You’re Rich. Here’s How To Raise Great Kids.

I've talked to founders worth $20 million, $200 million, $3 billion, and they all come from different family backgrounds. And when I talk to them about their kids, a lot of the same things come up time and again. I'm a dad, I've got two kids at home, and what I want more than anything is just to not ruin their lives. It's really hard being a parent, and none of us really know what we're doing. So when I went back through a couple of these money-wise transcripts, I've found a lot of backed research from experts talking about how to be a parent, especially when you have money. How do we raise kids who grow up in wealth? Some of these lessons might really make you mad. But I think if you listen to them and you digest them, you're going to leave much better off, and you're going to have a lot of really valuable tools for how to raise kids, especially wealthy kids. Let's give it a go. The dad had become very successful, and 16-year-old had a full-blown temper tantrum in an airport when he found out he wasn't flying first class. And the parent should be like, "How did we get here?" And yet when I think about it, again, so well-intentioned, this was a family where generally this kid did get the easiest version of everything, the most comfortable version of everything. The motivation to tolerance is actually one of the most important skills for life. Okay, I want you to park that image for a few seconds. There's a 16-year-old in a public airport screaming because he has to sit in coach. That is the exact picture that every guest in the show is afraid of becoming, including me. I have two kids. I flew with them two and from Italy last year. It was a three-week trip. They got used to the European time zone, and I will always remember the landing in Charleston, South Carolina, after a long vacation, how my three-year-old reacted when I woke him up from his deep sleep around 11 p.m. He could not handle it. And as a parent, you look at your three-year-old, he's losing his mind, and you think, "Well, I have to parent this because he's three. He can't help it. I'm the parent. I have to help him regulate his emotions." That's all part of the process. But when the kid is 16 years old, you sort of have to rewind and think through all the different parts of their lives that led to this moment. Dr. Becky's frame on this is one of the cleanest that I've heard. And it goes against every parenting instinct that money tends to give you. She says that entitlement isn't about being a brat, but it's actually a fear of frustration. You see, this kid in the airport, they weren't necessarily spoiled, but actually just terrified. They were terrified of being uncomfortable because they had never had to be uncomfortable. Every time mom or dad jumped in with an iPad or an upgrade or cushioning some uncomfortable situation, they were actually learning that frustration is a thing that someone else would fix for them. The part about making real money that I think a lot of us resonate with is that a lot of times you can buy your way out of frustration. It's literally what wealth lets you do. If you don't want to sit on hold with an airline, you don't. If you don't want to fold your laundry, you don't. You can buy yourselves out of situations that you've decided aren't worth your time. You don't have to live with some of the different frustrating things that a lot of people have to live with. Money can buy you out of those uncomfortable frustrating situations. But for kids, they actually need the exact opposite. A lot of times kids have to be in uncomfortable or frustrating situations in order to grow up and become an adult. Our Adams says something similar to Dr. Becky, but in a few different ways. You see Taylor is from a multi-generational billionaire family in LA. In his episode of Money Wise, he said success is nothing but a compounding series of small failures. Failing forward and failing small is something that you do until one day you wake up and realize that you've actually built something substantial. The entire muscle, he says, of building something substantial requires being in frustrating situations. You have to purposely be put into uncomfortable situations to build something worthwhile. You cannot grow in a frictionless environment. In the same applies for our kids. The data behind this is really interesting. There's a Columbia researcher named Sunia Luthar, who's actually been studying affluent kids for 25 years. She originally went into the research expecting wealthy kids to be a healthy control group for her studies on poor kids. But what she actually found out was that kids from households, making 200K or more, have rates of clinical anxiety, depression, and substance abuse two to three times the national average. 22% of suburban affluent girls in her study had clinically significant depressive symptoms. Three times the rate of normative samples. The two factors that drive it were pressure to achieve an isolation from parents. So this version of childhood we tend to build for our kids once we start making money is optimized and frictionless and achievement focused when statistically that's actually the version most likely to break our kids. When I first heard Dr. Becky tell that story, my first reaction was, "Yeah, but not my kid." I mean, we're going to do it differently. I hear you about that story, but that's not going to be what my family's like. But I caught myself right in the middle of that thought because every parent of that 16 year old probably says the same thing when their kid is one. They didn't really expect their 16 year olds to start throwing temper tantrums when they didn't sit in first class. They sort of drifted into that