Parents' housing careers and support for adult children across Europe

Housing careers have important consequences for individuals’ wellbeing. 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.