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If you were asked to name some of the things that shape the relationship between parents and children there are many you might think of: schools and peer groups, divorce and remarriage, drugs and drink, television and books, illness and ageing.
Asset prices and credit markets would probably not be among them. Yet you would be wrong not to mention them, for, as a new mortgage offered by Lloyds TSB makes clear, they are central to the way things are between generations.
As the mortgage market loosens up, some companies are beginning to offer 95 per cent mortgages once more. Most of them are hideously expensive.
Lloyds TSB's isn't, but it has a large string attached: the mortgage holder's mother and father have to cough up 20 per cent of the value of the property.
After three years, if payments are kept up, they can reclaim their cash, so long as the value of the mortgage is worth 90 per cent of the value of the property or less.
I've never seen a financial product before that required parents to mortgage their future for their children; but it's only making explicit a trend that has been under way for some time.
Fifteen years ago, when credit was cheap and property prices low, young people could, by and large, afford to leave home as soon as they had a job.
But during the 1990s, as property prices rose to levels never previously seen, that became harder. Parents who had expected to wave their children off with combined relief and regret found themselves still washing the socks of their thirtysomething offspring.
The property crash should have made it easier for young people to set up by themselves.
Unfortunately, though, credit markets seized up at the same time. So the cheap 100 per cent mortgages that financed not just the ill-fated consumer boom of recent years but also studio flats of the young have gone.
Instead, those who have no capital must pay unaffordable interest rates, get their parents to sign on the dotted line, or go on living at home.
I have mixed feelings about this. While I am keen on my children being able to afford their own places when the time comes, financial independence has bad consequences as well as good ones.
Friends of mine from India and Pakistan are shocked by the state of the family in our society; and one reason why the generations are closer in their countries is that parents and children depend more on each other financially and often live together.
When families can afford to live apart, they grow apart. So I quite like the idea of my children continuing to need me.
Anyway, I reckon that if my children expect me to rustle up a chunk of capital for them when the time comes, it's only fair that I should try to.
After all, thanks to the Government's mismanagement of this generation's finances, the next generation's taxes are going to be paying off the budget deficit that we have built up for years to come. So I reckon I'm probably going to owe them.
A great way to reinvigorate poetry
The resignation of Ruth Padel as Oxford Professor of Poetry after revelations that she had emailed journalists about her rival Derek Walcott's relationship with students has sent shivers through the literary world: if poets seem to have morals no better than those of politicians, what will it do to poetry?
No end of good, I should imagine. I can't think of a better way of reinvigorating interest in poetry than to put it about that poetry readings are fetid with lust and that top jobs in poetry are fought over with a ruthlessness more often seen in the world of pop music.
More of this, and we're but a caesura away from "Britain's Got Iambic Pentameter".
• Last week I came upon one of those wonderful incongruities London specialises in: a man standing in the car park by my mother's block of flats with a mobile phone in one hand and a startlingly beautiful, very angry-looking bird of prey sitting on the other.
I asked whether they were there on business or pleasure. It turned out that the bird, a Harris hawk improbably called Frank, was pest control: the most effective way of scaring off pigeons and thus keeping the area clean. There was, indeed, not a single rat with wings (Woody Allen's term for pigeons, not mine) to be seen in the area.
It seems to me a better way of discouraging them than Ken Livingstone's ridiculous ban on feeding them in Trafalgar Square-which Boris Johnson, as a liberal, should surely repeal.
Up the creek without any pumps
Distressing news from the countryside: in thinly populated areas, petrol stations are closing down. The Highlands and Islands council expects to lose 114 out 231 over the next few years.
Perhaps they should be subsidised by those of us who live in cities. That is what happens with Post Offices: a slice of what we pay for stamps helps keep open shops in the middle of nowhere used by two men and a sheep.
Or perhaps people who live in the countryside should stop expecting handouts and either keep a spare can of petrol in the boot or go and live somewhere where they don't have to drive 30 miles to buy a loaf of bread.
Emma Duncan is deputy editor of The Economist.
Reader views (1)
"When families can afford to live apart, they grow apart. So I quite like the idea of my children continuing to need me."
If the only way you can continue to feel close/needed by your children is for them to be financially reliant on you, then Ms Duncan, I feel very sorry for you.
- Smb, London, UK, 26/05/2009 13:29
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