family dynamic. The question Becky is actually asking in her money wise episode is, "Are you building a kid whose worst experience is mild boredom?" Because if that's really the worst your childhood is going to be, it's really going to feel like trauma to them by the time they're 30. Whenever I listen to podcasts, I try to take away one thing. When I listen to Dr. Becky's, the thing I take away is just to put my kids in normal average situations when it makes sense. My kid is watching what I tolerate, not what I tell them to do. If I'm constantly buying my way out of frustrating or inconvenient things, then that's what my kids are going to expect for their life. That's really what I want to take out of this segment is sometimes it's okay to be in less than ideal situations, especially if you're a parent. Your kids pick up on that and it's actually what makes them stronger. So I have a two year old and three year old. Whatever strategies me and my wife create on how to raise them, great. The reality is they're just going to emulate whatever we do. And so I grew up with my dad going to the office at 7am and coming home at 7pm and just grinding over his career. And I think a lot of my work ethic was the product of just emulating him. Okay. If you are a builder listening to this and a parent, you probably got wrecked by this just like I did. Taylor is saying that it doesn't really matter what your parenting rubric says. Your kid is not running your script. Your kid is running on your behavior on a five second delay for the next 18 years, which is really interesting. It's the old saying monkey see monkey do they will do what you do, not what you say. They're watching you and they're mirroring every action and behavior that you exhibit. Taylor in his episode goes a bit deeper into this and he says that the one who introduced him to the actual mechanics behind this saying shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. It's a really interesting concept. Most people when they think about money, especially generational wealth, they think the first generation tends to be the one that makes it then the second generation protects it and then the third generation just blows it all. Taylor is reframing this and he's saying that it's not really all about the money and how that generational wealth produces. It's actually about the inulation of behavior. Generation one creates the value. So that's kosher and that's correct. Generation two watches generation one and learns to manage that value. But then generation three watches generation two and concludes that the family thing to do is manage stuff that already exists. So they actually don't create in the third generation. They just consume what the first two generations built and maintained. The wealth in the third generation is eaten all up because they're not producing anymore. They're just consuming it. But it's not because they're not capable. It's just because they're emulating the closest model they have and the closest model was not a builder. It was just a maintainer. And so it's like playing a game of telephone. Ultimately, the third generation sort of stops adding value. And there's another stat here that is really interesting to look into. The Williams Group study did 3,200 family study and found that 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation and 90% lose it by the third. That's a crazy number because it basically means almost everyone who creates generation of wealth loses all of it by the third generation. And there's a family wealth consultant named Jim Groobin who basically tracked this citation and looked at that 70% number and argues it's probably even bigger than that. So that second generation may be even closer to the 90% in the third generation. So directionally, you start to see that those Vanderbilt type of families create a ton of value in the first generation. But then by the second and third generation, there's just a bunch of yacht parties. And ultimately, you lose a lot of that wealth that you created for yourself. Dr. Becky's version of this is a lot more practical for most of the listeners of this show. She says, if your kids don't ever see you fold laundry, for example, then why would they think they're ever supposed to fold it? The luxury that you, the person with money have built and maybe the staff you have that supports it is not invisible to your kid. It's entirely visible. It is the part that they see about your life that they're ultimately going to expect will be the same for theirs. There's another version of this principle from a guy named Alex Peikoff. This is the guy from the Macedonian milk family in Newport Beach. And he described how his dad threw money around when Alex was a kid and Alex spent his 20s recreating that exact behavior. Alex would get bottle service. He would buy fast cars. He would just spend his money on whatever he wanted. He didn't really ever choose that. He may not even have desired that. He just saw his dad do it. And so he emulated it. It took his teenage daughter going through something extremely traumatic for him to actually wake up and realize that the model of how he was consuming money and spending money was ruining his life and his family's lives. But he never really questioned it until he saw that negative impact. So now I want you to look at your own kids' lives for 30 seconds. They see what you do on Saturday morning. They see how you talk to your wife when something goes wrong in the house. They see whether you're on your phone at dinner. They see how you handle losing that $50,000 deal that might not have worked. They see all the ways that you deal with discomfort and frustration. And whether you want them to or not, you're wiring the