In stages, starting years earlier than most families are comfortable with. By twelve a child should know the family has a plan and money has rules, by eighteen they should know the categories of what the family owns and...
In stages, starting years earlier than most families are comfortable with. By twelve a child should know the family has a plan and money has rules, by eighteen they should know the categories of what the family owns and how school is paid for, and by twenty-five they should know substantially everything an executor would need. Disclosure is a curriculum, not an event.
The corpus lays out the bands in The Silence Myth. By twelve: no figures required, but the child sees a budget exist, hears save, give, and invest used about real family decisions, and knows what the family does for income. By eighteen: the categories and the logic, land here, a business, some investments, what debt exists and why, who the family's key people are, plus one real responsibility with real money and permission to fail at it cheaply. By twenty-five: the full asset map, the will's existence and broad shape, where documents live, and a seat in at least one meeting where a real decision was made.
The timing is not arbitrary. Craig Aronoff and John Ward, who study multi-generation families, urge parents to actively educate children about family finances between fifteen and twenty, and Teach Kids Money by Age Band turns that into a concrete milestone: before twenty-four, one sitting with a real, honest summary of what exists, what it is for, and what the plan is. The Fifteen-to-Twenty Window adds the stakes: this is the band where your child forms their picture of what the family can do and whether they are inside the plan.
The instinct behind secrecy is that knowledge breeds entitlement: tell them what exists and they will stop striving. The corpus takes this myth apart directly. Entitlement does not come from information. It comes from expectation without responsibility, and a child who knows nothing still forms expectations, usually inflated ones, from the car, the school, and the neighborhood. Secrecy does not delete the expectation. It only deletes the training that could have attached responsibility to it. Meanwhile the skills an heir actually needs, reading a title deed, questioning an advisor, saying no to a relative, all have long learning curves, and the silent family defers the whole curriculum to a single moment that grief gets to schedule. Heirs who first see the numbers at a funeral make grief-shaped decisions. Heirs who saw them at twenty-two ask better questions for the rest of their lives. Silence never cancels the conversation. It only picks the date, and it always picks the worst one.
Find your oldest child's band and check whether they have what that band says they should have. If they are twelve and money is still a sealed room, let them see this month's budget exist. If they are past eighteen and have never held real responsibility, hand them one. If they are past twenty-two and have never read the family numbers, put that sitting on the calendar for this month, questions welcome, and repeat it yearly until it is boring.