My Children Will Never Be Nepo Babies — 'They'll Inherit Nothing But Our Love'
My children know how to work hard, and they understand that kindness matters more than money.
ASphotowed | Canva As we drove home from school, my youngest was chatting in a stream of non-sequiturs the way only thirteen-year-olds can when she announced that she wished she could be a nepo baby. I laughed, and she quickly added, “Don’t worry, Dad, you still have time. I believe in you.” I laughed again because, with middle schoolers, it’s hard to tell the difference between sarcasm and earnestness.
I told my daughter that the only way she would ever be a nepo baby was if she decided to go into haiku comics, and then I could help her grow an audience of dozens with almost no effort. But her train of thought had already moved onto the mysteries of pop-star lyrics.
My train of thought remained stubbornly on the nepo baby track. When I was a young man, magazines and newspapers would frequently run articles about how much money we Gen-Xers would inherit when our boomer parents finally passed on.
Over time, as newspapers died and magazines became a mockery of their former glory, online stories began discussing how the Great Wealth Transfer was skipping Gen-X. And so it goes.
My father was quite briefly worth tens of millions of dollars, but it was all in stock options, and his paper wealth was erased with the dot-com bust of the early 2000s. He kept waiting for the stock to climb a little higher before selling. He and my mom had no savings, and when they both died six years ago, all I inherited was a funeral bill that I could not afford to pay.
And so it goes.
Dad was an engineer in Silicon Valley. I’m the only one of us four children who went to college — paid for by student loans I still carry. One of my younger brothers works in IT for a school district — he and his family still live in Silicon Valley, barely holding on as housing prices soar and wages for normal people fail to keep up.
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My other two siblings are estranged from IT brother and me. They both occasionally surface online, in the throes of a mental health crisis brought on by substance abuse or a refusal to take their medications.
As for me, I make money online and live in reasonably affordable Salem, Oregon. I have never owned a home, and if I died today, all my four children would inherit would be a funeral bill that they might be able to afford.
My daughter continued to talk — she had moved on from lyrics to recounting the details of her day. If you want to learn how a young teenager is really feeling, you must listen to them talk about random things for a long time without much input until they eventually share the vulnerable parts of their lives sandwiched between the ephemera of adolescent pop-culture fixations.
She wondered what it would be like to be rich — rich like some of the people she sees at the church she attends with her grandmother.
We are not poor, but we are also very much not rich. What are we? Are we working class? My wife is a nurse, and I’m a writer.
We keep the power on, and food in the fridge, and manage to come up with the money our kids need for field trips and outings with friends. Most days, that feels like enough.
Some days, it doesn’t. I’m reminded of some lines from the Ada Limón poem, We Are Surprised:
We linger on the field’s green edge
and say, Someday, son, none of this
will be yours. Miracles are all around.
We’re not so much homeless
as we are home-free, penny-poor,
but plenty lucky for love and leaves
that keep breaking the fall…
My daughter has stopped talking and is now absorbed by her music as we near home. I look over at her and remember when I took all four kids on a hike in the Mount Jefferson wilderness. At one viewpoint, we saw the valley sprawled out below us, and in that moment, I felt rich.
I’m fortunate enough to have had many moments like this. Our family has spent sunny days playing in the summer surf of the Pacific Ocean, watching spectacular sunsets and sunrises in the mountains, and seeing meteor showers from the comfort of a tent in our backyard.
All of these experiences have left me feeling deeply fulfilled in the moment and give me strength to keep pushing forward day-after-day even though our income remains flat, and groceries and gas keep climbing.
While my default outlook is optimistic, there are moments when I want to gather my children in the golden twilight and show them the trees around our rental home and whisper, “Someday, kids, none of this will be yours.”
My children will never be nepo babies.
My wife and I help our children with their homework and know that this is an inheritance we are passing on. It's not that our children couldn’t figure things out on their own — they are all far more talented than either one of us.
No — their inheritance will be the sense that we were rich enough that their parents had the time and energy to love them and to help them learn the quadratic equation or how to write a five-paragraph essay.
We turn onto our road and my daughter starts to put her earbuds away as our car sounds like it might explode as we climb the hill. Something is wrong with the transmission, but I don’t have the skills or money to diagnose the problem, let alone fix it.
This feels like the great paradox of our time. All six of us have cell phones that are more powerful than the computers that took humans to the moon before I was born, but we never have enough money to keep cars running in good condition. Compared to auto repair, our pocket supercomputers are cheap.
Neither my wife nor I is doing as well as our parents were when they were in their late forties. We have one child in college on a full-ride scholarship. Another is a high school senior applying for Pell Grants and scholarships. Our income is too high for some scholarships but modest enough for most.
Our third child, our son, is a student journalist — working on the high school paper as one of the only sophomores on the staff. He told me in passing the other day that he is a writer. I swallowed down a fear and pride cocktail and told him I’d love to read more of his work when he was ready.
What will the future be like for my children? Will the Great Wealth Transfer skip them, too?
If I were to take the perspective of Buddhism to heart, I would understand the future is a mirage, and my anxiety over my children’s future is a misuse of my imagination. But I cannot fully detach from their futures.
In the dark hours of the night, I feel like a failure. What have I given my children? I think this is what they call white-male-economic-anxiety.
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But then I watch my children — how kind they are to each other and how much they care about those with a much harder life than they do. My children know how to work hard, and they understand that kindness matters more than money.
I may not have any money to send them to college or help them buy a house, but each child knows how to stand in awe of the sunset and how to offer a helping hand to someone in trouble.
My children will never be nepo babies. And so it goes.
These four kids will inherit their parents' unconditional love, which is much more than my wife and I ever received from our childhoods. I hope that will be enough.
Jason McBride is a writer, poet, and illustrator focused on wonder and slow living. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling haiku comics collection, “Wild Divinity,” and the creator of the Weirdo Poetry newsletter.