It sounds harsh. I know. The first time I said it out loud to a room of parents, I watched a few of them physically recoil.

But after 25 years as an accountant, watching families try to help their kids with money, I've come to believe something uncomfortable. The help is often the problem.

A few years ago, I sat across from a woman I'll call Jenny. Her son was 27 and earning more than she ever had. She was still topping up his account most months.

A car repair here. A rent gap there. A medical bill. Each one felt small. Each one felt temporary. Each one felt like love.

She had been doing it since he was 22.

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When I asked her how it started, she couldn't really say. That is the thing about it. It never starts with a decision. It starts with a run of perfectly reasonable moments, each one easy to justify, that quietly add up to a grown man who has never once felt the full weight of his own financial choices.

Her words have stuck with me ever since. "I thought I was helping," she said. "I think I got in the way."

So let me be clear about what I mean when I say cut them off. I don't mean to abandon them. I don't mean change the locks, or stop loving them, or refuse to ever help again.

I mean stop being the safety net that catches every fall before they feel it.

Because here is what I have learnt. Financial resilience is a muscle, and muscles only grow under load. Every time we rush in to remove the load, the shortfall, the discomfort, the consequence, we also remove the very thing that would have made them stronger.

And the numbers should give every well-meaning parent pause.

Three in four young Australians who hit financial difficulty turn to family for help.

Yet 85 per cent still experienced financial insecurity last year, according to Monash University.

Read that again. We are helping more than ever, and they are no more secure for it.

Meanwhile, the Bank of Mum and Dad has quietly become one of the biggest mortgage lenders in the country.

The average deposit gift is now more than $74,000. And more than half of Australian parents, according to the University of Newcastle, are rewriting their own retirement plans to keep the support flowing.

So we pay twice. Once to prop up our kids now. And again later, when we realise we have hollowed out our own future to do it.

What I actually tell parents is this. Your job is not to remove the struggle. It is to orchestrate it.

To let the right struggles land while they are small and survivable, in their 20s, while the stakes are low, rather than saving them all up for their 40s when the options have narrowed and the stakes are far higher.

In practice, that looks less like a dramatic cut-off and more like a series of quiet decisions to stop rescuing.

It means letting them feel the pinch of a month they overspent, instead of smoothing it over.

It means that if you do help with a deposit, you match what they save rather than handing it over.

Skin in the game changes how a person treats money. A gift gets spent. Something you worked alongside someone to build gets protected.

It means asking yourself, before you reach for your card, two questions. Is this a genuine emergency, or is it a pattern? Will helping now make the next time easier, or harder?

I want to be honest about why this is so hard, because I don't think it is the reason most parents assume. It is not hard because you don't know what your child should do.

You probably know exactly. It is hard because the most loving instinct in the world, the one that says fix it, make it better, take the pain away, is the very instinct working against them here.

My own father worked hard for 30 years and never once felt financially secure.

When I think about what I wish someone had given him, it was never money. It was a system, and the confidence that comes with feeling in control of it.

He died still worried about whether his kids would be okay.

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So when I tell parents to cut their kids off, what I am really saying is this. Stop doing the thing that feels like love but works like a sedative.

Let them wobble. Let them problem-solve. Let them surprise you.

Because the goal was never to do it for them. It was to make sure they can do it without you.

And the strange, lovely thing I have watched happen, over and over, is that the moment a parent steps back is often the moment their child finally steps up.

Jenny got there in the end. She said it was the hardest thing she had done as a parent.

Six months later, her son had built his first real savings buffer. He had never had one. He was, in her words, weirdly proud of himself.

That is not abandonment. That is the most useful gift a parent can give.

Salena Kulkarni is a Chartered Accountant, private investor and the founder of I Can Be Wealthy.

Feature Image: Supplied.