Will Money Ruin Your Kids?

The myth of the spoiled rich kid—and what actually determines whether your children grow up motivated

A friend recently asked me one of those questions that had been keeping her up at night: “Are my kids going to become spoiled brats?”

She’d done well. Really well. The kind of well where the kids fly business class and assume that’s normal. Now she was terrified that her success would somehow curse her children to lives of entitlement and aimlessness.

It’s a fear I hear constantly from successful parents.

I’m no expert in child-raising. I’ve only done it three times. But I can tell you with absolute certainty that the “privileged kids become worthless adults” narrative is a myth. A convenient one, maybe—it lets us believe that struggle is the only path to character. That unless your kids learn to love powdered milk and hand-me-downs, they’ll never develop grit.

But it’s simply not true.

The real question isn’t about money. It’s about motivation.

Do you honestly believe that privation is the only thing that makes people want to work hard? That unless your kids experience genuine hardship, they’ll never develop drive? That’s not just wrong—it’s lazy thinking.

There are dozens of ways to cultivate motivation in children. In my family, four things mattered a lot.

Let them see you love what you do.

When you come home from work, what do your kids hear?

“I spent all day in meetings with idiots,”

or

“You won’t believe the problem we finally cracked today…”

When my kids were young, I’d come home buzzing about an experiment we’d run or a crazy idea we were going to try the next morning. They didn’t understand the details, but they saw that work wasn’t something I endured. It was something I got to do.

Kids are always watching. Always listening.

If they see that work is something adults dread—a necessary evil to fund the weekend—that’s exactly how they’ll approach it. But if they see you genuinely engaged, even energized by your work, they’ll grow up believing that hard work isn’t drudgery. It’s something people are lucky to have.

Encourage their curiosity—don’t squash it.

For me, the reason I loved going to work was that I was engaged in an incredible experiment. Every day was about figuring something out. My kids saw that. They came to understand hard work as something more like a challenging game than a chore.

When your kid asks “why?” for the fortieth time, resist the urge to shut it down. That curiosity is the raw material of motivation. Nurture it.

Teach them Type-2 fun.

Most people avoid things that are hard or uncomfortable. That’s natural. But there’s a kind of experience where the payoff comes after a period of difficulty—and learning to embrace that is one of life’s essential skills.

In my family, we did a lot of outdoor activities. Long hikes. Hill climbs. Bike rides that went on just a little too long.

I remember one ridiculous slog up a steep trail in the rain. One of the kids was sobbing, convinced they were “literally going to die” and that this was “probably the worst day of their life.”

An hour later, standing at the summit, they were grinning, tearing into trail mix, bragging about how steep it was.

That flip—from misery to pride—is the feeling of grit wiring itself in.

Show them that wealth doesn’t equal happiness.

This might be the most counterintuitive advantage of growing up around money.

As a kid, I knew plenty of rich people. Big houses. Shiny cars. Pantries that looked like small grocery stores.

And dinner tables so tense you could feel it the second you walked in the door.

Some were workaholics who never saw their kids. Some were on their second or third divorce. Some were just…miserable.

It was an invaluable lesson: you can’t attach your happiness to affluence. Money solves money problems. It does not solve meaning problems.

Growing up with fewer resources has its own trap. You start believing that if you only had a better bike, a better car, a better house, a bigger jet, then you’d be happy. The world reinforces this relentlessly.

But it’s a lie. And kids who grow up seeing wealthy, unhappy people learn that lesson early.

Wealth doesn’t ruin kids. Confusing wealth with worth does.

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Here’s what I’ve come to believe: motivation isn’t something you manufacture through deprivation. It’s something you model. Something you nurture. Something you build through shared experiences that teach kids the deep satisfaction of doing hard things.

In the end, your bank balance isn’t what raises your kids.

What raises them is what they see you do when things get hard. What you celebrate at the dinner table. What questions you take seriously. And what mountains—literal or metaphorical—you drag them up with you.

The summit is worth the hike.

Your job is to show them.