Every parent with more than one child eventually meets the arithmetic of fairness, and most meet it first in small change. Ron Blue meets it, in his book Faith-Based Family Finances, over $300. He...
Every parent with more than one child eventually meets the arithmetic of fairness, and most meet it first in small change. Ron Blue meets it, in his book Faith-Based Family Finances, over $300. He and his wife, he explains, might give one of their adult daughters, the one in unstable circumstances, $300 to help with expenses, along with babysitting help they would not offer another child in a steadier season. Then he asks the question every parent has silently asked: "Is such treatment unfair? We don't think so."
Blue spent forty years as a financial planner to Christian families in America, and wrote this 2008 book, with the accountant Jeremy White, as the summing up of that career. Out of all its thirty-three chapters, the pages on dividing an inheritance among children may be the ones that reach furthest beyond his American context, because the instinct he is confronting is close to universal. When parents think about what each child should receive, the default answer, arrived at with relief because it seems to end the discussion, is: exactly the same. Equal shares. Identical amounts. Surely that is what fairness means.
Blue's answer is a principle he states in eight words and defends across the chapter: "Love your children equally and treat them uniquely." And then, quoting a saying he clearly wants lodged in the reader's memory: "You may have heard it said that the greatest inequality is treating unequal people equally."
Hold your own children in mind and the sentence stops being clever and starts being obvious. Your children are not the same person. "They are unique in their character, values, and ability to deal with life," Blue writes, "unique in their vocation, health, and immediate family situation." One is a careful steward and one has never held money for a month; one is prospering abroad and one is farming the home plot and feeding your widowed sister; one married well and one married a man you pray about. An identical share handed to each of these people is not identical treatment in any sense that matters. The same amount will bless one, vanish through the fingers of another, and be irrelevant to a third. Equal division is not the fulfillment of parental judgment. It is the abdication of it, dressed as virtue.
To parents who feel the force of this and still flinch, Blue is blunt about where the duty actually runs: "You are a steward of God's resources on His behalf. You are not a steward of your children's resources. You are not accountable to your children for how you transfer or spend His money. You are accountable to God." He points to Ecclesiastes 7:11-12 for the deeper warning: money left to someone to whom wisdom has not also been left is not a gift at all. "Just because you have a child," he writes, "does not make the child the automatic beneficiary of your estate."
The obvious objection arrives immediately, and it comes carrying a Bible. Does Scripture not warn us, in one of its most famous family stories, about a father who treated one son differently? Jacob "loved Joseph more than any of his other sons" (Genesis 37:3), and gave him the richly ornamented coat, and the coat produced hatred, a faked death, and a brother sold into slavery. Is that not the verdict on unequal treatment?
Blue's reading of the story is the pivot of the whole chapter, and it is careful. "Although Jacob gave Joseph unique treatment, Jacob violated the uniqueness principle. Jacob did not love his sons equally. Treat children uniquely, yes, but such treatment should be motivated by equal love for each one." The coat was not the sin; the coat was the symptom. Jacob's heart ranked his sons, as his own father Isaac had ranked Jacob below Esau, and the brothers read the coat correctly, as the public flag of a private ranking. That is why it became, in Blue's phrase, "a symbol and lightning rod of conflict."
The distinction this gives us is the one that unlocks every hard decision downstream. Favoritism is unequal love, and it is poison in any dosage, whether the shares are equal or not; a father can divide his estate into identical fractions and still let every child know which one he delighted in. Differentiation is equal love responding to unequal circumstances, and it is not merely permitted but required; it is what love does when it is paying attention. The two can look alike from the outside, which is exactly why families fear differentiation. The safeguard, Blue insists, is not to retreat into identical shares but to communicate: "To avoid a perception of unequal love, you must communicate with all of your adult children." Adult children, he observes, can understand why an act of generosity toward one sibling was appropriate; what they cannot understand is a difference discovered after your death, unexplained, in a document. Silence is what converts wise differentiation into perceived favoritism. Reasons, given in person, are what keep the coat from becoming a lightning rod.
He adds one observation about timing worth keeping. With young children, perceived fairness genuinely matters; bring a gift from a journey for one child and not the others and the others conclude, reasonably, that they are loved less. The mistake is carrying "these legalistic notions of exact fairness" forward into relationships with grown adults, where circumstances have diverged and everyone can see it.
