How To Raise Happy Kids As A Multimillionaire

What happens when your kids grow up with more money than most adults will ever see? In this special compilation episode of Moneywise, host Daniel Berk goes back through some of the most powerful parenting conversations from the show, pulling research-backed insights from Dr. Becky Kennedy, Taylor Adams, Scott Galloway, Neil Patel, and others. The through line: affluent kids are 2-3x more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, and the instinct to cushion their lives with money is often the very thing making it worse.

We also went deep on: frustration tolerance and why comfort can be dangerous for kids, the science of praise (effort vs. traits), why 90% of wealthy families lose their fortune by the third generation, how to make money feel real through allowance and trade-offs, and why emotional presence matters more than physical proximity.

Below you'll find my summary of the episode along with the entire transcript.

And by the way...this podcast, the concept of it came from Hampton. Hampton is a private, highly vetted community for high net worth founders hosted by Daniel Berk. Members range from companies doing 3-5 million in revenue all the way up to hundreds of millions. The reason we started this podcast is because there are amazing conversations about money and growing companies that typically happen only behind closed doors, and we thought it would be awesome to share all of this information. If you're a CEO, founder, or business owner, check this out. New Moneywise episodes come out weekly.

Listen to this episode on:

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Now, below are the notes and the full transcript.

The Numbers

• 2-3x higher — Rate of clinical anxiety, depression, and substance abuse in kids from households earning $200K+, per Columbia researcher Suniya Luthar's 25-year study
• 22% — Suburban affluent girls showing clinically significant depressive symptoms (3x the normative rate)
• 70% — Wealthy families that lose their wealth by the second generation (Williams Group, 3,200 families studied)
• 90% — Wealth gone by the third generation
• 10-15 hours/week — Sweet spot for teen part-time work that improves employment outcomes without hurting grades (OECD longitudinal studies)

Frustration Tolerance: The Skill Money Can Erase

The episode opens with a vivid image: a 16-year-old having a full-blown temper tantrum in an airport because he wasn't flying first class. Dr. Becky Kennedy's frame on this is one of the cleanest Daniel has heard: entitlement isn't about being a brat. It's actually a fear of frustration. Every time a parent jumps in with an iPad, an upgrade, or a cushion for discomfort, the child learns that frustration is something someone else fixes for them.

"Frustration tolerance is actually one of the most important skills for life," Dr. Becky says. And wealth gives parents the ability to buy their way out of nearly every inconvenience. But for kids, that friction is exactly what builds resilience.

Taylor Adams, from a multi-generational billionaire family, reinforces the point: "Success is nothing but a compounding series of small failures." You cannot grow in a frictionless environment, and the same applies for children.

Monkey See, Monkey Do: Why Kids Run Your Script

Daniel makes a personal admission: whatever parenting strategies he and his wife create, his two- and three-year-old are just going to emulate what they see. His own work ethic came from watching his father go to the office at 7 AM and come home at 7 PM.

Taylor Adams explains the mechanics behind the old saying "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." Generation one creates value. Generation two watches and learns to manage it. Generation three watches generation two and concludes that the family thing to do is manage stuff that already exists. They don't create. They consume.

The Williams Group study of 3,200 families confirms this: 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation, and 90% by the third. Dr. Becky's practical version: if your kids never see you fold laundry, why would they think they're supposed to?

Alex Pakov's story drives it home. He watched his dad throw money around as a kid, then spent his twenties recreating that exact behavior with bottle service and fast cars. It took his teenage daughter going through something traumatic for him to realize the model was broken.

Praise Effort, Not Traits

Daniel highlights a famous 1998 study by Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller at Columbia. They gave fifth graders puzzles and praised half for being smart ("Wow, you must be really smart") and half for effort ("Wow, you must have worked so hard"). Then they offered both groups a choice: an easy puzzle or a harder one.

The kids praised for intelligence picked the easy puzzle. The kids praised for effort picked the harder one. Even more striking: kids praised for intelligence were significantly more likely to lie about their scores on a follow-up test. Their identity was fragile, and they had to protect it.

