“Teach Your Children Well“– do you know this song by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young? I recently listened to Howard Stern interview Graham Nash, who wrote the song in 1968 when he was a member of the Hollies. He explained that the song was inspired by a Diane Arbus photo, “Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, NYC”. He first saw the photo displayed at an exhibition next to a photo of the Krupp building, a German arms manufacturer.
Graham tells Howard that the images led him to realize that “if we do not teach our children better ways of dealing with our fellow human beings, we are fu—ed.”
This interview got me thinking about my work with enterprising families. I often see how parents and grandparents, sometimes unwittingly, set up kids and grandkids for chaos and pain, though usually with the best of intentions. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This maxim embodies so much truth in my work.
For example, kids are gifted a business to own and run. It is divided nicely into a fair split – each having their own little fiefdom. The idea being that they are given the same amount of gift but with little or no focus on the skills and abilities of each child or their ability to work together. Often, the kids have little or no outside experience to run the business and mom and dad need income from the business to fund their lifestyle. What could go wrong?
A few years back, I was in conversation with a 92-year-old man who went from abject poverty to great wealth. He was in tears over his kids and grandkids. Not wanting to subject them to the horrors of poverty he endured, he used his financial wealth to make life as easy as possible for them—private schools, fancy cars gifted upon passing their driver’s tests, college tuition covered and no-show jobs at the company. Few of the kids and grandkids finished college. There was no work ethic. The non-family executives who ran the company were completely frustrated by having to fix the mistakes of family members; they felt they’d be better off without these family members involved in the business at all.
The tears streaming down his face were a function of his profound sadness. “What did I do wrong? I only wanted them to have an easier life than I had!”
I could go on with many more examples. And yet, I do see a current trend in the field of family wealth with a focus on positive development of the rising generation, and success stories about subsequent generations of wealth creators with productive lives and who are making social impacts. Wealth 3.0 is a term coined by James Grubman, PhD; Dennis T. Jaffe, PhD and Kristen Keffeler MSM, MAPP in their popular 2023 book Wealth 3.0: The Future of Family Wealth Planning. This book lays out a school of thought based on avoiding the awful stories of “shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves” – a slogan from countries around the world referring to the creation and then dissipation of wealth in three generations.
Wealth 3.0 has its merits. There are lots of stories I hear now of families flourishing in the context of family financial wealth while for too long, the professional field was full of horror stories and scare tactics. We are moving in the right direction.
However, the overwhelming majority of pain my clients come to me with could have been avoided with one thing: more intention around how they raised their kids.
Graham Nash – you are onto something!