My daughter asked me this. How would you explain wealth inequality to a 12-year-old?
For context: ex-wife cheated on me and married this extremely wealthy Chinese guy. Crazy wealthy as in entire apartment building in Beijing’s CBD and a mansion out in the Shunyi district as his “main residences”. Daughter lives in China with my ex-wife, her husband and his son. Daughter lives with me during school breaks / holidays.
I would explain this in 2 parts.
Firstly, if you get a qualification and work most of your life, don’t fuck up by having a kid too early, or having a bad car accident, or getting addicted to something, then you’ll have enough money in your life to be comfortable and to care for the people you care about.
Secondly, if you’re lucky enough to have wealthy parents you don’t have to worry about that.
I also just want to add that I feel you buddy. You’ve been dealt a tough hand but the fact that you’re here asking this indicates that you’ve got game. It’s good to have a step dad with money but it’s better to have a dad that worries about what his kid thinks of him.
I’d love questions like that. Not that I have a kid.
One approach is asking her what she thinks, or if she can guess. Can be split into whether she knows why he is so wealthy.
Being concrete should make it pretty clear. You get paid what you get paid. And that’s that.
And that’s a great opportunity to talk about how wealth does not correlate with value or commitment or investment or ethics.
Start incorporating “gold digger” into her vocabulary
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You’re a little girl looking for vocabulary improvement?
Aren’t we all?
There are those who a born into money, those who manage to make money (don’t know which is in your situation), then there is the the other 99% of the population.
Sit with her and look at the prices of those units and compare them to the normal wage and ask her to calculate how long someone would have to work to afford the apartment.
He was born into money. His dad was able to capitalize on China’s switch to capitalism early on back in the day. And he doesn’t own just 1 apartment, he owns the entire multiple floor building as his personal home.
Fill a sack with 99 jelly beans and the one that’s been marked a marker.
Ask her to pick one out. If it’s the marked one she gets all of the jelly beans.
If she doesn’t pick the marked one, send all but one of the jelly beans to stepdad.
Some people are born into a family with wealth and different advantages.
Money isn’t everything and many of the ways to acquire a lot of money are cruel and exploit people and the environment.
You are more worried about supporting your family and living a good life than trying to get every dollar like Mr Krabs.
walk around the neighborhood and show the diversity of wealth. maybe go downtown if you can. Explain that wealth can be inherited (given), worked for (earned), and manipulated (invested)
First, understand that to her, inherently, presence and love is being rich to her, then they try to buy her happiness and she doesn’t understand. You are explaining to her about why they are like that, not the other way around. She is asking you because she trusts you. Don’t play their game, let truth happen and ask her how it feels.
I think there’s no pussy footing around the subject. I also think you’ll be surprised in kids’ ability to understand new concepts too. It’s why she’s asking, she’ll have the capability to understand if you teach her and keep answering any further questions.
It pisses me off when people say stuff like “they won’t understand” something because they are too young.
Are we just going to wait to teach them until after they should know it already, or are you just too lazy to frame it in an age appropriate way and spend time explaining?
They learn stuff they don’t know at school presumably all the time.
I’d say “that’s a funny way to address your mom.”
Wealth is unfortunately not evenly distributed within society and there are plenty of different reasons for that. Maybe the step dad already had righ parents, maybe he was lucky to be at the right place at the right time, maybe he’s a better business man than you, maybe he just won the lottery. If you don’t know, you can’t tell her.
Make sure to let her know that having less money doesn’t make one less valuable as a human. That you hope, she’ll have enough wealth one day but in case she won’t that it’s not her fault. It’s not about being stupid or lazy. And that money isn’t everything that counts.
Then explain compound interest, and how once you earn more than you need to have a comfortable life, your money can make money for you, and that each 1M invested can consistently return 50k a year…
Then explain how if you had 25k to gamble with in 2009, and bought APPL stock, it would now be worth 1 million, or if you’d bought BTC at that same time you’d now be a billionaire.
Then explain how societies laws are made by the people with the most money, so the rich get richer and the poor get extortion.
I would also choose a few stocks that didn’t perform as well, or even went bankrupt, to show that it’s really hard to predict which stocks will significantly outperform the market.
then explain that you need to convince me to buy @#$^ stocks in 3 years, it is really important
I don’t think this is what OP needs to tell his kid right now.
Right? Lmao. The next thing is gonna be to get them to start reading Marx or something.
Depends on how smart she is.
To not sabotage things, you can always leave it at a “mix of luck, talent and hard work”. And you’re working hard, and maybe you even have luck, but step dad might have all three.
If she’s smart, you can drop the whole thing on her: first of all, you love her, her mom loves her, her step dad hopefully does too or at least likes her and that has nothing to do with money. Then you can just be transparent on how much you earn, how much time that means in effort, and how much “lots of money” takes to earn. Then you can just do some math, and her step dad’s numbers won’t add up.
It’s a sensitive topic though, you can say your piece, communicate with your ex and the step dad about that she asked and what you said. They might have a different take.
Might even spin it into making her think about what she wants to do in the future.
To spend more time with daughter. Earning money that way is a high stress lifestyle of 100+ hour work weeks with creditors, investors, contractors, planners, inspectors, and tenants. Not everyone can function under that pressure long term.
Bullshit. Having money means less work.
Comparing people is unhealthy and the road to depression. It’s easy to imagine something we don’t like about ourselves that we cannot change, no matter how much money we have.
Money breeds resentment and invites corruption. Whenever we introduce money into a relationship, it imperils friendship and creates conflicts of interest. Money cannot buy your love. People who love money are ugly, no matter how good they look.
With 12, she probably knows how the concept of jobs and money work. I’d say there is more to the question. It’s likely a conversation opener regarding wealth, or what’s important in life. I’d just ask some follow questions and see where this is going.
