be considered when deciding whether to provide a parent with care later in life – their level of need, the recipient’s own financial position – but less consensus on the outcome of this consideration. However, the point to be taken from this finding is that giving and receiving intergenerational financial transfers does not simply make family practices visible, or prompt families to articulate them. It also has the potential to destabilize aspects of family practices, leaving family members to renegotiate and rearticulate the boundaries or these relationships. Druta and Ronald (2017) have claimed that intergenerational assistance with home ownership occupies a distinct category of assistance because it augments the independence of the recipient. We extend this claim by suggesting that while transfers of this type augment the recipients’ independence in the present, they also have the capacity to destabilize family practices and prompt families to engage in a renegotiation of the boundaries of their relationships for years into the future.

Conclusion

Much attention has been paid to the top-down impact of welfare state regimes while considering transfer practices across national contexts. While such research provides crucial insight into large-scale patterns of intergenerational assistance by demonstrating how specific environments may lead parents to feel compelled or be called upon to “step in” to assist their adult children financially, it does not consider the interpersonal impact of intergenerational transfers on the level of family life. Moreover, it does not account for the dynamic and relational nature of the negotiations informing decisions to give or receive financial assistance or the shift in family practices resulting from them. We thus suggest focusing not just on the outcome of intergenerational assistance, but on the process through which they are negotiated, the way this process is used to instil or encourage specific performances of self and orientations towards financial decision-making, and the subsequent negotiations through which the boundaries of family practices are reshaped. By doing so we stand to uncover the full implications of the turn to the family for financial support in the face of new biographical risks. The potential to understand the dynamics of this turn to family support is also augmented by the maturation of longitudinal studies such as the UK Longitudinal Survey and the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. These studies and others like them are reaching a stage at which reciprocity for intergenerational financial assistance in the form of care for parents in later life can be studied and linked to factors such as the size and timing of assistance. Doing so represents a promising area for future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).