way that their nervous system and their brain operates. It's how they're learning how to be an adult. Particularly speaking, if there's something you know you don't want your kids to do when they're 25, you have to ask yourself if you're modeling the inverse of that now. And if you're not, you're not really setting them up for success. You're actually setting them up to do the very thing that you don't want them to do because you're not modeling the behavior that you wish them to exhibit. You're just modeling your own behavior. And like we've been talking about, they're going to copy that. Whether you like it or not. I father would always share things like if you want to make a million dollars, then find a way to help a million people. It's fundamentally about building your own capability where you can contribute to others. And there's plenty of family members within our family that have become artists or teachers or done things that you wouldn't consider like pathways to building wealth. All right. There's a lot here. So let's break it down. In part one, we're going to talk about the fact that how you praise your kid matters more than how often. There's a famous study by Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller out of Columbia in 1998. They took fifth graders, gave them puzzles, and then praised half of them for being smart. They would say things like, wow, you're so smart. You must be really smart with your homework, really just praising them for their intellect. But the other half got praised for the effort they put in. Wow, you must have worked so hard at this. You know, there's two totally different types of praise. And they offered both groups a choice. You can either do another easy puzzle or you can try a harder one. The kids that were praised for being smart picked the easy puzzle. But what's interesting is the kids that were praised for the effort that they exerted picked the harder one. They were all fifth graders, the same baseline ability, but the way that they were praised actually rewired what they thought about themselves and what they could achieve. If we praise the trait, we get a kid who avoids challenges and who might disprove the trait. But when you praise the effort, you get a kid who chases challenges because the effort that they put forward and the effort that was praised is something that they can always show up with. Well, I can always give my best, but if I'm not smart or if I'm taught that I'm not smart, I mean, what do you really do about that? It really just changes their self-esteem and the way they think about themselves. There's a follow up here that I think is really important for the parents. Kids who are praised for intelligence were significantly more likely to lie about their score on a follow up test. It's not because they were bad kids, but their identity was fragile. They had to protect it because they kind of felt like they may have been stupid. The intelligence meter was what they were being measured against, not the effort they put forth. So the operational rule here will say that you will never or should never tell your kid that they're smart. Tell them they worked hard. Tell them they did something difficult. Praise them for the effort that they put forth, but don't tell them how smart they are because then you're compounding an amount of praise to something that will actually shift their entire identity sometimes to their detriment. The other part here is harder for people like me. I love building businesses and I love entrepreneurial things and I love building something from zero to one and seeing that one make money. But just because I love those things does not mean my kids will love those things. Take Shane. Shane is a guy from a fifth generation family nursery business who walked away from his entire family empire. He has a daughter now and when we asked him point blank, if he expects her to take over his work, he said zero percent zero. He watched in his family what generational obligation did to him and he wanted nothing to do for her. Taylor, this multigenerational billionaire said the same thing. The mandate in his family wasn't about building wealth. It was about doing something, anything that creates value for someone. Some of his cousins are artists, some are teachers and the family doesn't look down on it. They're not praising intelligence. They're praising effort. The point is not about the intelligence meter. It's about what are you doing to create something? Today's money wise episode is sponsored by Ocean's Talent. If you're trying to hire a great EA or an ops person right now, then salaries are through the roof. 80, 120, even more in salary. I know many founders who have tried the remote work route before and they've gotten earned. Someone goes, the work's sloppy and you're just redoing everything yourself. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money. The talent, which I use, is completely different. Every candidate, they're pre-vetted with real skills assessments before they even arrive in front of you and so whoever you get, they're ready again day one. And they're not just executive assistants anymore by the way. These are AI-fluent operators, meaning people who know how to run a quad, build automations, ship workflows, not just take notes and manage your calendars. Marketing operations, finance, HR, sales, everything. They do all of it. My personal assistant, I found her through oceans. My name's Trevina. She's awesome. She runs my life. I couldn't live without her. And so if you're a founder, drowning in stuff, a great hire could handle and check them out. Oceanstalent.com/moneywise. Again, oceanstalent.com/moneywise. So my encouragement to the parents listening to this, go