Let’s talk about the ghost in the room for every successful family: the fear that your ambition will become your children’s burden.

You’ve built an empire. You’ve sacrificed, taken risks, and won. You’ve given your children every advantage you never had: the best schools, the financial security, the open doors. And yet, you lie awake at night haunted by a quiet terror. You see the lack of fire in their eyes. The drift. The paralyzing weight of your own shadow.

This is the so-called “rich kid problem.” And we’ve been diagnosing it all wrong.

We treat it as a problem of motivation, of discipline, of grit. We try to solve it with tough love, internships at investment banks, or by cutting off the trust fund. We try to manufacture a struggle we ourselves worked so hard to eliminate.

But this isn’t a problem of character. It’s a problem of narrative. The “rich kid problem” is, at its core, a failure of storytelling.

You have a powerful origin story. A “Hero’s Journey.” You were called to adventure, you faced trials, you slayed dragons, and you returned with the treasure. Your life has a plot. It has meaning. It makes sense.  

What story have you given your children?

Too often, the story they inherit is a passive one. They are the beneficiaries of your success, the sequel to a movie that’s already over. Their story begins at “happily ever after,” which is the most boring part of any tale. They have no dragon to slay because you’ve already slain it for them. They have no treasure to find because it’s already sitting in a vault.

And without a story to live into, a person becomes a ghost in their own life.

My work has taken me from political war rooms to startup garages, but some of the most profound strategic challenges I’ve ever encountered have been inside families. And the solution is always the same: you have to give them a new story. Not your story. Theirs.

This is not about manufacturing hardship. It’s about architecting a new narrative framework.

1. Identify Their Unique “Dragon.” Every generation has its own dragons to slay. Perhaps their dragon isn’t financial survival, but social impact. Perhaps it’s not building a company from scratch, but transforming the one you built to be more sustainable, more ethical. The goal is to help them find a challenge that is worthy of their privilege, a problem so complex and meaningful that your resources become a tool for their quest, not a cushion.
2. Frame Their Inheritance as a “Call to Adventure.” Your wealth and network aren’t a safety net; they are a superpower. They are the magic sword and the enchanted map given to the hero at the start of their journey. This isn’t about what they have, it’s about what they can do with it. Frame their inheritance not as an ending, but as the most exciting possible beginning.
3. Let Them Write Their Own Damn Script. This is the hardest part. You have to let them fail. You have to let them take risks on ideas that seem absurd to you. The hero’s journey is defined by its trials and tribulations. If you swoop in to save them from every setback, you rob them of the most important part of their story: the part where they become the hero.  

Your greatest legacy will not be the empire you built. It will be whether you successfully passed on the fire that fueled you to build it. And that fire is not passed down through bank accounts. It’s passed down through stories.

Stop trying to motivate them. Start telling them a better story about themselves, and then give them the pen and the freedom to write the next chapter.