There’s extensive research on this, aside from what you’ll see in any history book or in literature from around the world!
The pre-war historical model of family
Across all mammal species and throughout recorded human history, resource pooling and offspring protection are evolutionary drives governed by kin selection i.e. the evolutionary mandate to secure the long-term survival, material well-being, and reproductive success of direct descendants through sufficient provision of resources for subsequent generations. As human societies grew in size and complexity this evolutionary mechanism transformed into an unwritten “intergenerational contract” manifested in family units as the bedrock of social stability.
Family wealth was culturally treated not as individual property to be consumed within a single lifespan, but as a trans-generational lineage fund held in stewardship for future generations. Protecting and economically positioning one's children ideally for a better life than the generation before them was viewed as a baseline moral duty (as it still is in most countries) and failing to do so brought severe social stigma. This was, and still is in most countries, in fact viewed as the main purpose of trying to accumulate wealth and the main motivation for working hard.
This model of family was highly visible in the UK's pre-war generations (the “silent” and “greatest” generations) and throughout recorded history prior to that. The evolutionary instinct manifested in organised societies as moral duties and obligations whoch were necessary for social stability due to economic volatility, structural hardships, and scarcity of resources. Personal luxury was heavily deprioritized in favor of preserving, building, and passing down family assets intact to shield their children from structural adversity, and in fact culture was built upon a moral distaste reinforced by religion and social norms which frowned upon and shamed self-indulgence at the expense of one’s descendants and wider family. It is an enormous cultural shift to abandon these centuries-long social norms which are grounded in evolution and were expanded upon as societies grew to form moral codes and social norms that were necessary to maintain a functioning society in larger groups: the structure of the family unit and obligations of that are an essential part of how human societies were able to expand into larger city states and then nations and remain fundamental in all cultures around the world that maintain stable societies over time.
A profound cultural break occurred with the modern “baby boomer cohort (born 1946–1964) in the UK and US in particular. They grew up during an era of unprecedented post-war economic growth and lived their working lives during the hyper-individualistic economic climate of the late 20th century. An unprecidented proportion of this generation fundamentally rejected centuries-old social norms and values of the traditional family construct, based on average social values and attitudes reported in multiple statistically validated data surveys, rejecting the values of family wealth stewardship and financial family responsibility across generations and recharacterising family wealth as individual assets, rejecting responsibilities towards future generations and refusing to accept that their own good fortune cannot be replicated by descendents in an entirely different economic climate, instead trying to recharacterise this abdication of family moral norms as a failing of morals of the generations following.
Sociological and economic research maps the anomalous transition in social attitudes in this specific cohort in these specific countries (UK and, to a lesser extent, the US) toward prioritising themselves over wide family groups, focusing instead on asset consumption for luxuries and leisure. This cultural shift gave rise to the 'SKI-ing' (Spending Kid's Inheritance) phenomenon, which psychologically reframes accumulated assets as a personal checking account and reward for individual labor rather than a trans-generational asset.
Evolutionary Kin Selection Foundation (William Donald Hamilton via Britannica): https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Donald-Hamilton
The baseline peer-reviewed biological framework outlining inclusive fitness and the innate evolutionary drive to invest surplus resources directly down the genetic line to ensure offspring survival and flourishing.
The Multi-Generational Continuity Study (National Institutes of Health / PSID Data): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6296851/
An extensive academic tracking study drawing on over 50 years of longitudinal data from the “Panel Study of Income Dynamics”. It demonstrates that family assets historically operate as long-term, multi-generational cascades, proving that treating wealth as single-lifetime property is an extreme historical departure.
The UK "hoard and delay" mentality bottleneck & intergenerational mismatch
In the modern UK economy, younger cohorts (gen X, millennials, and gen Z) view family economic cooperation as an absolute moral and practical necessity to navigate systemic hardships, such as historic wage stagnation and unprecedented house-price-to-income ratios. However, a significant proportion of the wealthy older generation rejects this mutual responsibility, creating a profound cognitive and material mismatch.
Sociologists attribute this friction to a severe “fundamental attribution error” uniquely prevalent within this specific cohort. They accumulated vast capital windfalls during an exceptionally prosperous era characterized by free higher education, final-salary defined-benefit pensions, and explosive, unprecedented and largely untaxed property market and asset inflation, they heavily (and falsely) attribute their wealth entirely to personal hard work and falsely believe this is replicable by other generations following who simply must be “not trying hard enough”. This cognitive bias filters out the structural tailwinds that insulated them, leading to a psychological misattribution where their adult children's financial vulnerabilities are blamed on personal lifestyle or work-ethic failures rather than systemic decay, ironically in large part caused by political choices made during their own working lives for which they voted, to benefit themselves, and a failure to take necessary long-term political choices which were not for the benefit of their own cohort. I.e. very few of the now-old men and women of this cohort were “planting trees under whose shade they would never sit”. Mostly, theywere busy chopping them down, burning the wood and congratulating themselves on how lovely and warm they were.