The operational rule: never tell your kid they're smart. Tell them they worked hard. Tell them they did something difficult. Shane, who walked away from a fifth-generation family nursery business, said the mandate shouldn't be about building wealth. It should be about doing something, anything, that creates value for someone.

Money Has To Cost Something

If your kid has an allowance but also has unrestricted access to your Amazon account, your emergency credit card, and a tab at the country club, that allowance is Monopoly money. You're not teaching trade-offs because there are no trade-offs.

Dr. Becky argues the choices can be absurdly small at first. If your kid decides not to order sparkling water at a restaurant because they want a candy bar later, that thought process is exactly the muscle that needs training. There's a real cognitive operation being built: if I want this, I can get it, but only if I don't get that other thing.

The OECD has tracked this in longitudinal studies across multiple countries: teenagers who work part-time during high school (the sweet spot is 10-15 hours per week) have better employment outcomes, better wage trajectories, more confidence, and stronger work skills. It's not about needing the money. It's about experiencing what money actually costs.

Dr. Becky's husband grew up bussing tables in Scarsdale. To this day, when he sees a $300 sweatshirt, he doesn't see a price tag. He sees 30 hours of running plates between busy tables. That translation is permanent.

Presence Has To Be Designed

This is the section Daniel says hit him hardest. Pete sold his company for $80 million and hit rock bottom. When he reflected on everything, the biggest regret wasn't the money or the company. It was that he didn't get back with his wife and kids.

Alex Pakov had a wake-up moment when his teenage daughter couldn't make eye contact with him in the hospital. He'd been physically there for years but emotionally absent. Scott Galloway watched his wealth threshold move from $3 million to $10 million to $100 million after each child was born. He was open about it being a trap: the number is never the number.

Neil Patel and Hank both downsized their homes and reported the same result: they see their kids way more now because the house is smaller. With 24,000 square feet, you're not bumping into people. You're living in a small town.

Dr. Becky's challenge: "Put your phone in another room, close the doors, sit on the floor with your kids, and have no agenda." She calls it PNP time: Play, No Phone. Ten minutes of real presence beats two hours of distracted presence. Kids absorb anxious energy even when they don't know what you're worried about. They just conclude that being an adult means being stressed all the time.

Daniel's Takeaway

Daniel closes with a personal commitment: designing his physical environment and calendar so presence is forced until it becomes habit. No phone at dinner. Getting on the floor with his kids and playing with no agenda.

His five-point recap:

1. Design frustration. Don't buy your kids out of discomfort.
2. They emulate you. Audit what they see, not what you tell them.
3. Praise effort, not traits. Build an identity around hard work, not intelligence.
4. Money has to cost something. Let them feel the finite nature of a dollar.
5. Presence has to be designed. Be intentional about showing up, physically and emotionally.

Other Key Quotes

"Frustration tolerance is actually one of the most important skills for life. — Dr. Becky Kennedy"

"Success is nothing but a compounding series of small failures. — Taylor Adams"

"Your kid is not running your script. Your kid is running on your behavior on a five-second delay for the next 18 years. — Taylor Adams"

"If your kids don't ever see you fold laundry, why would they think they're ever supposed to fold it? — Dr. Becky Kennedy"

"The number is never the number. — Scott Galloway"

"Ten minutes of real presence beats two hours of distracted presence. — Dr. Becky Kennedy"

"Whatever you do for the next 18 years of their lives, that is going to be the way they learn about money and about what it means to be an adult. — Daniel Berk"

Links You Might Like

• Join Hampton Community: https://joinhampton.com
• Explore Hampton Membership
• Daily Body Coach: dailybodycoach.com/hampton
• Oceans Talent: oceanstalent.com/moneywise
• Moneywise Podcast: Full episode archive

Full Transcript

Daniel Berk: I've talked to founders worth twenty million dollars, two hundred million dollars, three billion dollars, and they all come from different family backgrounds. And when I talk to them about their kids, a lot of the same things come up time and again. I'm a dad. I've got two kids at home. And what I want more than anything is just to not ruin their lives. It's really hard being a parent and none of us really know what we're doing. So when I went back through a couple of these Moneywise transcripts, I found a lot of backed research from experts talking about how to be a parent, especially when you have money. How do we raise kids who grow up in wealth? Some of these lessons might really make you mad, but I think if you listen to them and you digest them, you're going to leave much better off and you're going to have a lot of really valuable tools for how to raise kids, especially wealthy kids. Let's give it a go.

