Do rich people make bad parents?
Rich parents care just as much as poor parents. It’s just that rich parents need more than just caring.
If you were raised in a life style of lesser financial means than the one you are raising your children in, then there are very different rules in play that don’t usually portend well for those who don’t know what they are.
One of the most important concepts to get your arms around is that your child’s distance from absolute poverty, is matched by an equal distance in motivation.
This reality plagues all successful civilizations, and is usually their undoing. Be that as it may, I am not here to solve the plight of Western man, only to point out to you that your drive to overcome whatever obstacles in life you were born into, is not going to be matched in your children, precisely because you have made their life easier.
As T. Boone Pickens Jr. said, “If you don’t watch out, you can set up a situation where a child never has the pleasure of bringing home a paycheck.”
Therefore, the easier you make their lives the less inclined they are to improve them.
Expounding to your children how tough you had it, has only a nostalgic value not a motivational one.
To get a sense of this, I doubt you work any harder because your neighbor can’t afford a vacation. Your childhood is as irrelevant to your children as that.
I am not proposing you live in a tent and draw water from a well, but what I am giving is this principle:
“Wherever you can, DON’T!”
Let me explain.
You cannot NOT provide health care for your children, similarly you cannot not provide the best education for them. The things you cannot not do is long, so you need to find the things you can do —- and don’t.
Depending on where you live and your lifestyle, that might be the latest and greatest gadget, telephone, etc. —- that you don’t buy them.
I know it’s odd, you have worked hard to give your children the life you didn’t have. I’m sorry, but I didn’t make these rules.
So do rich people make bad parents?
That’s a question your grandchildren will hopefully answer.