No week is complete without a survey on which middle-class parents are invited to hone their stomach ulcers. This week’s offering went something like this: two thirds of parents over 50 are still paying out for their children and will continue to do so until the day they pop their wide-fitting clogs. The Bank of Mum and Dad is a flourishing institution, daily doling out cash for their offspring’s new cars, housebuying deposits and day-to-day grocery expenses until the “kids” are into their forties and developing a paunch. If we need an acronym to define this financial angst it is, apparently, KIPPERS — kids in parents’ pockets eroding retirement savings.

Mmm. While no one can deny that student debt, soaring property prices and the tendency to marry later mean progeny remain living at home for longer cadging beer money and failing to rinse out the bath, I suspect millons of parents know that another acronym is equally relevant here: GRUPS.

Grups — a shortening of grown-ups — was recently coined by New York magazine as the signal that the generation gap has closed. Grups are cool parents: “Dadsters”, if you like, enjoying the perks of middle age but talking and dressing like twentysomethings. They like the same music as young people (“Josh, can you download the Killers onto your mother’s MP3?”), enjoy sex, wear combat trousers and retro trainers, and may even take the odd recreational drug. But they are, in fact, old. This doesn’t stop them getting down with the kids, though, and thus they give their children no incentive to leave home and every reason to stay.

Such a plethora of shared interests mean there is nothing left to rebel against; grups have only themselves to blame. While they may feign exasperation to their friends — “Will we ever get the kids out from under our feet!?” — they are secretly triumphant. Having twentysomethings hanging around your house by choice is an ego trip — the ultimate proof of parenting success. Our kids count us as friends. How cool is that?

As recently as a couple of decades ago the sure-fire way to make one’s children leave home was to cramp their style. What teenager or twentysomething wanted to hang around while Sale of the Century and Songs of Praise dominated the telly? Their music was loathed, there was seldom an alcoholic drink in the house and their parents wore embarrassing slacks. Now families all watch The Simpsons together, parents teach their teenage kids about wine, mothers and daughters shop with equal enthusiasm at Topshop and borrow each other’s Grazia magazine. They might take a nominal amount in rent but in any case parents often stash it away to be represented to son or daughter later as a surprise lump-sum gift.

Meanwhile, the financial institutions warn parents to cut the apron strings and teach children to stand on their own two feet. This week it was the investment giant GE Life which said that parents are risking their own futures by spending too much on their grown-up children. Last month, Churchouse Financial Planning reported: “We see a lot of parents who’ve made it to their sixties and are annoyed that their children are in their mid-twenties and still at home.” The Council of Mortgage Lenders, which represents the big banks and building societies, says that half the number of first-time buyers under 30 are helped financially by their parents — up from one in ten in 1995. Alliance & Leicester says that the average amount given to children to start their own home is £17,677. Nearly 20 grand as a hand out? No wonder young adults aren’t hurrying to close their accounts with Bank of Pater.

Having enjoyed a free university education, I genuinely feel sorry for young graduates starting life with a pound-shaped ball and chain around their ankles while trying to afford ludicrously overpriced housing. But who makes them so obsessed with scrambling on to the property ladder? Could it be those thousands of middle-class parents who not only nag their children about being left behind in the property boom from age 18 but actually buy nice properties for them to live in as university students à la Cherie Blair? Don’t they see that the whole point of being a student is to exist like a pig in filth so that you are motivated for ever more to get off your backside and never live that way again?

A friend recently confided that her 18-year-old daughter had stayed over at her boyfriend’s parents house. Not only did they sleep together but his gruppy mother brought them toast in the morning and sat on the bed chatting about their night out. I don't know about you but this makes me feel queasy. Generation gaps were invented to prevent this sort of thing.

A house in which the fridge is always full, the laundry always done and taboos are nonexistent is not a parental home, it is Nirvana. Next time hipster parents pretend to complain about their children not flying the nest they should perhaps be honest with themselves. And ask whether this generous spendfest on their children isn’t just another form of Botox. In order to stay clean of alcohol and cocaine Robbie Williams has apparently been putting away 36 double espressos, 60 cigarettes, 20 cans of Red Bull and a raft of uppers and downers every day. As “clean” living goes it doesn’t exactly add up to the Detox Diet. Williams has now checked himself back into rehab.

AA counsellors often tolerate extreme cigarette and caffeine use as a necessary evil in helping clients to tackle the greater demon of drink. But Williams’s substitute fixes seem equally if not more likely to kill him. In fact, without wishing to trivialise addiction, they make a triple vodka and orange look like a fruit smoothie.

- Diane Abbott, MP, defends the £2,235 expenses that she claimed in taxi rides protesting: “I cannot ride a bicycle. I cannot drive. And there is no Underground station in Hackney.” Right. And as a socialist and friend of Ken Livingstone, she would find it outrageous to use a bus, I suppose?

On her website Ms Abbott claims to be a champion of public transport. Lashing two grand on a fleet of cabs isn’t perhaps the best way to show that commitment. Still, we shouldn’t be surprised. Having sent her son to private school after castigating other Labour MPs for doing the same, she is the reigning queen of cheap talk.

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