19 Mar 2026 How Not To Be A Burden
A common refrain I hear from clients is: “I don’t want to be a burden to my children.” Most of the time what folks mean by this is, “I don’t want to need my kids’ help when I’m at the end of my life,” and I can empathize with that impulse, even if I wish more people would be okay being a burden in their old age. That’s what families and communities are for!
But this brief is about some other money burdens we often unwittingly foist upon the children in our lives, and I think we would do well to spend more time and energy trying to avoid those ones. So here you are, three burdens to avoid passing along:
The burden of expectations. I was recently out in Tulsa, OK visiting my 92-year old grandmother, in the home she and my grandfather bought in 1965 and in which they proceeded to raise their six children. The house is just a shade under 1600 square feet. I’m not saying you or I need to have six kids in a 1600 square foot house, but I am saying that kids are very observant, and one of the dangers of wealth is that we can unwittingly pass along expectations that are completely unreasonable. There are plenty of young adults running around Raleigh who wouldn’t even consider my grandmother’s home as a doable starter home, and it’s almost certainly to their detriment. So talk to your kids! Tell the stories of your life, how things were when your grandparents and parents were starting out, how they were for you when you started out. Normalize the idea that a home can be a home without having an interior designer or a recently renovated bathroom. Normalize the idea that you can drive a car for a long time and find a good mechanic. Normalize delayed gratification.
The burden of “what you see is all there is.” I was having lunch with a friend recently and he relayed a story from his childhood: He would observe friends whose parents got the new BMW or pool in the back yard and he’d come home saying something to the effect of “Jeeze, Jimmy’s family must be loaded.” And his parents would invariably respond with this killer phrase: “Things are not always as they seem.” They were pushing back against the idea of money as an endless pursuit of status, and against status as an accurate barometer for overall wellbeing. And what I love about that simple phrase is that, without judging the family in question, it places a healthy skepticism in our children. Sometimes people are leveraged to their eyeballs, or Grandma’s trust fund bought the house. More importantly, regardless of whose money bought the nice thing you can observe, overall wellbeing is not so easily observable. Like Tolkien said, “All that is gold does not glitter.” Many things that are good and true and beautiful have nothing to do with money changing hands. So normalize character development over status. Normalize overall wellbeing, something that is often quiet and hidden, over a life of advertisement.
The burden of fitting in. It’s easy to lecture our kids about the dangers of peer pressure and constant attempts to fit in, but what are we modeling? Because that’s what they’ll remember (as a natural lecturer, this inconvenient fact that lectures are a basically useless form of child development is a hard pill to swallow). Normalize “in our family we do this.” Normalize courage as a virtue. Normalize the delight of being free—at least to some extent!–from the dictates of the culture around you.
Sometimes thinking about not being a burden can be a burden in and of itself. But of course what I want is not for this blog to be a burden, but to stoke awareness, and to see that in these “normalizing” imperatives, we have really impactful opportunities to play a key role in leading our children and grandchildren toward healthy money relationships for which they will be grateful later. It’s never too early, or too late, to start. So let’s start today!