praise your kids for the effort they're putting forth. Not for the traits that they're exhibiting, not for the intelligence. Don't praise them for how smart they are, even if they're smart. Say, wow, you're putting a lot of work into this and I'm so proud of you. But shut that starts to light them up. It'll start to help them rewire the way they're thinking about themselves and ultimately science shows that this is a healthier way for them to grow up. I've seen too many people who have a lot of disposable income. Essentially, their kids spend their parents' money or they can just kind of get whatever they want and then they have some, quote, allowance on top of it. But it's kind of meaningless because it's all play money. The point of allowance, again, is to a little bit mimic what you go through in the real world where money is real and choices and trade offs are real. I can do this, but then I'm not going to do this. Okay, this is a really interesting one because it talks about allowance, which is kind of a remedial idea to me, but it actually helps kids deal with what money can and can't do. So say you give your kid a $20 allowance. But if your kid also has unrestricted access to your Amazon account, your emergency credit card, your purse, a tab at the country club, basically that $20 is like monopoly money. You're not really teaching them any trade offs because there is actually no trade off. If they run out of money, they're just going to get a $20 allowance. just get more, but allowance is supposed to teach them to be part of a real functional environment where the money is finite. Dr. Becky argues around this idea and says that the choices can be absurdly small when you start to build this idea of finite money. If your kid is at a restaurant with friends and they decide not to order, let's say sparkling water because they want a candy bar later, that thought process is exactly the type of muscle that we need to train intentionally in our kids. It kind of looks ridiculous from the outside, but there's an actual cognitive operation being built when we do this. If I want this, I can get it, but only if I don't get that other thing. There's a foundation of adult financial decisions that they're learning to make that if you don't intentionally put them in that situation, if you have money, they might not ever have to make and they're not getting to learn that very important part of becoming an adult, where you have to deal with, like we said earlier, frustration and discomfort and you have to learn that things are finite, not everything exists in infinite quantities. Sometimes we have to choose one thing in order to get that thing and not get the other. Now Dr. Becky's husband is actually a really good example here. He grew up in Scar's Dale and in a much more modest family where he bust tables starting really young. He'll tell you that the experience of busing tables rewired permanently how he thinks about money. Now when he thinks about money, when he sees a $300 sweatshirt, he's not seeing just a $300 price tag. He's seeing 30 hours of running plates between busy tables. There's a translation he does automatically in his head and he can't turn it off. It's just how he learned to think about expensive things and the amount of work that goes into buying those expensive things. There is also research backing a lot of this. The OECD has tracked this in longitudinal studies across multiple countries. Teenagers who work part-time during high school have better employment outcomes in adulthood. They have better wage trajectories. They have more confidence. They have stronger work skills and they've learned over these studies that the sweet spot is around 10 to 15 hours a week when you have a teen job. More than 20 and you actually start seeing grades go down and a lot of distractions in the more age-appropriate part of life. But anything in that 10 to 15 hour range shows consistently positive all across research and literature. But it's not just the financial necessity of the part-time job where in this case they might not need to make money, but it's allowing them to go get a job as a developmental practice. This study brings up a really important concept that I want to flag. When we listen to the Taylor Adams episode, there's a woman Jane who found out about a $20 million inheritance in her late 30s. She had no idea she was going to get this money until she was in her late 30s. And there's a part of this that I think is very fascinating. Taylor thinks you should tell your kids about a trust early but with some shared language and structure. But Jane thinks not knowing is actually what saved her. If she had known in her 20s that she was going to come into a life-changing amount of money in her 30s, she probably would have made a lot of dumb decisions. So Jane and Taylor sort of disagree on this point, but what they don't disagree on is that money has to be made real somehow. You can't just pretend money doesn't exist because you have what feels like an unlimited amount of it. You have to, as parents, create this finite reality for your children so that they can developmentally learn what a dollar means. So you've got options. First the trade off the some type of allowance, make them choose. Just don't pay for everything. There's not really a single right answer here, but there is a lot of research backing that we have to give our children discomfort and frustrating situations intentionally sometimes. Yes, money can remove a lot of those barriers, but as kids, like they have to be forced to choose sometimes between multiple things. We have to make them live a reality that money isn't just unlimited and let them learn and grow and develop as adults the way that anyone who