Guest: The dad had become very successful and 16 year old had a full blown temper tantrum in an airport when he found out he wasn't flying first class. And the parents were like, how did we get here? And yet when I think about it again, so well-intentioned, this was a family where generally this kid did get the easiest version of everything, the most comfortable version of everything. Frustration tolerance is actually one of the most important skills for life.

Daniel Berk: Okay, I want you to park that image for a few seconds. There's a 16-year-old in a public airport screaming because he has to sit and coach. That is the exact picture that every guest in this show is afraid of becoming, including me. I have two kids. I flew with them to and from Italy last year. It was a three-week trip. They got used to the European time zone. And I will always remember the landing in Charleston, South Carolina after a long vacation, how my three-year-old reacted when I woke him up from his deep sleep around 11 p.m. He could not handle it. And as a parent, you look at your three-year-old, he's losing his mind, and you think, well, I have to parent this because he's three. He can't help it. I'm the parent. I have to help him regulate his emotions. That's all part of the process. But when the kid is 16 years old, you sort of have to rewind and think through all the different parts of their lives that led to this moment. Dr. Becky's frame on this is one of the cleanest that I've heard. And it goes against every parenting instinct that money tends to give you. She says that entitlement isn't about being a brat, but it's actually a fear of frustration. You see this kid in the airport, they weren't necessarily spoiled, but actually just terrified. They were terrified of being uncomfortable because they hadn't ever had to be uncomfortable. Every time mom or dad jumped in with an iPad or an upgrade or cushioning some uncomfortable situation, they were actually learning that frustration is a thing that someone else would fix for them. The part about making real money that I think a lot of us resonate with is that a lot of times you can buy your way out of frustration. It's literally what wealth lets you do. If you don't want to sit on hold with an airline, you don't. If you don't want to fold your laundry, you don't. You can buy yourselves out of situations that you've decided aren't worth your time. You don't have to live with some of the different frustrating things that a lot of people have to live with. Money can buy you out of those uncomfortable, frustrating situations. But for kids, they actually need the exact opposite. A lot of times kids have to be in uncomfortable or frustrating situations in order to grow up and become an adult. Taylor Adams says something similar to Dr. Becky, but in a few different ways. You see, Taylor is from a multi-generational billionaire family in L.A. And in his episode of Moneywise, he said success is nothing but a compounding series of small failures.

Guest: Failing forward and failing small is something that you do until one day you wake up and realize that you've actually built something substantial. The entire muscle, he says, of building something substantial requires being in frustrating situations. You have to purposely be put into uncomfortable situations to build something worthwhile. You cannot grow in a frictionless environment. And the same applies for our kids. The data behind this is really interesting. There's a Columbia researcher named Suniya Luthar who's actually been studying affluent kids for 25 years. She originally went into the research expecting wealthy kids to be a healthy control group for her studies on poor kids. But what she actually found out was that kids from households making 200K or more have rates of clinical anxiety, depression, and substance abuse two to three times the national average. 22% of suburban affluent girls in her study had clinically significant depressive symptoms, three times the rate of normative samples. The two factors that drive it were pressure to achieve and isolation from parents. So this version of childhood we tend to build for our kids once we start making money is optimized and frictionless and achievement focused when statistically that's actually the version most likely to break our kids. When I first heard Dr. Becky tell that story, my first reaction was, yeah, but not my kid. I mean, we're going to do it differently. I hear you about that story, but that's not going to be what my family's like. But I caught myself right in the middle of that thought because every parent of that 16-year-old probably says the same thing when their kid is one. They didn't really expect their 16-year-olds to start throwing temper tantrums when they didn't sit in first class.They sort of drifted into that family dynamic. The question Becky's actually asking in her Money Wise episode is, are you building a kid whose worst experience is mild boredom? Because if that's really the worst your child's childhood is going to be, it's really gonna feel like trauma to them by the time they're 30. Whenever I listen to podcasts, I try to take away one thing, and when I listen to Dr. Becky's, the thing I take away is just to put my kids in normal, average situations when it makes sense. My kid is watching what I tolerate, not what I tell them to do. And so if I'm constantly buying my way out of frustrating or inconvenient things, then that's what my kids are going to expect for their life. And so that's really what I want to take out of this segment is, like, sometimes it's okay to be in less than ideal situations, especially if you're a parent. Your kids pick up on that, and it's actually what makes them stronger.

