I'm going to apologise in advance for the rant that is coming.
When I read threads like this I am very glad of two things: 1. that my parents never had a pot to piss in and so never felt the pressure to give my sibling and I any hand outs. They didn't even have their own home because they never earned enough money between them to buy one. 2. I don't have kids.
I graduated in 1992. It wasn't a barrel of laughs and many people from my year, including me, ended up without a "graduate" job t go to. This was not through lack of trying, but there was nothing out there. The country had a few financial problems, let's say. There had been rioting in the streets a few years before, Thatcher decimating whole communities, mass unemployment during my childhood and a feeling among many of us working class kids that there was little hope of us having a lifestyle that we aspired to, you know: own home, good job, nice car, holidays.
We took shit, low paid jobs and by God they were low paid in the days before NMW. I couldn't afford to even rent a room in a shitty, mould-covered shared house which had no functional bathroom or kitchen. I ended up living with my parents and commuting to said low paid job by bike - it was 10 miles away. I became mega fit, so that's one advantage I guess. I had no savings. No handouts. No proper job until 1994 when I started temping. Only then I was able to afford the shitty room in the shared house, but then couldn't afford to eat properly and definitely no social life. Only in 1997 did I manage to escape the shit life - I was late 20's by then - with a place on a graduate programme. I could then afford to rent a slightly less grotty room in a shared house (this wasn't London and was actually a cheap area) and even managed to eat most days - though still had no social life, couldn't afford driving lessons so that cut down on job opportunities and definitely no hope of saving.
It wasn't until 2000 when I moved in with my then boyfriend, who became my husband (now ex) that being able to share the rent meant we could get a whole flat of our own. It was one bed, ancient kitchen and a broken bath, so we had to exist on sink washes to avoid flooding the flat below. We lived there for 3 years until we could afford a slightly better flat and then managed to buy a tiny, one bed starter home by taking out a scary number of credit cards and maxing them all out, plus a bank loan, to raise the deposit.
We were both, by then, in fairly good jobs and had progressed. We were still paying off the cards and the loan when we divorced in 2010.
For some of us there has never been a time when we could afford a deposit on a house in our 20's. Or 30s or, in the case of my parents. Ever.
For some of us the housing market has always been something out of reach and beyond our dreams.
I for one am sick to death of being expected to feel guilty for being born when I was. We struggled too. We had a cost of living crisis and we couldn't afford houses or a good life. Something that I think the parents of these spoilt children may have forgotten - or maybe didn't have to think about because they were the ones who had everything that people like me didn't.
Childfree people like me often get told that we are going to be dependent on your offspring to wipe our arses when we're old. I say to you now, I don't want your children anywhere near me because you have raised a generation of selfish, entitled drama queens and when I can no longer wipe my own arse, I'll see myself out of this life. Oh I don't blame the kids, btw. I blame you. Parents of my generation. What the fuck were you thinking.