doesn't have life-changing amounts of money would have to do. Our kids benefit most from when we're just like present with them with no agenda, which is almost like the opposite of an urgency mindset. But it's why one of my favorite inter-quote interventions is just I call it PNP time, play, no phone. And I tell myself, and you probably would do this to be like, Becky, my job right now, is to put my phone in my bathroom, close two doors, so I definitely don't hear it. And go sit on the floor and play with my kid. All right, this part is personally the hardest one for me. And I think any of us who are glued to a screen or who work in some form of tech or entrepreneurial startup, we probably struggle with this as parents. It's this last one that to me, exposes a lot of our thinking and our heart to be parents, to be good parents, to be present parents. What was so eye-opening to me about this was listening to people who had already had life-changing exits and reminisced on what they wish had gone differently. Pete is a guy who sold his company for $80 million, but then hit rock bottom. And when he reflected on the entire experience, he says the biggest regret or deficit wasn't the money or the company, it was that he didn't get back with his wife and his kids. Alex Peakoff, the same guy that we talked about earlier, he had a wake-up moment that came when his teenage daughter was unable to make eye contact with him in the hospital. He had been physically there for years, but emotionally, he was not there at all. I think this is the hardest part for people who are still building. What we're telling you is that the presence matters because we hear it's what matters and it's a nice thing to say, but what people who have already made it and they sold the company and they have the life-changing money, they're saying that they bought the wrong thing and now they're learning to live with the consequences. Sometimes you can't make all the money and spend all the time with the family. A lot of times they're incompatible and that's a really hard lesson to learn. There's a couple interesting episodes that weren't even talking about parenting. One is with Hank who is a pseudonym and is not even a real name and the other one is Neal Patel. They both said similar things that I think apply here. They each downsized. Hank went from a giant compound, like 24,000 square feet, and Neal went from 10,800 square feet to 3,000. They both said almost word for word that they see their kids way more now because the house is small. They're actually around. They bump into them. With 24,000 square feet, you're not bumping into people. You're basically living in a small town. That fact alone, I think for parents who want to be present, should probably make us reconsider having more space than we need because it's going to get easier and easier not to be present. Real quick pause because this is important. If you're running a company, you already understand leverage. You apply it everywhere in your business. Most founders, they treat health like it's a rounding air. In consistent training, reactive eating, good weeks, bad weeks, start, stop, repeat. That was me. I didn't need motivation because I had plenty of that. What I needed was structure. I needed systems, better energy, lower body fat, more muscle, something that actually stuck and not some 12-week sprint that I would abandon when things got busy. And so I hired a coach and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Being built around my schedule, nutrition that survives, travel, clear targets, clear metrics, daily accountability, no guesswork. And so today's sponsor is brought to you by Daily Body Coach. They are premium online coaching for entrepreneurs and executives who want their body keeping up with their business. It's run by an exited software founder who's already a Hampton member and yes, a bunch of Hampton members already use it. Everything's personalized. They're coaches. They're available seven days a week. And the habits they help you build survive board meetings late nights and back-to-back travel weeks. This isn't about looking good on the beach. It's about being strong and sharp in your 40s, 50s and 60s. So if you're serious about it, go to dailybodycoach.com/hampton. Like dailybodycoach.com/hampton. Scott Galloway talked about something similar. When his first kid was born, the threshold number that he had went from $3 million to $10 million. And then after his second kid was born, it went to $100 million. So the work continued to fill this wealth threshold he had and his target kept moving. He was all open about it being a trap. The number is never the number and it was never this threshold for him because he kept moving the goal post as he continued to grow. When we're parents, we think about the number that we want and we think about actually achieving that. But a lot of times, once we get there, we realize it's the time that we're supposed to be spent with our family that caused us either to miss or make that goal. But those goals stop mattering if it's at the expense of being a present parent. The data is really shocking here. Sunil Luthar did some research and it's the same research I cited earlier about the affluent kid's mental health. They identified two factors. that consistently predict bad outcomes in wealthy kids. One is achievement, pressure, and the other is isolation for parents, specifically both literal isolation, like physical absence and emotional isolation. So you can be in the same house in still being totally emotionally destructive to your kids' development, because you're there, but you're not really there. You can be at dinner, but you gluing your eyes to your phone can be enough emotional