The best reason for not buying your child a property Hands up who wants to buy their kids a house. I am now feeling like a bad parent. Unlike that couple in Mosman, featured in the Herald at the weekend, I have failed to surprise my twenty-something child by buying him a Surry Hills terrace for over a million dollars. And unlike the Sydney property lawyer featured in Tuesday's Herald I somehow neglected to snap up a city unit for one of my kids when he was five-years-old. What a tightwad I must be. Helping your children buy property now seems as accepted a part of middle-class parenting as supplying the Vegemite toast and driving them to soccer. I understand the urge. Sydney property prices are now so inflated it can be hard to imagine how the next generation of adults will have the ability to buy their own house. We who had that opportunity understand its pleasures. So we find ourselves thinking: "Surely it would only be fair to try and help." A million dollars if you have it; a few thousand for the rest of us. Yet here's the problem: in giving them property you are also taking something from them. The thing that you are stealing, of course, is the joy of making their own way. Most of us remember our first pay packet, the possibilities, previously denied, this manila envelope suddenly opened up. That pleasure grew from both the privations which proceeded it and from the feeling of achievement and self-mastery it represented. A little later there was the decision to try and buy a place. That brought with it a sudden education in budgeting. It was when you learnt to embrace that great middle class rule: when shopping, always buy the second cheapest in any category. I'm not saying it was enjoyable making the payments but it did bring a rush of achievement. More importantly, trying to raise the mortgage each week also supplied an easy motivation for getting up in the morning. Whatever your job, there are moments when you think, "Why am I doing this? Why have I dedicated my life to nursing, or school teaching, or lawyering, or building? You lie in bed, nursing a headache as the negative ideas crowd in: the boss doesn't appreciate me; I probably chose the wrong profession anyway; this is such a dead-end, and so on. In those grim moments, the mind can struggle to find a good reason to get up and go to work. But then, like the cavalry, the mortgage payment rides into town. You don't have to struggle to invent a purpose in life from first principles: you need to get up so you can earn some money so that you can buy food for your children and pay for the roof over your head. That easy excuse for activity and enterprise and achievement is what you steal when you make everything too easy for your child. Of course, there may be a time when your grown-up children are trying to buy into the market when - if you had the funds - you could truly surprise them by helping out. You could throw in enough to make the repayments a little less horrendous. Or to allow them to fix-up the bathroom this year rather than next decade. I say you could truly surprise them because if you do it right, it really will be a surprise, as their parents will have always behaved as if funds were tight. That, after all, is the best way to give children an understanding of money; setting themselves up for a life in which they will master money, rather than be mastered by it. Parents want to help and, if they can, they should. Just as long as the way they do it doesn't steal so much more from their children than has been given. Richard Glover writes in Spectrum every Saturday.