Most Canadian parents now subsidize adult children’s living costs: RBC

More than half of Canadian parents with kids aged 18 to 40 are still writing cheques for adult life — and most of that money is going to groceries, rent and utilities, not down payments, according to a new RBC–Ipsos poll.

Fifty-one per cent of parents surveyed said they gave financial help in the past year, averaging $6,151; nearly one in five of those helpers handed over $10,000 to $19,999. Among parents who support adult children, 56% help with groceries, 24% with rent, 21% with utilities and 12% with consumer debt — grocery aid even outranks emergencies (43%). Support stays stubbornly high later: 37% of parents of 35-to-40-year-olds still help, and 19% in that group say their kids are not financially independent.

Only 15% of supporting parents blamed poor money management. Thirty-five per cent said the cost of living is simply too high for their children to manage alone — a wage-and-price mismatch that has stretched “launch” into what should be peak earning years. Personal finance commentator Melissa Leong put it plainly: this generation isn’t failing to launch; the runway got longer and a lot more expensive.

The inflation read-through is brutal for two balance sheets at once. Shelter and food have outrun headline CPI for years, so parental transfers become a shadow social program — while parents burn savings and delay retirement to keep adult kids solvent. Soft CPI prints do not erase that private subsidy.