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“Family Business” Versus “Family Wealth”

The area of family business advising is considered by some to be a niche market, since there are not that many of us who hold ourselves out as specialists in the field. Family wealth, by contrast, seems to be a much more crowded area, perhaps because so many huge institutional players are involved in the area of wealth management.

Today I want to look at some of the similarities and some of the differences, and even throw in a couple of other terms to discuss variations of the two.

At its most basic level, the key difference is usually about the existence or absence of an operating business. When a family owns and operates a business, with facilities, employees, and the sale of goods and services, we would usually call it a family business.

In the case where a family has a good deal of wealth, but that wealth is mostly in the form of financial assets, and typically of the more liquid variety, we tend to describe them as families of wealth. There are even terms like high net worth individuals (HNWI) and ultra high net worth individuals (UHNWI) depending on whether they have $10 MM or $500 MM, for example.

There are plenty of families who do not fit so neatly into one category or the other, of course, as some are successful in exiting one line of business and turning that portion to liquid wealth, while maintaining another active operating company. Or a family may take some of its liquid wealth and invest in starting or buying another business.

What these families all have in common, though, is that the decisions that they make do not only affect their company or their money, but also many members of their family. When it comes time to think about how the business or the wealth will go from the parents’ generation to their kids, and then the grandchildren, there are many areas that can get tricky.

The Family Firm Institute, a global organisation based in Boston, offers courses and certification for those who advise these kinds of families. I recently completed the initial level of the Certificate in Family Business Advising (CBFA) as well as the Certificate in Family Wealth Advising (CFWA).

I will be doing their course on Family Governance beginning in January, as it is a requirement for both of the advanced versions of those certificates (ACFBA and ACFWA). Many of the courses for these certificates in Family Business and Family Wealth advising apply to both.

In Canada, IFEA, the Institute of Family Enterprise Advisors, offers the designation “FEA”, where they use the word “Enterprise” as more of a catch all, encompassing both business and wealth, because of the many similarities and the difficulty in labelling these families.

Much of the research in this area is currenlty focused on the area of entrepreneurialism, and creating “enterprising families”, which is often required to keep the assets of the family growing as quickly as the number of family members increases geometrically with each generation.

Tom Davidow, a veteran of this field and head of his eponymous advsiory firm, makes special mention of Real Estate families on his website, as he notes that they have many of the traits from the wealth realm but also an operations component and some tricky tax issues due to the way these assets are often owned.

I met Davidow this week at a conference for Family Offices, which is yet another term that is not always well understood, but which often operates at the intersection of family business and family wealth.

A family office is typically set up to handle the needs of one family (single family office, or SFO) or the needs of several families (multi-family office, or MFO), and can have anywhere from one employee to dozens of staff.

There are many names and not always a lot of agreement about what they mean. But when a family owns a large quantity of assets, that are destined to be kept in the family over coming generations, it is important to remember that the “family stuff” doesn’t always just take care of itself.

 

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Striving for a Succession Non-Event

This week’s blog is inspired by a quote that I came across on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. It was tweeted out by the Business Families Foundation, but ironically it does not come from someone in a family business.

It comes from Anne Mulcahy, the former head of Xerox, who Chief Executive magazine named CEO of the year in 2008. Without further ado, here is what she said:

“One of the things we often miss in succession planning is that it should be gradual and thoughtful, with lots of sharing of information and knowledge and perspective, so that it’s almost a non-event when it happens”.

There is so much that I love about this quote, so let’s get started and see if I can share all the reasons that I love it. To simplify the task, I will break it up into four parts.

One of the things we often miss in succession planning

–      There are MANY things that get missed in succession planning;

–      Things are OFTEN missed;

–      Succession planning happens in ALL businesses, not just family businesses.

 is that it should be gradual and thoughtful,

–      GRADUAL is preferred, versus all at once;

–      Before doing it, lots of THOUGHT should go into how it will be done.

with lots of sharing of information and knowledge and perspective

–      LOTS of sharing is better than just a little bit;

–      Sharing of INFORMATION is important, but it is not the only thing;

–      KNOWLEDGE must also be shared, and that is NOT the same as information (i.e. not just WHAT, but WHY and HOW);

–      PERSPECTIVE sharing is also important, and this implies listening to the points of view of,

and getting input from, MANY parties.

so that it’s almost a non-event when it happens.

–      What do we hope the result will be? Almost a NON-EVENT. Nobody should really notice when it happens.

Allow me to digress to make a key point here. As a kid I remember seeing a “Under New Administration” sign at a local business, likely a restaurant, and I asked my Dad why they would put up such a sign.

I don’t recall his exact explanation, but it’s not important, because everyone reading this understands what those signs are meant to convey.

But when you are planning for the succession of your family business, I daresay that you would prefer NOT to emphasize that there is someone new in charge of the place.

It is still the same family running the place and it is just as good as it has always been, maybe even better.

I had lunch recently with a friend who also grew up working for his father, and we talked about how his Dad still used to come in to the office every day for many years after handing over control to his sons.

I mentioned that he was lucky that his father was the type who could let go and let the next generation run things, as this is not always the case. In fact, when I first started dealing with their company, I am pretty sure the father was still nominally in charge of things.

But I can honestly say that I am not sure when my friend “officially” succeeded his father. It eventually became clear that the younger generation was in charge, but I still saw Dad there almost every time I visited.