Daniel Berk: So I have a two-year-old and a three-year-old. Whatever strategies me and my wife create on how to raise them, great. The reality is they're just gonna emulate whatever we do. And so I grew up with my dad going to the office at seven AM and coming home at seven PM and, and just grinding over his career. And I think a lot of my work ethic was a product of just emulating him.

Guest: Okay, if you are a builder listening to this and a parent, you probably got wrecked by this just like I did. Taylor's saying that it doesn't really matter what your parenting rubric says. Your kid is not running your script. Your kid is running on your behavior on a five-second delay for the next 18 years, which is really interesting. It's the old saying, "Monkey see, monkey do." They will do what you do, not what you say. They're watching you, and they're mirroring every action and behavior that you exhibit. Taylor, in his episode, goes a bit deeper into this, and he says that the one who introduced him to the actual mechanics behind this saying, "Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations," it's a really interesting concept.

Guest: Most people, when they think about money, especially generational wealth, they think the first generation tends to be the one that makes it, then the second generation protects it, and then the third generation just blows it all. Taylor is reframing this, and he's saying that it's not really all about the money and how that generational wealth produces. It's actually about the emulation of behavior. Generation one creates the value, so that's kosher, and that's correct. Generation two watches generation one and learns to manage that value. But then generation three watches generation two and concludes that the family thing to do is manage stuff that already exists. So they actually don't create in the third generation. They just consume what the first two generations built and maintained. The wealth in the third generation is eaten all up because they're not producing anymore. They're just consuming it. But it's not because they're not capable. It's just because they're emulating the closest model they have, and the closest model was not a builder. It was just a maintainer. And so it's like playing a game of telephone. Ultimately, the third generation sort of stops adding value. And there's another stat here that is really interesting to look into. The Williams Group study did 3,200 family study and found that seventy percent of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation, and ninety percent lose it by the third. That's a crazy number because it basically means almost everyone who creates generational wealth loses all of it by the third generation. And there's a family wealth consultant named Jim Gruben who basically tracked this citation and looked at that seventy percent number and argues it's probably even bigger than that. So that second generation may be even closer to the ninety percent than the third generation. So directionally, you start to see that those Vanderbilt type of families create a ton of value in the first generation, but then by the second and third generation, there's just a bunch of yacht parties, and ultimately, you lose a lot of that wealth that you created for yourself. Dr. Becky's version of this is a lot more practical for most of the listeners of this show. She says if your kids don't ever see you fold laundry, for example, then why would they think they're ever supposed to fold it. The luxury that you, the person with money, have built and maybe the staff you have that supports it is not invisible to your kid. It's entirely visible. It is the part that they see about your life that they're ultimately going to expect will be the same for theirs. There's another version of this principle from a guy named Alex Paykov. Alex is the guy from the Macedonian milk family in Newport Beach, and he described how his dad threw money around when Alex was a kid. And Alex spent his twenties recreating that exact behavior. Alex would get bottle service. He would buy fast cars. He would just spend his money on whatever he wanted. He didn't really ever choose that. He, he may not even have desired that. He just saw his dad do it, and so he emulated it. It took his teenage daughter going through something extremely traumatic for him to actually wake up and realize that the model of how he was consuming money and spending money was ruining his life and his family's lives. But he never really questioned it until he saw that negative impact. So now I want you to look at your own kids' lives for thirty seconds. They see what you do on Saturday morning. They see how you talk to your wife when something goes wrong in the house. They see whether you're on your phone at dinner. They see how you handle losing that fifty thousand dollar deal that might not have worked. They see all the ways that you deal with discomfort and frustration, and whether you want them to or not, you're wiring the way that their nervous system and their brain operates. It's how they're learning how to be an adult.

