Children as young as eight are lending pocket money to their cash-strapped parents in Britain as they worry about family finances, a new study has claimed.

According to the study, 58 per cent of eight to 15-year-olds quizzed by Halifax said they worry about their family finances. Almost a third (31 per cent) of the 1,132 children surveyed said they had lent their own money to someone else.

As many as 29 per cent had helped their parents with a handout and two-thirds had lent money to a friend, the Daily Mail reported. A quarter of eight-year-olds had loaned cash, with a third of those children lending money to their parents.

The study comes a month after the Office of National Statistics revealed real disposable incomes in UK had dropped to their lowest level in nine years to £273 a week.

Family budgets are under pressure from high living costs, unemployment and low pay rises in UK.

Researchers found that children in London were most likely to worry about money (64 per cent), with youngsters in the West Midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside the least likely to be affected by cash concerns as 49 per cent and 50 per cent of worried kids, respectively.

The older children got, the more likely they were to say they were anxious about household finances.

In the study, 57 per cent of eight-year-olds said they never worried about it, but that dropped to 47 per cent among 11-year-olds.

“It is concerning that children are becoming anxious about their parents’ money worries,” said Richard Fearon, head of Halifax savings.

“This highlights that children are really aware of the financial behaviour of the people around them,” he said.

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