Thousands of baby boomers and Gen Ys are engaged in loving, reciprocal relationships in the private sphere. Credit:Frank Maiorana That makes no sense to me, because it's not how families work. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says rich parents should "shell out" to help their Gen Y kids buy property. Fine, but that already happens. The problem is not everyone is rich. There are many Millennials who not only won't get help to buy a property or inherit much, they also expect to support their parents in their old age. Nearly one in three Millennials are concerned they will have to give up work to look after their parents, or that their retired parents will come to them for money.

This is according to research by REST Super, based on a demographically representative sample of 1006 18 to 34-year-olds across Australia. Despite REST's interest in promoting retirement savings, and the margin of error with the sample size, the broad brush conclusions ring true to me. I am a little older than their sample and technically part of Generation X, those born from the early 1960s to 1980. When I consider my friends and their parents, I think the findings are true for Gen X as well. When I was in high school, our parents' wealth influenced whether we wore fancy clothes or hand-me-downs, or where we took our holidays. Now some of my classmates stand to inherit decent estates, while others are paying their parents' rent or medical bills. The problem will only get worse next year, with the eligibility for the age pension being tightened from January. The REST research suggests retired mothers are nearly twice as likely as retired fathers to need help with medical expenses and nearly three times as likely to need assistance with making rent payments.

One in three Australians who now support their mothers in retirement say this is required because of her selflessness in putting her family's financial needs ahead of her own. It's a self-perpetuating trend, as nearly two in three young Australians who support their own parents in retirement believe they themselves will need their own children to give them financial support in retirement. The most common ways Australians give financial support to their retired parents are to help with home expenses, medical expenses, rent payments and mortgage payments. The research also found that of those one in three Millennials who currently support their retired parents financially, three in five have made a change to their own housing situation to do so, whether through building a granny flat for one or both of their parents, moving in with their parents or moving into a smaller dwelling. The headlines about the financial plight of Millennials are nearly always focused on the property market and it's true that many young people are worried about housing affordability.

In the REST survey, nearly nine in 10 say the Australian Dream of home-ownership is just as important to them as it was for their parents. However, four in five are afraid it is out of reach because of the increasing cost of living and rapidly rising house prices. I've heard 20-somethings say that they plan to vote for Bill Shorten's Labor in the July election, because they support the negative-gearing policy. "I'll vote for the party that won't make me poor," one said. Australia is a property-obsessed nation and it seems Millennials are no different. However, climate change also looms as a big issue for the Millennials I know, and it's a worry shared by my generation, as we raise young families. We can argue about bricks and mortar as much as we like, but keeping our planetary home habitable trumps everything. Young or old, or the forgotten Gen Xers in between, we all need to work together.

Caitlin Fitzsimmons is the editor of Money. Find her on Facebook or Twitter.