Parents’ housing careers and support for adult children across Europe

Housing careers have important consequences for individuals’ well-being. The present study focuses on the role of parents’ housing careers in affecting the way and extent to which they provide economic support to their adult children. By adopting a family life course perspective, it shows that while housing tenure has relatively little effect on parents’ transfer behaviour, mobility between different tenures can elicit or suppress intergenerational support; moreover, the quality of the house positively affects intergenerational co-residence. Support received to acquire a home along one’s life course has an important demonstration effect: those parents who have received their home as a gift or have received economic support for buying it are more prone to provide help to their adult children. The empirical results do not allow to identify macro-contextual conditions that shape the effect of parents’ housing careers on intergenerational support, but they show that the demonstration effect plays only a marginal role in Southern Europe.