Not Everything Gets Easier
Has there ever been a time in your life when you stood at an ATM machine, put your card in and kept your fingers crossed?
I’ve been there. Many of you have been there. It’s not fun.
Money solves a whole bunch of problems that not having it creates.
It’s nice to think that when you get past the point of keeping your fingers crossed at an ATM, everything gets easier, but I’m not sure that’s the case.
As Coventry Edwards-Pitt recently said, there are some problems that money exacerbates rather than solves.
Coventry is the author of the excellent book “Raised Healthy, Wealthy and Wise”.
She starts her book:
“When new clients come to us for advice, they often believe their biggest challenge is whether or not they will achieve investment returns that will both preserve and grow their wealth. But, if they have children, it’s likely their biggest problem lies elsewhere – and that it is, in many ways, more intractable: It is whether their wealth will interfere with their children’s ability to launch successful and independent lives.”
This is a big topic. It’s certainly not something I claim to be an expert on, but it’s something I am spending increasing time thinking about.
Raising well-adjusted, grounded, contented, productive adults isn’t something any of us can take for granted. But an abundance of financial resources almost certainly makes this harder. Parenting with wealth requires special care and thought.
Let’s dig in.
If you grew up in a household where resources were constrained, your parents had a script. The script went something like ‘we can’t have that/do that because we can’t afford it’. Travelling business class or buying the designer clothes were not options. Living within your means simply meant not having luxury items or holidays.
Many of us had a work ethic built into us because we had to work. I got my first job when I was 12 years old and worked hard earning my own money all the way through school and university. I think I made £25 a day in my first Saturday job waitressing in a small cafe. I was raised in a household where there were constraints - at times in my life, there were serious constraints. I learned lessons about money by default. I learned what happened when you spent more than you had (it resulted in that horrible moment at the ATM).
What happens if you find yourself today, as a successful and wealthy adult, raising children in a home where that old default script of ‘we can’t afford it’ and ‘you need to go get a job’ doesn’t work anymore? What happens if ‘living within your means’ literally means spending half a million or a million dollars a year?
Coventry’s advice; your children still need to learn the same lessons that you did. And you need a new script.
If asked what we want our children to be, there’s a temptation to say ‘happy’. I just want my children to be happy. (We’ve all said that). A client rightfully added ‘healthy’ this week during such a conversation. Happy and Healthy. Isn’t that it?
If you grew up in a household where resources were constrained, perhaps severely so, there is an additional temptation to think that giving them everything that you didn’t have will indeed make them happy. You remember that sense of deprivation and you want to save your children from that. You want to save your children from everything.
As Coventry explains, that’s an incredibly powerful and understandable emotional urge. But it can also be really damaging because by giving them everything you deprive them of something far more important.
Coventry writes in her book, “there seems to be a mysterious epidemic of unhappy young adults in the Western world. These are children raised in relative affluence who have had joyous childhoods, attentive parents, and never suffered trauma or heartbreak. In other words, they have nothing to complain about. Everything suggests they should be teed up for happy adulthood, and yet they’re not.”
Lori Gottlieb, a psychotherapist asks, Could it be that be protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?
It’s a big question. We know the answer, deep down.
To raise grounded, contented, productive adults in a family where resources are not constrained you have to create artificial constraints. You need to write a new script. You need to create opportunities to teach your children the lessons you learned, even though you don’t actually need to. They need to understand that just because you have the money to buy something doesn’t mean that you should buy it. You need to communicate your values, teach them life lessons.
Even if you raise children in a world of luxury, you can still have them learn the difference between need and desire. They can understand that the presence of expensive things does not mean that a person has wealth. You can teach them that you don’t make financial decisions just to fit in, but you make decisions that fit with your family values. They can learn that family and character are more important than money.
They can also work and earn their own money from a young age.
There is a huge temptation for wealthy families to skip this last one. Coventry explains that “work is often an infrequent scenario in wealthy families for two obvious reasons. First inconvenience: work is often difficult to fit into a hectic schedule, and parents feel responsible for keeping kids organised and getting them to work on time. Second, the majority of wealthy parents feel compelled to make their children’s lives “easier”. They hate to see their children suffer, struggle, or miss out on the fun elsewhere, and so they prioritise other experiences and underplay the importance of the child experiencing earning an income.”
“Working enables young people to separate from their parents emotionally and financially, which is critical to their successful launch into adulthood. Maintaining a job requires resilience, time investment, flexibility, conscientiousness, humility and creativity. It’s hard work to train for a job, seek a job, keep that job and, once you have it, turn it into a career.”
None of this is easy. But it is possible. Others have done it. Despite their affluence and wealth, they have raised children who have forged their own way, children who have their own sense of identity, children who are resilient and not afraid of hard work. Children who have gained a sense of purpose and pride from standing on their own two feet. They have raised children who are indeed, healthy, wealthy and wise. Coventry’s book is full of examples and of practical steps you can take.
Where it starts is where it always starts. With awareness. The key is to start building awareness around how your wealth might or might not be helping your children grow into contented, successful, grounded adults. Take small steps now.
The stakes are high. They are our children. Have they ever been higher?
As Dr James Taylor writes, “Giving your child a fundamental belief in him – or herself. Allowing your child to gain ownership of his or her achievements in life. Teaching your child to be an emotional master. Raising your child to be a successful achiever. These are the greatest gifts that you can give your child. Yet they are also the most difficult gifts to achieve.”
Georgie
georgie@libertywealth.ky