Guest: Practically speaking, if there's something you know you don't want your kids to do when they're twenty-five, you have to ask yourself if you're modeling the inverse of that now. And if you're not, you're not really setting them up for success. You're actually setting them up to do the very thing that you don't want them to do because you're not modeling the behavior that you wish them to exhibit. You're just modeling your own behavior, and like we've been talking about, they're gonna copy that whether you like it or not. My father would always share things like, "If you wanna make a million dollars, then find a way to help a million people." It's fundamentally about building your own capability where you can contribute to others, and there's plenty of family members within our family that have become artists or teachers or done things that you wouldn't consider, like, pathways to building wealth.

Daniel Berk: All right, there's a lot here, so let's break it down. In part one, we're gonna talk about the fact that how you praise your kid matters more than how often. There's a famous study by Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller out of Columbia in nineteen ninety-eight. They took fifth graders, gave them puzzles, and then praised half of them for being smart. They would say things like, "Wow, you're so smart. You must be really smart with your homework." Really just praising them for their intellect. But the other half got praised for the effort they put in. "Wow, you must have worked so hard at this." You know, it was two totally different types of praise. Then they offered both groups a choice. You can either do another easy puzzle or you can try a harder one. The kids that were praised for being smart picked the easy puzzle. But what's interesting is the kids that were praised for the effort that they exerted picked the harder one. They were all fifth graders, the same baseline ability, but the way that they were praised actually rewired what they thought about themselves and what they could achieve. If we praise the trait, we get a kid who avoids challenges and who might disprove the trait. But when you praise the effort, you get a kid who chases challenges because the effort that they put forward and the effort that was praised is something that they can always show up with. Well, I can always give my best, but if I'm not smart or if I'm taught that I'm not smart, I mean, what do you really do about that? It really just changes their self-esteem and the way they think about themselves. There's a follow-up here that I think is really important for the parents. Kids who are praised for intelligence were significantly more likely to lie about their score on a follow-up test. It's not because they were bad kids, but their identity was fragile. They had to protect it because they kind of felt like they may have been stupid. The intelligence meter was what they were being measured against, not the effort they put forth. So the operational rule here will say that you will never or should never tell your kid that they're smart. Tell them they worked hard. Tell them they did something difficult. Praise them for the effort that they put forth, but don't tell them how smart they are because then you're compounding an amount of praise to something that will actually shift their entire identity, sometimes to their detriment. The other part here is harder for people like me. I love building businesses and I love entrepreneurial things and I love building something from zero to one and seeing that one make money. But just because I love those things does not mean my kids will love those things. Take Shane. Shane is a guy from a fifth-generation family nursery business who walked away from his entire family empire. He has a daughter now, and when we asked him point blank if he expects her to take over his work, he said zero percent. Zero. He watched in his family what generational obligation did to him and he wanted nothing to do with for her.

Guest: Taylor, this multi-generational billionaire, said the same thing. The mandate in his family wasn't about building wealth. It was about doing something, anything that creates value for someone. Some of his cousins are artists, some are teachers, and the family doesn't look down on it. They're not praising intelligence. They're praising effort. The point is not about the intelligence meter. It's about what are you doing to create something?

