The documentary film Born Rich opens with Jimmie Johnson (an heir of the Johnson & Johnson fortune) at a lavish 1920s themed party on the eve of his 21st birthday. As he says, at midnight he is to inherit more money than most people could spend in a lifetime. In the film, Mr. Johnson goes on to explore how various friends in his social network – and heirs themselves – attempt to deal with what he characterizes as “the voodoo of inherited wealth”. The film is a fascinating exploration of the world of young adults who have grown up in great privilege. As he concludes the film, the young Mr. Johnson says this:
“I was always told that the American dream is about getting a bigger and better life than your parents had, but that dream was accomplished by my great-grandfather. So I live outside the American dream, and now it’s my job is to build a meaningful life apart from all this privilege I’ve inherited.”[1]
Take a minute and soak this in. It is an astonishing statement. What does it mean to live outside of the dream of your society? If you are living outside of the cultural dream you are, almost by nature, an outcast. If you are cosseted within a bubble of wealth and privilege, how do you even go about building a “meaningful life”, particularly when most sociologists would say that meaning is a social, not a personal, construct?
At its heart, this quote captures a dilemma close to the heart of the dynamic of entitlement. The words ring with a longing for authentic social connection and reflect a level of disempowerment that must be overcome by sheer force of will.
And while society may not have much sympathy for this peculiar ennui, it is a very real set if problems that vexes both heirs and their parents.
The Problem
In a recent post, I spoke of silver spoon syndrome which results in what many of us would consider adult entitlement. I suggested that this syndrome is characterized by failures of love and power in family systems. These failures foster a kind of arrested development. The children in these family systems “remain dependent – in a state of perpetual childhood – and never quite manage to carve out a life for themselves that allows them to mature into what most of us would consider full adulthood.”
Now, a great deal has been written about attempting to thwart entitlement before it has taken root. Books and articles address issues of forestalling entitlement in younger children and teens.[2] Much of what is offered in these books is sage advice and I commend them highly for parents with younger children. Practical tools such as Share|Save|Spend and Philanthropy Day are gaining ground and are wonderful, if partial, antidotes to the patterns that create entitlement. Along these lines, more and more financial services firms are attempting to provide financial literacy programs for teens and young adults, which are again partial but still extraordinarily helpful. In short, there is a growing literature and set of practices to support parents of younger children.
What is missing – indeed what is almost completely absent from the conversation — is what to do about adult children who have already succumbed to entitlement and are less amenable to parenting techniques that work with youngsters and even teenagers. I have been asked this question repeatedly in the Q & A after talks I have given and have scoured the literature looking for good answers. Hints are very few and far between. Most approaches are either simplistic or heavy-handed or both. In one strain of general advice given; after creating the problem through poor parenting, parents are told to create tough love approaches that involve cutting their children off. These seem harsh and when adopted in practice, work only to compound the damage already done. Cutting children off without ever giving them the emotional or personal skills to “live poor” is seen by many parents for what it is – unkind, hypocritical and even cruel. It is also a dangerous strategy in that it often forces already fragile children into harmful relationships and downward spirals of self-destructive behavior. Recognizing these pitfalls, but without clarity about healthier alternatives, these well-meaning but ineffective parents continue to indulge their children. They suffer in the recognition that they are only perpetuating maladaptive behavior. These parents are hopelessly and painfully stuck.
One Way Out
Over the years I have cobbled together and developed some thoughts about these situations and how to constructively intervene. I have begun to implement these approaches with a few client families with some real success. Here is what I have to offer at this point in my practice:
The Need to Assess the Individual. Entitlement doesn’t come in one flavor. If one is to engage the particular form of entitlement one is confronted with, one must understand that particular form. Entitlement, in my experience, is almost always a function of failures of power and love on the parts of both parents and children. In this sense “power” is the drive all of us have towards autonomy and our own independence and agency in the world. In entitled children, this drive has often been deeply subverted by the parents with the knowing and unknowing complicity of their children. “Love”, as I use it here, means the drive of all things to be connected with something larger than their own egoic self-interest. All of the literature suggests that entitlement is characterized by forms of narcissism where the sense of self is cramped and narrowly understood. Those who include in their sense of self the well-being of their families, their friends, their associates, their community, the world and even the future will not be so narcissistic and hence will be less entitled (though they may still have dependency issues on the “power” side). If this makes sense, then entitlement is not one thing but is a process with multiple dimensions which needs to be understood in each individual in order to address the specific issues in play. This kind of assessment requires thoughtful interviews and testing using applicable and well-validated inventories.
The Imperative to Evaluate the Family System. While entitlement looks individual, it is always created and sustained by structural dynamics within the family system. Mom and Dad perpetuate entitlement through a complex dance that results in dispensing largesse to the children. This kind of distributive system has huge payoffs for both parents and children. It creates strange forms of control and dependency on both sides of the equation. It is also fraught with tremendous anxiety on both sides. For example, parents may wonder if the children love them only for the benefits they dole out and the children live in fear that they will be cut off if they misstep or somehow offend their parents. Gaming behavior runs rampant. Each family comes to enact entitlement in its own unique way and each family must be evaluated separately. Understanding how the family “does” entitlement as a set of scripts and rituals within a complex family system is critical to designing interventions targeted to key inflection points that are likely to shift that system from stasis.
