It's especially so for entrepreneurial parents -- most of whom did not grow up in wealthy homes. The fact is, families with new money face problems unknown to those with generations of wealth behind them. Take time, for instance. "Old money has time to spend with the kids, but new money either doesn't have it or won't take it," explains John Levy, an inherited-wealth counselor in San Francisco.
If time is a major concern, issues of control are no less so for children of entrepreneurs. "Old money tends to have less control over the trust and, therefore, is less controlling with the children," says San Francisco psychotherapist Judy Barber, many of whose clients are unhappy inheritors. Also, old-money people have seen that money alone won't send a child into a life of crime, but "the entrepreneur, being less experienced, has more concerns about the impact, what it will do," as Barber puts it. "He or she tends to be more controlling not only of the money, but also of the children's lives."
* * *
Have there been missed opportunities in Peter Kalmus's life? His soft laugh answers the question. "If you only knew how many times people have said to me, 'Peter, follow your dreams. Do the things you really want to do.' And I'd think, 'Yeah, well, sure, you can say that because you don't have anything to lose, do you?' I grew up knowing I had this standard of living to protect."
Kalmus says that even though he has yet to receive his inheritance, his wealthy background has probably left him with more fear of risk than a child of a less affluent household might have, simply because he has had little experience with making leaps of faith or judgment.
"As a child, I didn't know what it was like to be hungry for anything," Kalmus says. "When you're not hungry, you're not aggressive. And when you're not aggressive, despite what may be enormous innate abilities, you just don't implement them or test them in the way that someone who's hungry will. So, over here you have this overachiever who makes it by dint of his own efforts. And here you are, never having had to expend the energy or test yourself in any way. By the time you're both in your thirties, the guy who's tested himself knows what he can do. He knows that if everything goes to hell, he can build it up again. But you haven't had that experience. You don't have that psychological security. You cling more to what you have."
Bravery, the experts say, is one of the few things that affluent children lack. "Kids of wealth often have no idea what their primary strengths and abilities are," says Minneapolis inheritor-turned-personal-management-consultant Rob Stevenson. "They don't know what they can do, because they've never had to find out."
In that sense, Peter Kalmus can't help but feel that a key component of his inheritance has been denied him. "My father was very careful not to throw down the gauntlet, not to brag about his achievements in a way that would make me feel there was something I had to do or had to live up to, and I'm glad for that," Kalmus says. "But there were so many times that I wanted so much for him to share his knowledge, to give me advice, to challenge my thinking. He just wouldn't do it. He made decisions all day long, but with his own kid, he was reluctant to even offer an opinion."
There was a lot that Kalmus felt he needed to know in the years before his father died. Should he continue practicing law? Should he go into the family business?
Now, circumstances have put Kalmus in his father's chair relatively unprepared. He has only his own experiences to guide his decision making. In the face of a dilemma, he can only guess what Dad would have done. Kalmus is on his own, and no matter how wealthy he is now or may be in the future, he can't help but feel he'd have been richer for having the one asset his father withheld, however well intentioned he was. "I've got his job, I've got his power, and someday I'll have his money," the younger Kalmus says, "but where business is concerned, I won't ever have his voice in my head to listen to, to argue with, or to base judgments on."
* * *
Like many parents, Kalmus's father kept him in the dark about the family's finances. He earned the family nickname "the D.A." for the prosecutorial zeal with which he attempted to ferret out his father's net worth. "One day, while I was still in high school, I sat my father down and demanded to know how much he made. 'Thirty thousand a year,' he told me. I said, 'C'mon, look at everything we've got. Thirty's way too low.' 'OK,' he said, 'forty.' I was incredulous. I said, 'This family has never wanted for anything, and you're trying to tell me you pull down forty?' 'Well, your mother makes another forty,' he said, 'and we've got savings.' "
To his dying day, Peter Kalmus's father refused to see himself as a millionaire. "Anybody could see what was there," says the son, "but for whatever reason, he didn't want to."
Consultants say it's amazing how many children's wealth hang-ups are based on what should have been easy to address -- namely, not understanding where the money came from or what it ought to represent in their lives. To the extreme frustration of their children, many entrepreneurs persist in believing they're doing them a favor by refusing to provide the information.
"Rachel," a West Coast film producer with a "six-figure" trust fund from her family's business, says she is attempting to do a better job of communicating with her child than her parents did with her. "There was a patriarchal situation -- I was told I didn't have to worry," she recalls, "but I was never told what the real situation was." With her preteen daughter, Rachel says, "I try to talk about every decision I make. I want to do everything in my power not to pass on the denial system, this we-have-it-but-we-can't-talk-about-it thing that I grew up with. I want to make money less important in her life. And most of all, I want to avoid letting her think she's not capable of understanding it."