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Guest: So my encouragement to the parents listening to thisGo praise your kids for the effort they're putting forth, not for the traits that they're exhibiting, not for the intelligence. Don't praise them for how smart they are, even if they're smart. Say, "Wow, you're putting a lot of work into this, and I'm so proud of you." Watch how that starts to light them up. It'll start to help them rewire the way they're thinking about themselves, and ultimately, science shows that this is a healthier way for them to grow up. I've seen too many people who have a lot of disposable income. Essentially, their kids spend their parents' money, or they can just kind of get whatever they want, and then they have some, quote, "allowance" on top of it, but it's kind of meaningless because it's all play money. The point of allowance, again, is to a little bit mimic what you go through in the real world, where money is real and choices and trade-offs are real. I can do this, but then I'm not gonna do this.

Daniel Berk: Okay, this is a really interesting one because it talks about allowance, which is kind of a remedial idea to me, but it actually helps kids deal with what money can and can't do.

Guest: So say you give your kid a $20 allowance, but if your kid also has unrestricted access to your Amazon account, your emergency credit card, your purse, a tab at the country club, basically that $20 is like Monopoly money. You're not really teaching them any trade-offs because there is actually no trade-off. If they run out of money, they just get more. But allowance is supposed to teach them to be part of a real functional environment where the money is finite. Dr. Becky argues around this idea and says that the choices can be absurdly small when you start to build this idea of finite money. If your kid is at a restaurant with friends and they decide not to order, let's say, sparkling water because they want a candy bar later, that thought process is exactly the type of muscle that we need to train intentionally in our kids. It kind of looks ridiculous from the outside, but there's an actual cognitive operation being built when we do this. If I want this, I can get it, but only if I don't get that other thing.

Guest: There's a foundation of adult financial decisions that they're learning to make that if you don't intentionally put them in that situation, if you have money, they might not ever have to make, and they're not getting to learn that very important part of becoming an adult, where you have to deal with, like we said earlier, frustration and discomfort, and you have to learn that things are finite. Not everything exists in infinite quantities. Sometimes we have to choose one thing in order to get that thing and not get the other. Now, Dr. Becky's husband is actually a really good example here. He grew up in Scarsdale and in a much more modest family where he bussed tables starting really young. He'll tell you that the experience of bussing tables rewired permanently how he thinks about money. Now when he thinks about money, when he sees a $300 sweatshirt, he's not seeing just a $300 price tag. He's seeing 30 hours of running plates between busy tables. There's a translation he does automatically in his head, and he can't turn it off. It's just how he learned to think about expensive things and the amount of work that goes into buying those expensive things. There is also research backing a lot of this. The OECD has tracked this in longitudinal studies across multiple countries. Teenagers who work part-time during high school have better employment outcomes in adulthood. They have better wage trajectories. They have more confidence. They have stronger work skills, and they've learned over these studies that the sweet spot is around 10 to 15 hours a week when you have a teen job. More than 20, and you actually start seeing grades go down and a lot of distractions in the more age-appropriate part of life. But anything in that 10 to 15-hour range shows consistently positive all across research and literature, and it's not just the financial necessity of the part-time job, where in this case they might not need to make money, but it's allowing them to go get a job as a developmental practice.

Daniel Berk: This study brings up a really important concept that I wanna flag. When we listened to the Taylor Adams episode, there was a woman, Jane, who found out about a $20 million inheritance in her late 30s. She had no idea she was gonna get this money until she was in her late 30s, and there's a part of this that I think is very fascinating. Taylor thinks you should tell your kids about a trust early, but with some shared language and structure. But Jane thinks not knowing is actually what saved her. If she had known in her 20s that she was going to come into a life-changing amount of money in her 30s, she probably would've made a lot of dumb decisions. So Jane and Taylor sort of disagree on this point. But what they don't disagree on is that money has to be made real somehow. You can't just pretend money doesn't exist because you have what feels like an unlimited amount of it. You have to, as parents, create this finite reality for your children so that they can developmentally learn what a dollar means. So you've got options. Force the trade-off via some type of allowance. Make them choose. Uh, just don't pay for everything. There's not really a single right answer here, but there is a lot of research backing that we have to give our children discomfort and frustrating situations intentionally sometimes.

