Ending Entitlement

The one move that ensures your kids will not become entitled no matter how much you bless them

As the leader of a mastermind group for successful Christian fathers, I often hear the question: How do we ensure our financial success doesn’t spoil our kids? Living in the West, where most of us are in the global top 1% of wealth, this is a pressing concern for many families.

I used to view this as a complex puzzle, but I’ve come to see the solution as remarkably simple. You can uncover it by reflecting on two questions:

Have you ever met a young mother with three or more young children and thought she was struggling with entitlement? Or a father providing for a thriving family with a growing brood, and wondered if he was entitled?

The answer is almost always no. Why? Raising children is hard work. No amount of financial support spares parents from sleepless nights, the physical toll of pregnancy and childbirth, or the ever-evolving challenges of meeting their children’s needs. This demanding reality naturally curbs self-centeredness.

Yet, we’ve created a culture of entitlement through modern innovations like birth control, which turned having children into an optional lifestyle choice. Imagine a world where every young couple, regardless of wealth, expected an unpredictable number of children. Those sons and daughters would need our support, not to indulge a life of ease, but to carry the meaningful burden of raising a family. This, I believe, was God’s design to foster selflessness: make extramarital sex immoral, encourage early marriage, and make preventing pregnancy difficult, so character becomes other-centered through the demands of parenthood.

Instead, we’ve used technology and shifting cultural norms to bypass this plan, resulting in some of the most entitled generations in history. But we can reverse this trend.

The solution lies in cultivating a family culture where children are expected to marry early and embrace parenthood enthusiastically. As parents, we should offer our physical and financial support with one clear condition: it’s to help them build a family, not avoid one.

In our family, we’ve seen this work. Our three adult, married children have embraced this culture of “kids early and often.” As they’ve leaned into the challenges of parenthood, my fears about entitlement have vanished. Yes, they wrestle with selfishness—like we all do—but raising children immerses them in God’s curriculum for selflessness.

By fostering this mindset, we shift from worrying about raising entitled children to finding ways to support our kids in the noble, demanding work of growing our family line. In one move, the specter of entitlement fades, replaced by a legacy of purpose and sacrifice.

Painting Credit - A Mother with her Children by Agnes Nicolls