How Can Parents Help Adult Children to Purchase a Home?

Families with physical homes are stronger, and stronger families strengthen their communities, states, and nations. My husband and I purchased our first home in 1974. We were each 29 years old. I think that house has about 1,000 square feet and cost $40,000. Five years later, we purchased a larger home, 2,000 square feet for $112,000. The same house now appraises at four or five times the purchase amount.

            Our first house had a single-car garage, small kitchen with room for a kitchen table, living room, three bedrooms, and one bathroom. The second home, with more square footage, had room for an additional bedroom, two more bathrooms, eat-in kitchen, living room with dining area, family room, and two-car garage. We could not afford the same house with the same income today.

            Over the past week, the cost of housing has been “in my face” almost every single day. A son wrote about the housing problem for first-time homebuyers in his blog. A daughter mentioned that she and her husband will probably have to help their children to buy their first home. People on pod casts were saying the same thing. Articles were written about the same thing. Today I found still another article, this one written by Lois M. Collins and published at the Deseret News. 

First-time homebuyers continue to get older nationwide – and likely in Utah.

The median age for purchasing a first home in the United States has now reached an all-time high of 40, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors, up from last’s record-breaking age of 38….

Typical first-time homebuyers were under 30 in the 1980s, according to the association’s 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, which this year features an older couple in the midst of moving on the cover.

The median age for first-time homebuyers didn’t hit 30 until 1989, association data shows. By the time the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a housing frenzy in 2021, the median age was 33, jumping to 36 in 2022, when mortgage rates more than doubled from record lows.

The new median age is based on information collected from responses to a survey of homebuyers throughout the country who purchased a primary residence home between July 2024 and June 2025.

Collins’ article emphasizes that first-time homebuyers are getting older throughout America because houses are costing more. Young couples simply cannot afford the price of homes today. Three of my sources this week spoke of trying in some way to help their children buy their first home.

Another source compared houses being built now to the homes of fifty or sixty years ago. Young couples today are looking at more elaborate homes than their parents or grandparents purchased in earlier years. As I remember the market fifty years ago, there were few homes in my price range that had a garage. Most of them had only one bathroom and no family room. So young couples are expected to pay more for a house today, but they are getting more house for their money.

Parents and grandparents should help their children and grandchildren to obtain their first house. One of the best ways that they can assist is to help the younger generation to purchase a home within their affordable price range. There are costs to owning a home other than the mortgage payment: home insurance, maintenance, comparison with their neighbors (keeping up with the Jones). Young couples today are just as capable of doing without a dishwasher or a second bathroom as their parents and grandparents were when they were young. They can start small and move into a larger home as they can afford to do so.