Does least-happy child deserve extra parental resources (i.e., money)?

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Few parents will admit to loving one of their offspring more than another. But sometimes one child seems to need special attention.

In fact, family advisors sometimes suggest that, in order to help the whole family, it’s useful to identify the member who is struggling the most and then dedicate resources to elevating his or her circumstances. You’re only as happy as your least happy child, goes the parenting adage.

“There can be any number of reasons why one offspring is in a less favourable situation, and it can make sense to support them,” says Steve Legler, who is a family legacy guide based in Montreal.

But this strategy can also backfire. “Where it gets dangerous is when it’s always the same person,” Legler says.

Of course, no one will argue that a family member living with a disability shouldn’t receive special help. Similarly, Legler says, some families will supplement the income of a child who works as a teacher, social worker or artist.

Best way to provide assistance

But even then, there’s a right way and a wrong way to proceed, Legler says, and the best chance for a good outcome lies in what he calls “co-creating” the assistance strategy: When you co-create something instead of imposing it on someone, the chances of success are much greater.

“If I were the parent of three kids, and one of them was facing the short end of the stick, I might talk to the others and use them as a sounding board. The more they can work on things together, the better,” he says.

Wealthy parents are sometimes trying to medicate their own anxiety and frustration with a struggling child by trying to fix it with money.

Family advisor and researcher Jim Grubman

The pitfall to avoid in this scenario is making the family member who’s being helped feel that all the others are discussing the issue behind his or her back.

“There’s so much room for misinterpretation or misperception or hard feelings,” Legler continues. “The intention may be all good, but you don’t always get judged by your intentions. Most people don’t think through all the ways that their acts will possibly be misperceived, and that’s where the hard feelings are.”

Jim Grubman, author and Boston-area principal with Family Wealth Consulting, says he would rarely take the approach of addressing the least happy family member.

“I have seen families who have taken that approach, and it’s often been ineffective or has backfired,” he says. “So when I work with families, sometimes I help them move to a much broader approach to parenting.”

Grubman advocates a multimodal approach, “where the problem is evaluated not only with your heart but with your head.”

Finding alternatives to financial support

Parents should consider financial support as just one facet of their parental responsibilities, he says. He describes one family that had become accustomed to demonstrating their love and support for an adult daughter with frequent gifts of money, “which had set up some resentment and dependence,” he notes.

“The daughter looked at the parents and said a remarkable thing: If you don’t give me money, how will I know that you care about me? The parents actually became tearful and they realized that something fundamentally had gone wrong,” Grubman says.

“When I work with very wealthy families, who often go overboard on support, I ask a question that often stumps them: If you didn’t have money, what would you do? Some families will say quite literally, ‘I don’t know,’” he says.

Sometimes parents need to broaden their menu of support but have forgotten how you do that, or may never have learned to do that in the first place, he says.

Finding the sweet spot

Daniel Trimarchi takes a broad philosophical approach to the issue. The director and national leader of family dynamics and governance with KPMG in Canada starts by asking families how they define happiness.

“A lot of wealthy families are more purpose-driven than they are financially driven. If happiness equals sense of purpose, we could have one discussion. If it means financial reward, then that would mean a different discussion.”

There are two general types of families, he says, those who put family first and those who put the business first. Raising the circumstances of the least happy family member is a useful strategy, he says, when you have a strong family-first mindset.

This might mean, for instance, employing a family member in the family business even though they don’t have a strong background for the role, or buying a house for one child while expecting their siblings of greater means to buy their own.

“There’s a sweet spot between supporting people and either creating dependency on the one hand or, on the other, entitlement,” Trimarchi says.

Changing the focus

He suggests that a different, and possibly preferable, way to approach the situation would be to apply the ideas of Bowen Family Systems Theory, which views the family as a holistic unit. “Using this system, we usually focus on the one with the most control or the most influence,” he says.

“As weird as it sounds, the fact that one child is unhappy might be what keeps the rest of the family in balance,” says Trimarchi.

Therefore, instead of simply directing money or other resources to that individual, the family advisor might do better to try to understand the cause of their unhappiness and how their situation fits in with the rest of the family dynamics, then defining an approach based on the core values of the family and their definition of success.

Steve Legler recommends being transparent about your approach and not keeping secrets. “Treating people equally and treating people fairly is not the same thing. To me, the most important thing is that there’s transparency and clarity. The surprises are never good.”

Grubman says, “There is a parenting adage that most parents relate to: You’re only as happy as your least happy child. But wealthy parents are sometimes trying to medicate their own anxiety and frustration with a struggling child by trying to fix it with money.

“In some families, money can substitute for love, but in healthy families, it doesn’t.”

More from Canadian Family Offices:

• Five smart ways to transfer wealth to your children, grandchildren
• Paying the absolute lowest in tax no longer top priority for today’s families
• Recent changes to Canada’s tax laws could be costly to family businesses
• Money-related disorders are proof that wealth can’t fix everything

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