A Legal & General study of 2018 US data, reported by Money, found that parents gave their adult children an average of $39,000 to help buy a home. Among the parents who provided that help, 15% said they had to accept a lower standard of living as a result, 14% reported feeling less secure about their financial future, and 7% postponed retirement by an average of four years. On the inaction side, there is no direct survey of parents who declined to help; the closest measurable signal of the stake involved comes from LendingTree’s 2026 down-payment survey, in which 35% of buyers who received family help said they could not have bought their home when they did without it. Both figures are proxies, not “do you regret your choice?” questions, so this entry is published as proxy_only.
The structural driver of inaction regret is the widening gap between housing costs and first-time-buyer incomes. When a parent can observe a concrete, durable consequence of withholding the gift — a child who, by the recipients’ own account, could not have bought without help — the regret becomes harder to rationalize away over time. This fits Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal pattern: the costs of inaction compound as the counterfactual (what homeownership would have meant for the child’s wealth-building) becomes clearer with each passing year. By contrast, action regret among parents who gave the gift tends to be more immediate and often fades once the child is stably housed.
The two sides measure different populations and are not strictly comparable. The 15% action figure captures concrete financial harm to giving parents, not emotional regret per se; a parent who accepted a lower standard of living but feels the gift was worthwhile would still be counted. The 35% inaction figure is a recipient-reported barrier, not a measure of how often non-helping parents regret their choice — no survey of that population was located. Separately, Bankrate finds that 61% of parents of adult children have made some financial sacrifice to help them, with 37% sacrificing retirement savings, underscoring how common the trade-off is. The comparison is most applicable to families with enough assets to make the gift a genuine choice and where children face real housing-access barriers; for parents with inadequate retirement savings of their own, the decision carries a different risk calculus the aggregate figures do not capture.