• Why Parents Worry: The Ravages of Riches
• In the Shadow: Recognizing the Silver Spoon Syndrome
• Self-Test: Is Your Child a Silver Spooner?
• Knee-Deep in Spooners: The Rising Tide of Wealth in America
• The Peril of the Spooner Generation: Why We Must Rescue Them

• How the Best of Intentions Can Produce the Worst of Results…
• Just How Much Happiness Can We Buy?
• "We Just Wanted Them to Have It Better than We Did"
• "We Were Afraid Our Kids Wouldn't Like Us"
• "We Were Just Trying to Give Them a Great Childhood"
• "Why Burden Our Kids With Financial Matters?"
• "We've Told Them Money Isn't Everything"
• What We Really Want for Our Children
• The Secret to Happiness: It's All In Your Head
• Helping Your Children Grow Healthy, Wealthy and Wise

• 911 for Spooners in Peril: Practicing the 5 Life-Salvaging Laws
• One Law to Rule Them All: The Law of Priorities

• Self-Test: Is Your Child Suffering From "Persistent Underachievement?"
• The Five Absolute Needs vs. Endless Wants: Teaching Kids the Difference
• Rx #1: Stoking an Appetite for Success

• Self-Test: Are You Giving Them "Things" When You Should Be Giving Them Discipline?
• Platinum Hugs, Golden No's: The Two Keys to Raising Stronger Kids
• Building for Success: How Resilience Makes All the Difference
• Rx #2: Turning Tantrums Into Emotional Resilience

• Enough's Enough: No More "The World Owes Me" Attitudes
• Self-Test: Do You Feed Their Greed?
• Getting Out of the Way: Wealth as a Real-World Insulator
• Rx #3: Breaking the Back of Entitlement

• The Importance of Age-Appropriate Financial Skills
• Self-Test: Are You Teaching Your Young Child Money Management? (Ages 6 to 12)
• Self-Test: Are You Teaching Your Adolescent/Young Adult Money Management? (Ages 13 and up)
• Rx #4 Junior: Developing Your Child's Financial IQ
• Rx #4 For Teens and Adults: Correcting Financial Illiteracy

• Values Are Contagious: What Are You Passing On?
• Self-Test: Do You Practice What You Preach?
• I Can't Hear You: Actions Speak Louder Than Words
• Rx #5: Modeling a Healthy Relationship to Money

• Chapter Nine: From 3 to 12: Preventing the Silver Spoon Syndrome
• Inoculating Your Young Child Against "Affluenza"
• The First Economy: The Do's and Don'ts of Allowances
• Beyond Money: Teaching Kids Essential Life Skills

• I Never Promised You a B'mer: Dealing With Children's Great Expectations
• Confronting Entitlement: Helping Teens Learn to Earn
• Emptying the Nest: Launching the Reluctant Teenager

• Ending Sloth: Breaking Patterns of Underachievement in Adult Children
• Lost in Paradise: Knowing When You Should Push?
• Negative Nudges: Can You Push Too Hard?
• Even for Adult Kids, Money Can't Replace Your Involvement
• The School of Hard Knocks: Lessons from the Real World
• The Good Career Fit: Helping Them Find a Labor to Love
• The Darker Side of Green: Dodging Wealth's Shadow
   

• Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost: Kids Set in Their Paths
• Sharing The Wealth: Timing Isn't Everything
• When is Right? Answering The Timing Question
• Enriching the Kids: Is It Love or Is It Just Money?
• Painful Procrastination: Recognizing The Myth of Tomorrow
• Knotted Purse Strings: Let's Be Reasonable
• When Blood and Business Mix: Passing On the Dream
• Making It Work: A Few Family Business Guidelines
• Dollar Distributions: How Much Is Too Much?

• Questions of the Heart: Talking With Your Financial Advisors
• Golden Giving: Smart Moves in the Transfer of Wealth
• Getting the Estate Planning Ball Rolling
• Protecting Your Money and Your Kids
• Trusts for the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• Avoiding Inheritance Battles: Communicating What's What
• Tips on Holding the Family Money Meeting
• Spending Down: The Advantages of Dying Broke
• Positive Philanthropy: Giving It All Away
• Loving Legacies: The True Measure of Success

Chapter One

When Wealth Cripples:
The Monetarily Mangled

Money brings some happiness.  But after a certain point, it just brings more money
-Neil Simon

It was the happiest day of his life, or so he thought.  When he reached the tender age of eighteen, Jim Martin and his two siblings each inherited ten million dollars from their grandmother's estate.  A few short years later, Jim was beginning to understand how sudden affluence can quickly become more cloud than silver lining.

