I had a very frustrating experience a month or two ago, and it has been niggling at me since. A husband and his wife came to see me, having flown in from their home country with their two young adult children. The wife had inherited a large fortune from her father, and part of it was involved in a charity she had set up that has, over the past few years, been supporting a range of projects round the world. She is a very thoughtful, charming and caring lady of deep intelligence, but, unless you knew about it, you would have no idea of her wealth. She dresses conservatively, even to the point of shabbiness; she would never dream of upgrading to business class, or travelling around London in the heat by any means other than public transport; and she would always stay in a modest hotel.
What an opportunity the family had missed to excite and encourage the children, and to reinforce family ideals
She is now approaching the age of 65. She and her husband of 40 years come from a culture such that he makes all the decisions and she loyally supports him. Sadly, she is not in the best of health, and, when I met them both in relation to some of the charitable activities she was undertaking, I asked about their plans for the future. It became clear that her husband was very uncomfortable with their wealth and was petrified that the children would be spoilt by it. He did not want them to take life for granted, and feel they did not need to work. So far, so good, for such sentiments are often expressed. However, the husband’s views went further: he would not let the children know anything about the wealth, nor about the charity his wife had set up.
Frustrated Plans
The wife had been planning that I should talk to the children about how the charity worked, and the ideals underpinning it (derived from her father’s vision), with the idea that the children would slowly but surely start becoming involved. But the husband refused even to contemplate this. Nothing would budge him, even his wife’s distress at his obduracy. As I mused later, perhaps the husband’s problem was that he had had nothing to do with any of that wealth creation.
I was so sad for the wife. She had seen the opportunity to open her children’s eyes to the good that they could do with the wealth within the charity, but her cultural commitment to defer to the wishes of her husband had dashed her chances.
Salient Points
The episode brought two points to mind. First, it is indicative of the speed of change in our society that I was shocked a wife would so readily accept the supremacy of her husband’s views, when I recall my grandfather, born in 1876, having exactly the same hold over my grandmother. Second, what an opportunity the family had missed to excite and encourage the children, and to reinforce family ideals. Their father was putting his head in the sand because he did not know how to cope with the process of education. He sees wealth as a privilege, but we who work with wealth know all too well that privilege comes with an equal burden of responsibility, and it is fundamentally important to teach the young that truth.
As the family left Heathrow to go home (economy class, of course), I feared for those children – not because, when they inevitably find out the reality, the result is bound to be a disaster, but because their father, no doubt for all the best motives, has just made it much more di cult for them to adjust.