A new poll suggests adult children are draining their parents’ retirement nest eggs.

The CIBC survey has found that two-thirds of Canadian parents polled say they’re feeling the financial impact of supporting their adult children.

Almost half of them said supporting their adult kids is hampering their ability to save for themselves, while 20 per cent say it has actually delayed their retirement.

“Parents may have the will to help their adult kids but they may not always have the means,” said Christina Kramer, executive vice-president of retail and business banking at CIBC.

One in four parents said they spend more than $500 a month to cover their adult kids’ rent, groceries and other bills.

The top two expenses are groceries and other household expenses and cellphone bills.

The survey of 1,054 randomly selected Canadian parents was conducted two weeks ago. It’s considered accurate within plus or minus three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The most recent data released by Statistics Canada in 2011 showed that 42.3 per cent of adults aged 20-29 lived at their parental home, “either because they never left it or because they returned home after living elsewhere.”

In 2006, 42.5 per cent of young adults lived at home, a marked increased from previous decades (32.1 per cent in 1991 and 26.9 per cent in 1981).

Monica Boyd, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto who researches the reasons young adults live with their parents, told the Star the rising rate is linked to several factors, including school attendance, postponement of marriage ages and family structures.

“Living at home is highly associated with going to school, and unlike the United States, a lot of young adults who are attending schools don’t go very far away. They go to school in the area in which they grow up,” she told the Star.

An emphasis on family and the prevalence of intergenerational homes among first-generation immigrants means that they have a higher proportion of children living at home, Boyd said.

This includes families from China, India, Southeast Asia and countries in the Mediterranean region, like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.

But how does adult children living at home affect family structures?

Boyd said it varies, but the best relationships are ones in which both the parents and children are behaving like mature adults. “Both parents and children have to adapt,” she said.

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“The parents in a sense have to learn not to parent so much, which is difficult when you’re financially contributing to the well-being of this child in your midst. And the children have to learn to stop sliding into being a 9-year-old or a 13-year-old, which is very easy when you have parents who want to parent. There is always a give and take.”

–With files from Jillian Kestler-D’Amours