"I've seen money do some ugly things in my family," Jim lamented, "My brother's never worked a day in his life.  The money he inherited runs through his finders like water.  He just hangs out and get high.  My sister stays to herself because she doesn't trust anybody.  She thinks everybody wants to be with her because of what she has.  I've had a hard time staying in school because it's so easy to quit. I don't really have to get up in the morning.  I don't have to study hard for tests because I don't have to work, so what's the point?

"My dad fought with my grandmother over her giving us kids all this money.  At the time I didn't really see what the big deal was.  Who doesn't fantasize about striking it rich?  It took me these last few years to understand what my father was so worried about.  It's changed our lives forever in ways I never could have imagined.  Everybody thinks I've got it made.  But sometimes I just wish I had my own life back."

We want to believe the American Dream.  We labor under the cultural delusion that greater wealth equals greater happiness.  Buried in this prosperity is the old truth that money may pay the bills, but it confers neither meaning, nor satisfaction, nor love to our lives.  Rich and poor alike, we find ourselves trapped in the assumption that more is always better, yet true contentment remains perpetually out of our reach.

People like Jim tell us that money is not an instant recipe for happiness - in fact, it generates special challenges all its own.  As another one of my clients put it, "Everybody thinks we live this fantasy life: great homes, expensive cars, private schools, extravagant vacations.  They don't see the flip side: the long conversations into the night about how money will impact our lives, our kids' lives, our grandkids' lives ... people who have never faced these things can't understand how money could ever feel like a curse instead of a blessing."

Jim represents just one example of a group of seemingly advantaged kids cut-off from life's traditional responsibilities and rewards.  Lacking conventional ambition and having not yet developed a core identity or purpose, they find themselves lost and disoriented.  Without normal goals and solid peer and family relationships as anchors, they are driven to a "special", yet twisted view of reality, and finally to despair.

That's usually where I come in.  For over two decades I've been successful helping people solve their personal and family problems.  As a clinical psychologist, I've developed a specialty of solving problems relating to family businesses and fortunes.  I've guided the entitled adolescent and the underachieving young adult, I've counseled the stalled careerist, helped select the successor to the family business, and aided parents facing decisions about their ne'er-do-well heirs.

In researching this book, I've also interviewed over fifty financial and mental health professionals to learn of their experience with wealthy families.  I've spoken with brokers, tax and probate attorneys, psychiatrists, accountants, insurance advisors, financial planners, psychologists, church counselors, clergy and family therapists.

I've added to the things they've told me by studying the ways many of our country's wealthiest families have handled difficult financial issues - where they've all succeeded and where they've failed.

They all paint a dangerous picture.

Wealth is a double-edged sword.  Its unique challenges can be mastered, but where they are not handled adeptly, the damage is devastating .  And no one pays a greater price then our children.

I've written this book for the parents of these at-risk or troubled children.  They have watched helplessly as their beloved offspring develop disturbing attitudes and frightening patterns of behavior.  They may or may not connect their financial success to their children's difficulties, but they know that something is going terribly wrong with their youngsters' development.  Or, they may have observed other people's children in the throes of the "Silver Spoon Syndrome" and vowed grimly that their progeny will not suffer the same fate.  Whatever the case, this book can help.

Within the following chapters, I'll detail the symptoms and causes of the so-called "Silver Spoon Syndrome," or "affluenza," as it is sometimes known.  I'll also introduce you to a five-step rescue plan that appears here for the very first time in print.  I developed this regimen from two decades' worth of successful outcomes in my clinical practice.  Once you've understood and applied these Five Laws of Financial Parenting, you'll be armed with specific actions you can take to minister to your children's particular symptoms.  You'll learn how to disrupt their dysfunctional patterns of behavior and guide them toward a healthier relationship with money - and with the world at large.

But before we can collect our weapons to go into battle, we must be very clear about the nature of the beast.  We must take a hard look at material wealth, and understand the crippling effect it can have on our kids.

Why Parents Worry: The Ravages of Riches

Let me be clear.  Money, even money newly acquired, doesn't always mess up families.  I'm pleased to report that, at least in my experience, it adds to the happiness of most.  Money itself is never the problem.  It's what we do with the money that can wreak havoc in our lives.