Guest: Yes, money can remove a lot of those barriers, but as kids, like, they have to be forced to choose sometimes between multiple things. We have to make them live a reality that money isn't just unlimited, and let them learn and grow and develop as adults the way that anyone who doesn't have life-changing amounts of money would have to do. Our kids benefit most from when we're just, like, present with them with no agenda, which is almost like the opposite of an urgency mindset. But it's why, like, one of my favorite inter- quote, interventions is just, I call it PNP time. Play, no phone.

Guest: And I tell myself, and you probably would do this too, like, "Becky, my job right now is to put my phone in my bathroom, close two doors so I definitely don't hear it, and go sit on the floor and play with my kid." All right, this part is personally the hardest one for me. And I think any of us who are glued to a screen or who work in some form of tech or entrepreneurial startup, we probably struggle with this as parents. It's this last one that, to me, exposes a lot of our thinking and our heart to be parents, to be good parents, to be present parents. What was so eye-opening to me about this was listening to people who had already had life-changing exits and reminisced on what they wish had gone differently. Pete is a guy who sold his company for eighty million dollars, but then hit rock bottom. And when he reflected on the entire experience, he says the biggest regret or deficit wasn't the money or the company. It was that he didn't get back with his wife and his kids. Alex Pakov, the same guy that we talked about earlier, he had a wake-up moment that came when his teenage daughter was unable to make eye contact with him in the hospital. He had been physically there for years, but emotionally, he was not there at all. I think this is the hardest part for people who are still building. What we're telling you is that the presence matters because we hear it's what matters, and it's a nice thing to say. But what people who have already made it, and they sold the company, and they have the life-changing money, they're saying that they bought the wrong thing, and now they're learning to live with the consequences. Sometimes you can't make all the money and spend all the time with the family. A lot of times they're incompatible, and that's a really hard lesson to learn. There's a couple interesting episodes that weren't even talking about parenting. One is with Hank, who is a pseudonym and is not even his real name, and the other one is Neil Patel. And they both said similar things that I think apply here. They each downsized. Hank went from a giant compound of like twenty-four thousand square feet, and Neil went from ten thousand eight hundred square feet to three thousand. And they both said almost word for word that they see their kids way more now because the house is small. They're actually around. They bump into them. With twenty-four thousand square feet, you're not bumping into people. You're basically living in a small town. And that fact alone, I think for parents who want to be present, should probably make us reconsider having more space than we need because it's gonna get easier and easier not to be present.

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Daniel Berk: It's about being strong and sharp in your forties, fifties, and sixties. So if you're serious about it, go to dailybodycoach.com/hampton. Dailybodycoach.com/hampton. Scott Galloway talked about something similar. When his first kid was born, the threshold number that he had went from three million dollars to ten million dollars. And then after his second kid was born, it went to a hundred million dollars. So the work continued to fill this wealth threshold he had, and his target kept moving. He was all open about it being a trap. The number is never the number, and it was never this threshold for him because he kept moving the goalpost as he continued to grow. When we're parents, we think about the number that we want, and we think about actually achieving that. But a lot of times, once we get there, we realize it's the time that we're supposed to be spent with our family that caused us either to miss or make that goal. But those goals stop mattering if it's at the expense of being a present parent.

Guest: The data is really shocking here. Sunil Luthar did some research, and it's the same research I cited earlier about the affluent kids' mental health. They identified two factors that consistently predict bad outcomes in wealthy kids. One is achievement pressure, and the other is isolation from parents. Specifically both literal isolation, like physical absence, and emotional isolation. So you can be in the same house and still being totally emotionally destructive to your kids' development because you're there, but you're not really there. You can be at dinner, but you gluing your eyes to your phone can be enough emotional destruction to start negatively affecting your kid's development. Again, like I said earlier, your kid is logging the way that you behave, not what you say, but actually what you do. And to a child, that matters so much more. Dr. Becky has a great challenge that I think all of us should try to do. She says, "Put your phone in another room, close the doors, sit on the floor with your kids, and have no agenda." It sounds kinda dumb, and maybe it is kinda dumb, but it's the difference between being a present father or mother or parent and just being physically there. And 10 minutes of real presence beats two hours of distracted presence. Dr. Becky flagged something specifically for people like me, who have anxious, productive energy, I wanna call it. The guy who's in the room but happens to be checking his social media or the stock price, or the guy whose nervous system is at, like, 80%, even when they're at the playgrounds that are... and they're supposed to be watching their kids. Kids absorb that anxious energy, and they don't know what we're worried about. They just know that we're worried, and they don't always have the different context that we have that cause us to be worried or stressed or anxious. They just conclude that, all right, I guess being an adult is, means you're worried and anxious and, and, and stressed all the time. And that actually becomes their baseline and default.