destruction to start negatively affecting your kids' development. Again, like I said earlier, your kid is logging the way that you behave, not what you say, but actually what you do. And to a child, that matters so much more. Dr. Becky has a great challenge that I think all of us should try to do. She says, put your phone in another room, close the doors, sit on the floor with your kids, and have no agenda. It sounds kind of dumb, and maybe it is kind of dumb, but it's the difference between being a present, father or mother or parent, and just being physically there. And 10 minutes of real presence beats two hours of distracted presence. Dr. Becky flagged something specifically for people like me who have anxious, productive energy, I want to call it. The guy who's in the room, but happens to be checking his social media or the stock price, or the guy whose nervous system is at like 80% even when they're at the playgrounds that are, and they're supposed to be watching their kids. Kids absorb that anxious energy, and they don't know what we're worried about. They just know that we're worried, and they don't always have the different context that we have that causes to be worried or stressed or anxious. They just conclude that, all right, I guess being an adult means you're worried and anxious and stressed all the time. And that actually becomes their baseline and default. Rough. Here's the one thing that I'm gonna actually put on myself most aggressively after this episode, is that I'm going to design my physical environment and my calendar so that presence is forced until it's a habit. 'Cause right now the habit is being physically there, but emotionally on the screen. And I think it's really going to shape the way that I am emotionally present with my family. I'm not gonna have my phone in the room at dinner. I'm gonna get on the floor with my kids and actually play with them without an agenda. I mean, there's really easy, small, simple steps that we can do that I think will help the way that we're raising kids. And if you're listening to this and you resonate with some of that, I implore you to consider what it might be for you to be a more present physically and emotionally present, parent. So I think there's a lot that we covered here and I just want to quickly recap some of it. And I encourage you to go back through it because there's a lot of meat here from some of these past episodes. One was frustration being something we have to sometimes design for our kids. We can't always buy our kids out of their discomfort. Number two was that they emulate you. Monkeys see monkey do. If you do something, your kids are gonna do that as well. Even if you don't want them to. You have to audit what they see and do what you want them to do. Not just tell them to do those things. The third thing was to praise effort, not traits. We wanna praise the amount of work that our kids put forth toward anything so that they start to build this identity around something being worked for, not a trait that they may or may not have any control over. The fourth thing was that money has to cost something. When we give our children an allowance, for example, we should let them feel the finite nature of a dollar being spent. If they want to go buy something, we should create a reality where buying that thing means they can't buy something else. We can't let them live in a lavish, infinite amount of wealth all the time or else they're going to develop the wrong habits about money and life. And that last thing, and I think the hardest thing for me is that presence emotionally and physically have to be designed. We have to be very intentional about the way that we show up with our kids, with our family. And if I'm being honest with myself, that's gonna be the one that's the hardest for me to actually digest and make a difference about. These are the ones that require us to actually change our behaviors and our belief systems. If I'm being honest with myself, this last one is gonna be really difficult for me to change. I always feel like I'm checking my email, I'm looking at social media, I'm checking notifications. Sometimes I find that I'm just scrolling at nothing. I mean, it's really bad. And I know with my two kids at home, they see that. And I am painfully aware of how often this is happening. And so I need to really just put my phone in the other room, lock it in a case and be present. When it's time to be with my kids and with my family, my phone shouldn't be anywhere nearby. That's what I'm taking away from this episode. I encourage you to go back through and figure out like what is it for you as a parent and a listener of money wise to go do with your family, to build this sustainable lifestyle around raising kids who might have a lot more money than you did, but doing so mindfully and intentionally. Whatever you do for the next 18 years of their lives, that is going to be the way that they learn about money and about what it means to be an adult. I'm doing this with my kids right now and I am gonna get plenty of it wrong. And if you've made any real money and you're trying to do this with your kids, join the club. I don't think any of us really know what we're doing, but we look to experts like Dr. Becky to help us try to figure it out together. And this is exactly the kind of conversation we have inside of Hampton. There's people with $5 million, $50 million, hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even billions of dollars, wrestling with these same questions. Off the record together in a community. If that sounds like something you're interested in having for yourself, go to joinhampton.com and I look forward to seeing you in the community. Thanks for listening to Money Wise.