Money only creates misery when it falls into the hands of those ill prepared to handle it.

The issues we'll talk about aren't solely problems of the rich.  Any of us can get into trouble with money based purely on what we believe.  It's as much about he mailman who fritters away his opportunities for contentment fantasizing about "striking it rich" as it is about the prosperous physician whose life is void of meaningful relationships and filled with nothing but work and the accumulation of material goods.  It includes the dual-career, middle-class couple whose children spend most of their time in the company of strangers - not because the parents need the money, but because they believe more of it is always better.

All of these dysfunctional beliefs about money are learned.  Many are passed down from generation to generation.  To compound the problem, commercial messages bombard us daily, reinforcing the false notion that material goods are the solution to all our woes.  In a society as affluent as ours, individuals at any income level can fall prey to the siren song of wealth.

None are so gravely affected by money as those who have it dropped in their laps.  Recall Jim Martin and his siblings, whose inheritance changed their lives:

"I wasn't raised like some Little Lord Fauntleroy," he told me, "Even though my dad's parents had a lot of money, my parents did a good job of raising us like everyone else.  I raked leaves and shoveled snow for money.  I didn't get any extravagant toys or gifts.  I lived a pretty normal life until I turned eighteen.  After the inheritance, everything changed.

"All of a sudden I didn't need to go to work, go to school, or do anything.  I quit my job at the grocery store and flunked out my first year in college.  It's been difficult figuring out what to do next.  I feel like I'm standing in a huge wide open space and I can walk in any direction," he concluded, "But there's no sign to tell me which way to go."

Jim was experiencing a classic case of rich-kid disease, of being "soft where we were hard," as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in his story The Rich Boy.  When so much is free, rich kids don't know what to value, or how to obtain what can't be bought.  In Jim's case, he had lost all desire and direction.  This is why so many young inheritors express a sense of emptiness, depression, and listlessness.  Their lives lack any clear purpose.

Nelson Aldrich, in his book Old Money, spoke of this dilemma: "The inheritor is placed in a unique position of being able to choose whether to participate in purposeful activities or do nothing at all.  Because they are not forced into participation, they often don't take risks, stretch themselves, or connect in a meaningful and instructive way with others.  They end up leading an isolated life, lacking in the richness and complexity of experiences."

Jim and countless other young heirs frequently become resentful of their benefactors: "Even though I should be grateful for what my grandmother gave me, I sometimes regret that she didn't use better judgment.  I've thought about giving it all away just to get my old life back."

Peter Collier and David Horowitz, in their book Rich Kids, warns of the hazards of money: "It is like some magic sword: it gives the holder rare powers, but only the mightiest warriors can keep from being nicked themselves by the blade."  Jessie O'Neill of The Golden Ghetto, and Burton Wixen of Children of the Rich, both describe the potential devastation caused by wealth and privilege.

I've worked with both children and adults who have been slashed by the sword of affluence.  Some had gaping wounds.  Some were literally near death.

Then there are the more dramatic, well-known casualties of affluenza.  We all recall the Menendez brothers who murdered their parents to gain access to their estate, McCauley Culkin's family destroyed by his sudden wealth and fame, and the murder and fraud case of the Billionaire Boys Club, to name a few.

Now stop and reflect on your own situation.  What delicate issues have you faced in your own life involving money and love?  Have you felt guilty for trading more income for time with your family?  Maybe you're worried about the effects of buying toys for your kids every time you go to the store.

If you're reading this book, the odds are that you've recognized the warning signs in your own kids.  Is your brilliant young son inexplicably flunking out of school?  Does your teenage daughter refuse to work then demand her allowance early so she can go to a rock concert?  Or maybe your youngest won't talk to you because you won't buy him the red BMW he wants.  Perhaps your grown child doesn't call anymore because she's angry that she's not receiving what she feels she "deserves" from your estate.  Does your heart break, hearing your adult kids fighting over what they will get when you die?  Or were your hopes dashed when your grown daughter spent your last cash gift on drugs and clothes?

If you've encountered situations like these, you know the guilt, anguish, disappointment and anxiety of watching a child slip into the throes of affluenza.  These experiences represent the dark side of wealth, the pitfalls of prosperity, the ravages of riches.  Let's take a closer look at the way this vicious cycle of destructive behavior, the Silver Spoon Syndrome, manifests in our children.