Miser Mick is right not to help out his children

MICK JAGGER’S long been said to be mean with money. It’s a nasty trait — those who have it tend also to have a meanness of spirit. For this reason, I sympathise with Jerry Hall, who’s locked in a battle with her ex over Downe House, the £ 10 million Richmond property that’s been her family home since 1991 but which Jagger has never signed over to her.

Now she wants to be able to sell up so that she can give some money to their three eldest children — Lizzie, 29, James, 27 and Georgia May, 21 — to buy homes of their own.

Jagger opposes the idea on the grounds that his children have already had a privileged upbringing and should make their way into the world without any help from him. And though it pains me to admit it, I think he’s right.

For whatever our incomes, too many children have come to expect that their parents will ease their financial burdens at every opportunity, indulging them in a way our own parents would never have dreamed of doing for us.

The truth, I’m afraid, is that many of today’s pampered teens won’t contemplate getting out of their beds on a Saturday or Sunday morning to do anything that sounds like work.

But dare to suggest they might like to work to pay for the longed-for concert ticket or Topshop must-have, and they look at you as though you’re asking them to shin up chimneys.

NO WONDER newsagents complain that they simply can’t find youngsters to do paper rounds.

The change within just one generation is extraordinary. I had my first Saturday job at 13 — starting at 8am in a bakery (later graduating to working in a jeweller’s) — and continued to work right through until my A-levels, school holidays included.

Apart from pocket money, I never expected my parents to give me anything extra, partly because they weren’t wealthy but mostly because it simply wasn’t the way things were done.

My friends and I all understood that we had to work for what we wanted, whether that was going on holiday on our own for the first time or buying our first cars.

By contrast, today’s school-leavers are all too frequently still dependent on their parents for everything from handouts to somewhere to live. Some of my friends whose children have moved back home after university say that not only are they letting them off paying for their keep, but they often give them spending money, too.

We all mean well. Why charge your adult child rent when you know he’s saving for a house deposit? Why insist your teenager gets a Saturday job when you know the academic pressure he’s under to pass exams? Why refuse to buy your daughter that longed-for ticket to a music festival when you know all her friends’ parents will be shelling out?

It doesn’t end there, either. Many young couples today don’t even contemplate getting married until they can afford to live in homes that wouldn’t disgrace an interiors magazine. If I’d had the same attitude, I wouldn’t have been able to marry until my 40s. As it was, my daughter was born in a one-bedroom flat furnished from junk shops, and had to sleep in the hallway.

But by constantly opening our wallets, we’re doing our children no favours in the long term. What they don’t realise — and what our well-intended cushioning is failing to teach them — is that out of necessity comes not only invention but, even more crucially, drive and determination.

So what if you can’t get the job of your dreams? Get another one instead and work your way up from there. And if you can only afford a damp-ridden basement with fungus growing on the ceiling? You’ll survive — and it’s a powerful incentive to work all hours until you can afford something better.

As Mick Jagger so memorably sang: ‘You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.’