Wealthy families have the ability to give their children advantages such as a top-notch education and diverse experiences — but they also want to raise their children without a sense of entitlement.
“We work pretty hard at this, believing that kids see what you do at least as much, if not more, than hear what you say. So our actions follow our values,” says Josh Kanter, president of Chicago Financial, Inc., a single family office. “We talk about the privilege and opportunity that they have and why.”
Early childhood is an important time to begin laying the foundation for responsible stewardship.
“When you’re parenting in a context of a lot of privilege and a lot of wealth, you have to ask yourself, ‘How am I going to teach this kid how to respect that wealth, not take it for granted?’” says Philip Benjamin, a licensed mental health practitioner and researcher with a focus on child and adolescent psychology. He continues to practice part-time, working with parents on how to treat tough behavioral issues with kids. His main job is investing as head of the Benjamin Family Office and co-founder and managing partner at Colzen Capital.
Benjamin notes that early habits can influence children’s long-term trajectory.
“If you’re launching a rocket from Earth, and you’re trying to get to the moon, if the rocket starts going off course, you want to course correct as soon as possible,” Benjamin says. “Because the longer you allow that rocket to go off course, the greater the distance you have to course correct back to.”
The same is true with parenting, he says. Entitlement can start subtly — for example, if young children never have to wait to get what they want.
“You really, really want to start the trajectory as straight as possible, so early childhood to late childhood and even early adolescence is really the most important time,” Benjamin says.
Parents and experts say there are several ways to lay the foundation for a responsible adulthood:
Model the way you want your children to live.
“Our kids see how we act: We work hard, we volunteer, we contribute time and money, we’re involved in our community – all things that we hope send a message about our values and discourage any sense of entitlement,” Kanter says.
Parents’ spending, giving and working habits shape children’s sense of what is normal.
“You can try to parent however you want, but how are you living your life? That’s actually probably just as powerful, or maybe even more powerful, than what you’re telling your kids, or even expecting from them,” Benjamin says. “Are you frugal? Are you a spendthrift? Do you work hard? Do you not work? These are all questions you should ask yourself.”
Reinforce the behavior you want to see.
“What do you want to reinforce? What do you want to ignore? What do you want to have consequences around? And how are you going to kind of shape and nudge kids in the right direction?” Benjamin says. “Rewards for behavior create more of that behavior; consequences or ignoring decrease that behavior.”
Parents can use a combination of modeling and reinforcing to build important skills, such as a strong work ethic and delayed gratification.
“This includes avoiding a concept called satiation, which is where you give your kids everything that they want, whenever they want it and you don’t build important things like delayed gratification or work ethic,” Benjamin says. “You can build those things even in a context of lots of privilege if you parent correctly around them.”
Build children’s awareness of how others live.
“Sometimes when you’re raised in wealth, you don’t know anything else,” says Shannon Zur, family office director at Vogel Consulting.
When children are younger, many families have children work through their foundations or volunteer at somewhere like a food pantry to make sure they appreciate what they have.
“It has to start young — full engagement on helping others in meaningful ways and teaching them about the world and how it can impact their lives,” says Wendy Craft, chief executive officer of Elle Family Office.
Kanter uses travel as an example of a way to broaden children’s horizons: “We travel, but our kids are as comfortable at the La Quinta as at the Four Seasons.”
In all of these endeavors, it’s important to recognize individual differences in temperament and personality — and to remember that parenting does not dictate every outcome.
“We have to understand who the kid is in front of us, and then we have to parent around that,” Benjamin says. “There’s a combination of nature and nurture. It turns out, nature is pretty strong. I talk about how we’re all born into a lane on a freeway. Through nurture, we might be able to move one lane to the right or the left. But if I’m born in lane five or six, I’m probably not going to be in lane one.”