Wean. Once the individuals and systems are understood — but only then — can a strategic weaning process begin. This involves the progressive development of the adult children to positions of relative and increasing independence. In my experience, full independence is likely to be years away and may never arrive. This is a problem that was created over decades and it takes a long to time to undo it. On top of that, most personal development is completed and these characteristics are difficult to change once someone becomes an adult. That said, some significant degree independence is almost always possible if parents are willing to make the emotional investment in change. Weaning involves the development of skill sets in parents and children coupled with increased expectations of responsibility in both parents and children. With respect to development, the person assisting the family (and the family can almost never do this itself for reasons stated below), has to determine the right level of intervention. Sometimes this skill building is a matter of education – merely having knowledge empowers parents and adult child who then are then able to act on it. More often than not, a deeper intervention is required – first coaching and facilitation and if that does not work, therapeutic intervention by a qualified metal health professional. Along with this developing skill set, progressive levels of responsibility must be developed. This occurs through negotiated and targeted agreements that have real consequences, but which are carefully scaled to the skill sets of the adult child. These must be challenging but not overwhelming.
Disrupt the Family System. Entitlement is not an individual symptom – it is the product of a family system. In most families with entitled children, the parents sit at the center of a wheel. For years, the parents have “soothed and smoothed” their own anxieties and the anxieties of their children though the application of wealth. Parents sooth their own anxiety by giving their children “stuff” and they smooth the confrontations with their children (or their children’s facing challenges in the world and the anxiety of watching their children suffer) by giving in to what their children want. The children learn along the way that indulgence soothes their anxiety (they had wonderful teachers on that score) and that wealth will smooth the bumps in life that might otherwise challenge them. Shortcutting these challenges short-circuits their personal development. As the children become adults, each child comes to the parents for favors (to sooth their anxieties and smooth their way) and careful score of these interactions is kept by the parents, the child and the child’s siblings. These systems have psychic payoffs for each participant and become the source of both a kind of enmeshment that substitutes for a more authentic closeness as well as occasions of high drama in the family system as it becomes flooded with high anxiety.
For these systems to change, the parents must get out of center of the wheel. Many parents when confronted with this requirement fight it. That resistance is symptomatic of the very dynamic that created the entitlement to begin with.[3] One way, among a number of others, to subvert the system where multiple adult children are involved is to require the children who want something to formally petition their siblings for what they want (with perhaps an outside advisor sitting on this panel). The petitioning child must make a case and then come to negotiated agreements that contain accountabilities to their other family members. Siblings are then required to take into consideration whether past obligations were fulfilled before considering the next request. This gets the parents out of the position of being at the center of the wheel and pushes both power and accountability to the edges. The levels of emotional resistance to this idea can be high, but it makes visible to the family precisely what is happening in the dynamics of entitlement. Getting this kind of change “sold” into the family is a process that often takes some time. It presents a challenge to stubborn habits and persistent patterns of family interaction.
Create New Ecosystems of Support. For the most part, the adult child’s entitlement is a function of a very narrow system that is comprised of his or her parents and siblings. If such children are going to be successful – by which I mean increasingly autonomous (“power”) and increasingly connected (“love”) – they need to participate more fully with professional advisors, life coaches, facilitated peer groups, mentors, and educational and experiential training. Creating such an ecosystem beyond the nuclear family disrupts the family system. It also expands skills and builds connections. In cases where a narrow sense of self is a core component of the entitlement, participating in experiences that require emotional connectivity to the needs of others becomes important. Here philanthropic travel and service projects can be helpful. In the beginning, continued largesse often needs to be made contingent on participation in this kind of ecosystem development.
Build a Unique Dream. The key to moving beyond entitlement is creating opportunities for the entitled adult to discover and build his or her own legacy. If a child lives outside the American Dream, as Jamie Johnson suggests, and if one’s job outside of that dream is to build a “meaningful life” apart from the legacy of the family, then that child must find his or her own voice and make his or her own mark on the world. This dream must be built in parallel with the work done above, but it is almost always the last thing to fall in place. It usually comes after a great deal of personal work, coaching and, perhaps, therapy. It also requires experimentation. When it does arrive – when children begin to understand how they are wired and then start to meaningfully contribute something of value to the world – then they find their way out of the patterns of entitlement that have held them in thrall. They may not ever be completely free of their conditioning (who of us is?) but they will be far less entitled and far more engaged than otherwise.
I have seen adult children break long standing patterns of dependency. When it happens it is a beautiful thing. A fitting end to this reflection is the final part of the Jamie Johnson quote at the top of this post. It goes like this:
” I’ve learned that part of coming of age is finding something that’s your own and not your family’s legacy. I have had the benefit of being rich all my life and I’ll never want for material possessions. But after working on this movie, I discovered that what you inherit may not be as valuable as what you’ve earned. And although I’ve still not found all the answers, at least I know how important it is to ask the questions.”
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[1] Born Rich, directed by James Johnson. HBO Films. (2003).
[2] See, e.g., Godfrey, Jolene, Raising Financially Fit Kids (2003), Levine, Madeline, The Price of Privilege (2008), Edwards-Pitt, Coventry, Raised Healthy Wealthy and Wise (2014)
[3] The fact that entitlement is the symptom of a family system (and the deep investment that all of the players have in keeping the system in place) is one of the reasons why families are unable to address this themselves. Any act they make will be coopted by the system and repurposed to keep the system intact. They have neither the vision nor the capacity to transform the dynamic.
— April 8, 2013