If children differ in their readiness to handle wealth, a wise parent needs a way to find out who is ready, and to grow the ones who are not, before the estate arrives all at once. Blue's answer, drawn from his earlier book Splitting Heirs, is the most practical device in the chapter: "If you want to include your children in your will but are unsure about their ability to handle money, you might consider giving them 'training' inheritances while you are alive."
He tells the story of a couple he calls Sam and Becky, who gave each of their four children a portion of their inheritance on their eighteenth birthdays. "Their goal was to find out how the kids would handle a small amount of money, and consequently, how they would likely handle more." The results were, at first, a complete failure by any accountant's measure: the children, young and inexperienced, "wasted most of the money." And yet the story is in the book as a success, because the waste happened in the shallow end. Like the prodigal son Blue compares them to, the children came back with lessons no lecture could have installed. "Today, Sam and Becky periodically give their children lump sums of money, and they do a masterful job of handling it wisely." The later gifts funded family vacations and helped send grandchildren to good schools. Blue's summary line deserves a place in every family's vocabulary: "experience is a good teacher; 'coached' experience is a great teacher."
See what the training inheritance actually does for the uniqueness principle: it replaces guesswork with evidence. The parent deciding shares at seventy is no longer comparing impressions of her children; she has watched each of them steward real money, made mistakes with them while the mistakes were cheap, and coached them through the recovery. And the child who stumbled has been given the one thing a posthumous inheritance can never include: a second chance under a living parent's eye. Blue's warning to wealthy parents applies to every tier: the more you have, the harder it is to let children feel the consequences of their errors, "since it is easier for you to take away the financial pain." The training inheritance is the discipline of not rescuing, practiced at survivable stakes.
Now the translation, because this principle lands on African soil with more weight on it, and the book, written for American nuclear households under formal estate law, does not see what it lands on. Its surrounding pages about US estate taxes and account types are dated even in America; here they simply do not apply. The principle applies with force.
Our version of "equal shares" is usually not equal at all; it is customary. In many of our communities the formula was written centuries before we were born: land to sons, the home plot to the youngest or the eldest according to the custom, daughters provided for through marriage rather than inheritance, the firstborn carrying both privilege and burden. A parent who applies Blue's principle honestly may collide with that formula from two directions at once. Treating children uniquely may mean leaving productive land to the daughter who has actually farmed it and provided for you, rather than to the son in the city who would sell it by Christmas, and custom will call that disorder. It may equally mean declining to fund, yet again, the son whose record with money is a trail of debris, and custom, which reads every gift as rank, will call that rejection. The uniqueness principle does not tell you to defy your culture for the sake of defiance. It tells you that neither an imported ideal of identical shares nor an inherited formula of customary shares can substitute for the specific judgment you owe before God about these particular children. Formulas are what parents reach for so they will not have to judge. Stewardship is judging, in love, with reasons you are prepared to give with your own voice.
And our families hold one advantage the book never mentions: the training inheritance is already native to us. The father who entrusts a son with one season's harvest money, the mother who stocks a daughter's first market stall, the family that hands a nephew the boda boda (motorcycle taxi) and watches what the earnings become: all of these are Sam and Becky's practice in local dress. What our families often lack is only the deliberateness: doing it as a stated test with coaching attached, and letting the evidence actually inform the final decision rather than surrendering, at the end, to the formula anyway.
Blue writes that "much prayer, wisdom, and courage are needed in making the treatment decision," and he does not pretend the courage is a small requirement; a few pages later he admits plainly that "signing the wills to treat your children uniquely takes courage." For an African parent the sentence is doubly true, because the signature may face not just disappointed children but a disapproving clan. That is why the decision cannot live only in the will, discovered when you are no longer there to stand behind it. It needs your reasoning, in your words, on the record. This is work a Legacy Statement in LegacyPot is built to hold: alongside the legal documents, a plain statement of how you decided, that you loved each child equally and treated each uniquely, and why, child by child, so that what the family inherits is not a bare division that invites comparison but a parent's thinking that forecloses it. The will says what. The statement says why. Families are broken by unexplained whats.
Begin before any of the big decisions are due. This year, give one small, deliberate training inheritance: an amount you can afford to watch be wasted, to the child whose readiness you know least, with coaching promised and consequences real. Write down what you learn. Do it again next year. By the time the treatment decision must be signed, you will not be guessing, and neither, when they finally hear your reasons, will your children be guessing about your love. Equal in love, unique in treatment, and explained while you live: that is the whole principle, and there is not a family on any continent too rich, too poor, or too traditional for it.