For couples whose first child changed everything they planned.
Articles and guides curated for new parents on building a lasting family legacy.
Browse all LegacyPot Journal articles
Some of the parents reading this track are separated. Some divorced. Some were never married to each other at all. The relationship between the adults ended, or changed, or never fully formed, and the child remains, which means the money conversation between you and your...
This track has spent fourteen articles talking to parents in the plural: decide together, sit down as spouses, hold the squeeze meeting with both of you in the room. If you are raising your child alone, by widowhood, by divorce, by a relationship that ended before the birth, or...
Somewhere in the first year of your child's life, usually late at night, the fear arrives: what if everything we are building ruins him. You have seen the case studies walking around your own extended family, the heir who treats money as weather, the adult child still funded at...
This track has spent nine articles on protection: the [documents](/blog/new-parents-first-documents), the [pots](/blog/new-parents-education-pot), the [cover](/blog/new-parents-life-insurance-now), the [guardianship letter](/blog/new-parents-guardianship-letter). All of it...
This is the last article in the new parents track, and it has one job: to put the whole thing on a single page. Fourteen articles have handed you documents, pots, cover, letters, boundaries, and rituals, each one urgent in its own week. Read in sequence, they can feel like a...
Somewhere in your house, this week, a child will do a chore, and money will or will not change hands, and either way you will have taught a lesson. This is the part parents miss. There is no neutral...
There is a moment, early in most marriages, when a couple discovers they have been carrying two different futures in their heads. It surfaces over something small: a car one of them assumed they were...
In the 1970s, an American economist named Arthur Okun did something almost no economist ever does. He built a measure of the economy that a tired person could understand at the end of a long day. He...
A girl of ten or eleven sits at a kitchen table and announces that she is fed up with the family money system. The system is not complicated. It is a recipe box holding five paper envelopes, each...
In May 1780, in the middle of a war he was not sure his side would win, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail about why he spent his days the way he did. "I must study Politicks and War that my sons...
A twenty-seven-year-old man named Kamal once sat across from a coach and was asked a question nobody had ever put to him: describe your relationship with money. He answered the way most of us would,...
Two teenagers, in two different houses, ask their fathers the same question: can I join the traveling soccer team? The fees are heavy. In the first house, the father does the math and cannot make it...
At the end of her senior year of high school, a girl in Colorado got into her first-choice private college with a significant academic scholarship, and her father, delighted that the scholarship was...
In 1967, two young psychologists named Martin Seligman and Steven Maier ran an experiment that would be cited for the next half century by nearly everyone who worries about what comfort does to...
In the summer of 1963, in Houston, Texas, a nine-year-old boy went to his father and asked how he could earn some money. The father did not reach for his wallet. He ran through a checklist instead....
There is a decision every family makes in the first days of a child's life, before the child can object, that quietly announces what the child is for. It is the name.
Picture the table. It is the first night of Passover, one of the most sacred holidays in the Jewish year, and the extended family is assembled for the seder, the ceremonial dinner: parents,...
"We don't need meetings. We're a close family. We talk all the time."
In 1972, in Manila, a father asked his daughter, then in her early twenties, to open a department store. The father was Henry Sy Sr., a Chinese immigrant to the Philippines who had started with a...
The first time Justin Whitmel Earley tried to bless his sons at bedtime, it failed completely. He had written a short call-and-response for the end of the day, a father's questions and a child's...
One evening, a father named Justin picks up a book of family devotions from his friend Steve's kitchen table and flips through it. "This any good?" he asks. Steve shrugs. "Not sure yet." Then he...
There is a red garage in Justin Whitmel Earley's childhood, and in it a 250cc Yamaha motorcycle that almost never ran. Once a year his father and his uncle Chas would spend a couple of days working...
Denise Sanchez's mother was home. That is the detail to hold onto, because it is the one that breaks the usual story. She was not absent, not working three jobs in another city, not gone. "Sure the...
In a semirural community in Southern California, in a devout Evangelical family called the Wilsons, the father was a night owl. His wife Elaine described the habit to a team of researchers: "He would...