Help Your Clients Raise Kids Who Aren’t Entitled

By Kristin MacDermott and Jocelyn Baker

Families of wealth seek a delicate balance. They want their children to benefit from their hard work and financial blessings but in ways that result in self-sufficient, responsible kids. Like Goldilocks, they want things just right: to raise kids who enjoy the privileges of wealth without becoming entitled.

For many parents, entitlement—when it occurs—is a mystery. They have no idea why some children become entitled but others do not. Their only strategy is to wing it and hope they get lucky. The good news is that we can articulate exactly what leads to entitlement—and we can therefore identify how to prevent it.

Why Do Children Become Entitled?

Children become entitled when their parents fail to do two things:

1. Tie their children’s privileges to responsibilities
2. Enforce boundaries that protect the parents’ needs

To understand how financial advisors can help their clients solve this problem, let’s unpack these two components.

Tie Privileges to Responsibilities

While we often hear of extravagances lavished upon the children of the ultra-wealthy, privilege can creep into even middle-class households. While it is not inherently “bad” for these families to give children nice things, problems arise when those privileges are not tied to any expectations about how children should behave when receiving them. In other words, children need to understand the specific responsibilities they must uphold to earn each privilege, or the privileges will seem like entitlements.

For instance:

• Cell phone privileges can be tied to the responsibility of polite cell phone etiquette.
• Video game privileges can come with the responsibility of getting physical exercise to counterbalance the time spent in front of a gaming console.
• The privilege of a housekeeper can require gratitude when interacting with the housekeeper.
• A private school education can come with the responsibilities of behaving ethically and earning high marks.

These are just examples. The specific responsibilities for various privileges are up to the parents. They might even differ from child to child within the same family. The point is, if privileges are not tied to responsibilities, they feel like entitlements.

In families of wealth, privileges commonly slip into the category of entitlements because they are commonplace and not clearly tied to enforced responsibilities. Children come to believe they have a right to housekeepers, private schools, piano lessons, extravagant birthday parties, fancy vacations, and unlimited UberEats because they always have them. The truth is that children are only entitled to these things if parents decide they should be.

Parents get to define the specifics for their households, but the list of things children have a right to is actually quite short. Food, shelter, safety, clothing, education, medical treatment, emotional support, and love are sufficient to allow a child to thrive. Clarifying which things are rights and which are privileges, and then tying those privileges to specific responsibilities, is a powerful way to prevent entitlement from taking root.

This takes us to the second component: boundaries.

Parents Must Set Boundaries

Parents must set boundaries to ensure their needs are not constantly sacrificed in service to their children’s needs. When parents fail to enforce boundaries around their own needs, children become entitled.

We live in an age when child-centered parenting is the norm. Gone are the days when children were told to be seen but not heard. In our opinion, this is a positive change, as we believe helping our children find and use their authentic voices is an important aspect of parenting! However, child-centered parenting can be a slippery slope.

When well-meaning parents consistently allow their kids’ privileges to prevent their own needs from getting met, kids come to believe their needs are more important than everyone else’s. Kids don’t even think about other people as having needs. This breeds entitlement, and it breeds resentment on the parents’ side of the equation.

This can manifest in small and large ways. For example:

• When a child’s desire for extracurricular activities and playdates consistently prevents the parents from spending quality time with their own friends, the parents’ needs are being sacrificed.
• When a child’s desire for extravagant birthday and holiday parties prevents the parents from having intimate and meaningful celebrations, the parents’ needs are being sacrificed.
• When a child’s desire to boss around the nannies, babysitters, and housekeepers prevents the parents from setting a tone of respect and goodwill in their home, the parents’ needs are being sacrificed.

All of this can breed entitlement and cause the parents to become resentful.

Healthy families balance everyone’s needs to prevent entitlement and resentment. The good news is that when children see their parents setting boundaries to get their own needs met, they realize that everyone has needs. They learn to respect other people’s needs, and they begin to understand the importance of boundaries. Modeling healthy boundaries is one of the most powerful interpersonal skills we can teach our children.

Healthy boundaries feel like self-care, not punishment. Healthy boundaries promote relationships that feel good, not resentment. Healthy boundaries breed personal responsibility, not entitlement.

How Can Advisors Help?

Good communication is critical in both tying responsibilities to privileges and enforcing boundaries that protect parents’ needs. That said, conversations around needs, boundaries, and responsibilities can feel awkward.

Advisors can help their clients by initiating conversations about the strings that are attached to privileges and the boundaries around the parents’ needs. Namely, remind parents that their need to raise children who are not entitled should trump the children’s privilege—every time.

In practice, what does this look like?

When discussing large expenditures, such as cars or private school tuition, advisors might say, “I want to make sure I am helping you protect your money, not just now, but for generations to come. To that end, I would like to talk about putting boundaries around this privilege. I want to help make sure your children understand that you have expectations about their use of the financial blessings awarded to them through your hard work.”

Then, you can suggest that they use a simple contract that outlines their expectations around the responsibilities tied to each privilege the children have.

The real beauty of tying privileges to responsibilities is that it is the child’s action that causes the loss of the privilege, not the parent’s meanness.

• The child loses the phone because they failed to turn it off at the agreed-upon time.
• The child loses video games because they didn’t get their homework done first.
• The child must start doing their own laundry because they were rude to the housekeeper.

These are not punishments. They are consequences of the child’s actions. And this becomes clear when it is discussed up front and put into writing.

Just as advisors can initiate conversations about tying privileges to responsibilities, they can also bring up the subject of setting boundaries around the parents’ needs. Advisors are positioned to help their clients in meaningful, personal ways. Inviting clients to talk about their own needs and brainstorm how they might begin to set some boundaries to get more of their needs met can be profoundly helpful.

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Kristin and Jocelyn are co-founders of Resilient Family Strategies, which helps advisors communicate with families of wealth about building family units that persevere over time. Contact Kristin at kristin@macdermottmethod.com. For more info about preventing entitlement, watch the video at resilientfamilystrategies.com.

image credit: istock.com/moxiegirl12