Daniel Berk: Rough. Here's the one thing that I'm gonna actually put on myself most aggressively after this episode, is that I'm going to design my physical environment and my calendar so that presence is forced until it's a habit. 'Cause right now, the habit is being physically there, but emotionally on the screen. And I think it's really going to shape the way that I am emotionally present with my family. I'm not gonna have my phone in the room at dinner. I'm gonna get on the floor with my kids and actually play with them without an agenda. I mean, there's really easy, small, simple steps that we can do that I think will help the way that we're raising kids. And if you're listening to this and you resonate with some of that, I implore you to consider what it might be for you to be a more present, physically and emotionally present parent.

Daniel Berk: So I think there's a lot that we covered here, and I just wanna quickly recap some of it, and I encourage you to go back through it because there's a lot of meat here from some of these past episodes. One was frustration being something we have to sometimes design for our kids. We can't always buy our kids out of their discomfort. Number two was that they emulate you. Monkey see, monkey do. If you do something, your kids are gonna do that as well, even if you don't want them to. You have to audit what they see and do what you want them to do, not just tell them to do those things. The third thing was to praise effort, not traits. We wanna praise the amount of work that our kids put forth toward anything so that they start to build this identity around something being worked for, not a trait that they may or may not have any control over. The fourth thing was that money has to cost something. When we give our children an allowance, for example, we should let them feel the finite nature of a dollar being spent. If they want to go buy something, we should create a reality where buying that thing means they can't buy something else. We can't let them live in a lavish, infinite amount of wealth all the time, or else they're going to develop the wrong habits about money and life. And that last thing, and I think the hardest thing for me, is that presence, emotionally and physically, have to be designed. We have to be very intentional about the way that we show up with our kids, with our family. And if I'm being honest with myself, that's gonna be the one that's the hardest for me to actually digest and make a difference about. These are the ones that require us to actually change our behaviors and our belief systems. If I'm being honest with myself, this last one is gonna be really difficult for me to change. I always feel like I'm checking my email, I'm looking at social media, I'm checking notifications. Sometimes I find that I'm just scrolling at nothing. I mean, it's really bad. And I know with my two kids at home, they see that, and I am painfully aware of how often this is happening. And so I need to really just put my phone in the other room, lock it in a case, and be present. When it's time to be with my kids and with my family, my phone shouldn't be anywhere nearby. That's what I'm taking away from this episode. I encourage you to go back through and figure out, like, what is it for you, as a parent and a listener of Money Wise, to go do with your family to build this sustainable lifestyle around raising kids who might have a lot more money than you did, but doing so mindfully and intentionally. Whatever you do for the next 18 years of their lives, that is going to be the way that they learn about money and about what it means to be an adult. I'm doing this with my kids right now, and I am gonna get plenty of it wrong. And if you've made any real money and you're trying to do this with your kids, join the club. I don't think any of us really know what we're doing, but we look to experts like Dr. Becky to help us try to figure it out together. And this is exactly the kind of conversation we have inside of Hampton. There's people with $5 million, $50 million, hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even billions of dollars, wrestling with these same questions off the record, together in a community. If that sounds like something you're interested in having for yourself, go to joinhampton.com, and I look forward to seeing you in the community. Thanks for listening to Money Wise.