by Bruce Helmer, President of Wealth Enhancement Group

As a parent, you probably want your children to have a better life than you had growing up. It is a universal wish, and it is admirable. If you are able to fulfill that wish, however, how do you instill ambition in your children and keep them from getting spoiled? How do you teach them the value of what you earned and how to be good stewards of what you gave them? How do you raise financially smart children? How do you give them all you can without creating disincentives to their own productivity?

Many parents, especially those blessed with affluence; fear that wealth will rob their children of ambition. According to a 119 survey by U.S. Trust, half of the country’s wealthiest parents worry that material advantages will undermine their children’s initiative and independence.

I have a client who recently cashed out his stock in a dot-com start-up. He walked away with roughly $10,000,000 after taxes. That didn’t put him on the Forbes list of richest people in the world, but to him and his family it was an enormous sum after years of toiling with little reward to get a business off the ground. I was surprised to hear that he had not yet told his teenage kids of his financial success. In fact, he said he didn’t know when, or if, he ever would. Before he and his wife told the kids anything, they wanted to have an estate plan in place, which was why they came to me.

The couple told me that had gone through a lot of soul-searching about what to do with the money and how it would best benefit their children. They weighed the advantages that money could bestow on their children, against the harm such a nest egg could do to their children’s drive and ambition. The fact that they were concerned about the issue demonstrates that they themselves have strong values and have probably passed those values on to their kids-which mean the kids will probably do well regardless of the parent’s decision.

I have had people tell me that too much money limits children because it serves as a disincentive and encourages nonproductive, dysfunctional lives. My own opinion is that too much money does not hurt children. There can never be too much money, but there can definitely be too little character.

Your role as teacher in all things financial begins with teaching your children the realities about life and the value of money. They need to understand how work, play and money coincide. The first lessons we give our children are the most important and stay with them for life. We teach them how to love, we teach them values, and we teach them how to pursue their own happiness. If they learn those lessons well, they will find the appropriate place for money in their lives.