The Bank of Mum and Dad: should parents lend money to their adult children?

I don’t normally glean insights for my personal finance columns from police dramas on TV, honest. Recently, though, I caught up with series one of Line of Duty.

One of the plotlines explored the middle-class money dilemma of our time: how much a good parent should shell out for their kids.

A decent officer was corrupted, not through drink, drugs or gambling, but because he needed money for his daughters’ ruinous private school fees.

This is not the kind of thing you can imagine happening to DCI Gene Hunt or Dirty Harry.

But then, back in the Life on Mars 1970s, parenting wasn’t even a verb, let alone a competitive sport. School fees were far more affordable and university education was fee-free.

There was certainly no such thing as BoMaD, or the Bank of Mum and Dad. If there had been, we’d have probably thought it was a music festival, or an up-and-coming district of New York.