Father's Day Advice From Billionaires: How To Not Raise Spoiled Kids

(L-R) Donald Trump and his children Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. in New York City. (Getty Images North America via @daylife)

One of the great ironies of clawing your way to becoming super-wealthy is that your children might end up too lazy to lift a finger.

The word “entitlement” may strike more fear into the hearts of affluent parents–especially self-made ones–than any other. Tales tinged with it haunt the headlines: 22-year-old heiress Ekaterina Rybolovleva buys an $88 million New York condo, 32-year-old heir to a Colombian beer fortune Andres Santo Domingo flees in his Mercedes Benz after running over an innocent pedestrian’s foot. The ongoing battle between  Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest woman, and the adult children she has publicly deemed too irresponsible to inherit her wealth.

How do affluent parents who want to give their children everything avoid shoving a silver spoon down their progeny’s throats? Just in time for Father’s Day, we asked a few billionaires—and their kids—to share tips for not raising spoiled brats.

Peter Buffett (Warren‘s son): Examine your own relationship to money
Buffett’s rejection of the trappings of wealth are so storied they’re almost cliché: he famously lives in the Omaha home he bought in 1958 for $31,500, and his salary is far less than most CEOs (just $100,000 last year, plus other compensation that brought it to $491,925). (Although even Buffett has dabbled in conspicuous consumption: he sheepishly dubbed the private jet he bought in 1989 “The Indefensible.”)

But Buffett’s second-oldest son Peter, a musician, says that the message was loud and clear growing up: money wasn’t what mattered in life. Instead, it was finding something you loved to do and then doing it.

“I really think the parent’s relationship to money and things is sort of the bottom line,” says Peter Buffett. “Of course, famously, I saw my father have almost zero relationship to material things. We didn’t see [money] growing up, specifically, which was key. And I still don’t see it!”

In his book, “Life Is What You Make Of It,” Peter Buffett talks about practical steps, like requiring children to do chores and letting them solve problems on their own instead of bailing them out. But he warns that children will pick up on their parents’ true beliefs about money–no matter what a parent says about money.

“If a child sees a parent trying to make themself look better by accumulating things, then (the child’s) going to think that’s what life’s about.”

Mark Cuban: Don’t hire out your parenting
“My kids are still young. The oldest is 8,” Cuban told Forbes. “We are doing our best to make sure they are grounded. But it literally scares the shit out of me that they will grow up feeling entitled.”

Cuban and his wife try to hedge against this by giving their children as normal a childhood experience as possible. His best advice: “To spend as much time as possible with no one else around,” he says. “We don’t have any help over the weekend so we can do our best to be just like any other family.”