Consequently, they enforce artificial 'meritocratic conditionality' on downward financial support, insisting that adult children 'stand on their own feet' under economic conditions that make it structurally impossible. This mindset is compounded by increased longevity and institutional insulation. The expansion of state pensions and the institutionalisation of elderly care structurally weakened the historical necessity for reciprocal intergenerational ties (from this cohort’s perspective, because their children are legally mandated to support them via taxes). Therefore, older people largely no longer depend directly on their children for direct physical and practical support because their children are paying for this for them via the state instead, so the evolutionary and social pressure to maintain a highly integrated economic bond has declined, from their perspective.
Combined with wealth hoarding, this creates a severe timeline bottleneck: capital remains locked in housing equity while descendants face peak structural vulnerability (ages 25–40) trying to buy homes and establish families. Instead, wealth is delayed until end-of-life care or released when the children themselves are already entering retirement, compounding the declining living standards caused by the general economic decline.
The Lifetime Wealth Persistence Paper (Gregg & Kanabar via Wiley Online Library): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/roiw.12620
A peer-reviewed empirical study published in the Review of income and wealth using microdata from Great Britain's “wealth and assets survey”. It proves that younger British cohorts have become structurally and entirely dependent on their parents' asset levels just to attain baseline social stability, highlighting the severity of the generational wealth gap.
The Inheritance & Age Trajectory Bottleneck (Institute for Fiscal Studies / NatCen Data): https://ifs.org.uk/publications/inheritances-and-inequality-within-generations
A comprehensive macroeconomic report utilizing direct survey data from the “English Longitudinal Study of Ageing” (ELSA), co-managed by NatCen Social Research. It proves that younger generations are no wealthier than previous generations were at the same age, and tracks how delayed wealth retention pushes the average age of inheritance back to 62 to 64 years old, missing the lifecycle window where it is critically needed.
The Cultural Logic of "The Bank of Mum and Dad" (Moor & Friedman via Taylor & Francis): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03085147.2021.1932353
A qualitative sociological paper exploring the intense psychological friction between the primal, domestic urge to back one's young and the individualistic Anglo-American ideal of the “self-made” person, mapping how families struggle to morally reconcile lifetime gifting with meritocratic ideals.
Global comparisons within and beyond Europe
Cross-cultural welfare sociology and macroeconomic surveys demonstrate that the Anglo-American framework of individualised asset hoarding and delayed distribution is an extreme international anomaly. Outside the UK and US, families operate on a highly integrated continuity model where parental assets function as a fluid safety net for the lineage.
In continental European, Mediterranean, and Asian cultures, wealth is treated as an explicit investment in the bloodline. In southern Europe (e.g., Italy, Spain, Greece) and throughout East and South Asia, prolonged financial support and early lifecycle lifetime gifting are completely normalised, expected, and continuous. In these societies, withholding available capital from an adult child struggling to navigate property ownership or family formation carries deep cultural stigma, profound social shame, and is viewed as a total failure of parental duty. This cultural expectation is further reinforced by Continental legal frameworks, such as forced heirship laws, which statutorily block individuals from disinheriting their children and codify wealth as an asset belonging to the bloodline rather than the individual holder.
The Cross-National Wealth Decomposition (LISER / Wiley Fiscal Studies): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1475-5890.12299
An international comparative study by the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER). The raw data proves that while lifetime financial flows are highly transactional and conditional on a child's performance in Great Britain, continental European systems treat downward gifting as an unconditional, automatic safety net to shield the lineage, and as a moral duty of family which is would be shameful to neglect.
The Trans-Generational Disparity Study (INET Oxford):
https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/publications/the-wealth-of-families-the-intergenerational-transmission-of-wealth-in-britain-in-comparative-perspective
A major comparative report modeling international wealth transmission data. It establishes that only a minor fraction (approximately 5%) of all transferred wealth in Great Britain reaches adults under the age of 35, proving that the UK actively blockades early lifetime transfers compared to its global peers.
The Nuffield Foundation Project Framework: https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/project/the-intergenerational-transmission-of-family-wealth
The official primary research project page and data repository mapping the underlying methodology, policy parameters, and tracking metrics behind how British generational asset distribution behaves on the global stage.
The SHARE Global Interdependence Survey (Wiley / Journal of Marriage and Family): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2012.01028.x
A landmark 13-nation longitudinal tracking study assessing intergenerational transfers. The survey explicitly highlights that collectivist family systems and non-Anglo regimes maintain heavy, systematic downward flows of lifetime capital, completely uncoupled from the meritocratic conditionality unique to the UK and US cohorts.
There are of course numerous economically focussed studies looking at the disparities in wealth, opportunity, living costs and lifetime tax payments between generation cohorts, but I think this is a good summary of basic sociological papers about the anomaly of the attitudes of the current cohort of UK pensioners to which I was referring earlier, comparing large-scale data from the UK to other countries around the world and to previous generations.