They seem to have created the Non-Event Succession, and good for them. Some people are more naturally inclined to be good delegators, good teachers, good parents.

Gradual, thoughtful sharing of information, knowledge and perspective. You do not have to have read Mulcahy’s quote to do it well, far from it.

But if you know people who are struggling with their succession issues and you can only give them one quote to help guide them, you can start with Mulcahy’s.

But why limit yourself to just the quote? Please feel free to share this blog post with them too!

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Family Business Advising: Art vs. Science

The professionals who provide services to family businesses come from a variety of fields, but even so, most of them have a lot in common. Whether they are accountants, lawyers, tax specialists, wealth managers or insurance specialists, they typically deal with business and financial issues.

If we are talking about family businesses, why aren’t there any who deal with the family? The truth is that there are some people who specialize in the family circle, but not nearly as many professionals who advise the business and ownership circles.

The field of family business advising as a sub-specialty of business advising is relatively new, but it is growing and slowly being recognized as an important area. Most people can quickly see that there are lots of business issues that affect the family, but fewer have actually thought about the fact that there are family issues that affect the business too.

The people whose serve the family side of things more than the business side have a number of obstacles to overcome; let’s look at some of them, in no particular order.

Content vs Process

A lawyer will prepare a shareholders agreement, an accountant will prepare a set of financial statements and a wealth manager will make an investment for you. They are all discrete transactions, all of them are tangible; each is one piece of content.

Facilitating family meetings, mediating a dispute between siblings, or helping bring a family together to work on their values, vision and goals, for their part, are more process related. These functions can be very important for long-term family business success, and as such, they are often longer term in nature.

Transaction vs Relationship

The content pieces I mentioned above are typically done as separate transactions. Yes, relationships are also important to work on for accountants and lawyers, but in the family realm, it is almost all about the relationship, and the advisor needs to develop a good working relationship with everyone, not just the person who signs the cheques.

Soft vs Hard

Some people like to talk about hard skills versus soft skills, and I suppose that is one way of looking at it, but let’s not forget that the “soft” stuff is often actually much HARDER to deal with. Few of those who work on the transactions are trained to deal with these soft issues, and many families don’t want to talk about their family problems with those who charge them several hundred dollars an hour.

Business is about $$$ vs Family is about Love

Business is usually very much about making money and creating wealth, while family is all about love. It is the head versus the heart, and they do not necessarily always agree.

The advisor who can show you how his tax strategy can save you $XX,000.00 has an easier sale than the one who tells you that he can help make sure that your family has conflict-free Thanksgiving dinners in the future. How much is that worth?

Art vs Science

What it comes down to in many ways is that it is an art to deal with the family, while dealing with the business is more of a science. To be a good family business advisor, you need to be able to bridge both of these, art AND science.

There are some family therapists who help families deal with conflict, but very few of them understand anything about business, so it is hard for them to provide that bridge.

I have come up with an analogy, but I am not sure how good it is, but here goes.

Paint-by-Numbers

When I was a kid, I did a few paint by numbers, and while it felt like I was an artist, I was just filling in spaces with pre-decided colours of paint, which is more like science.

We need to be able to show our client families the canvas with the outlines of what we can do, and tell them what colour we can help them put in which spaces. This way, they will better understand what we can do for them, in a way that helps them see the value we can bring.

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R.I.P. my Old Friend

As much as I struggled to find the right title for this blog post, I know that I will likely struggle more writing it, as the tears are already welling up in my eyes just contemplating the topic.

Thankfully, this writing is actually a bit therapeutic for me.

Bosco was a Golden Retriever who had been with us for the past 8 and-a-half years, after spending his first two years with another family, who unfortunately went through a divorce. It was unfortunate for them, since they could not agree on who got to keep him, but very lucky for us.

Our kids were just 5 and 6 at the time, so it is no exaggeration to say that he has been a part of most of their childhood family memories, with the series of annual Christmas photos as a reminder of how they grew up as he grew old.

He had slowed down considerably over the years, but still seemed to be in decent health considering his sedentary lifestyle and his propensity to hang around the kitchen, you know, just in case some food happened to fall on the floor.

But on Wednesday this week, my wife was out of town and I was at an event downtown. The kids were at home with the pets (Bosco plus another dog and 3 cats), and things went bad unexpectedly and quickly.

My daughter texted me around 5 PM saying something was wrong with Bosco, so I called her to see what was up. Difficulty breathing, and inability to even stand up, hmmm, I thought, I better head home quickly.

By the time I got to my car not even 10 minutes later, she texted me to say that she feared the worst. I got home and sadly realized that she was right. Sad enough to have an old friend pass away, but sadder still that it happened in front of my kids, without their parents there.

My son helped me load him into the car for one final trip to the vet, where we said goodbye one last time, and we both cried all the way home.

After sleeping on it a few nights, I am very thankful for the quickness with which he scheduled his ultimate departure, if not the exact timing. How many stories have you heard about people whose pets get sick, and they then have to make choices between expensive veterinary procedures and letting nature take its course.

I will now try to carefully draw a parallel between the case of a pet and that of a parent. I say “carefully” because I recall an instance when my aunt passed away, and my father suggested to her widower husband that he get a dog.

Dad was making what he felt was a constructive suggestion to help his brother-in-law through some of the grief and loneliness, but I know that some people took it wrongly, as if he was suggesting that my aunt could be “replaced” by a dog.

The story I wish to convey is about my Dad, and how he left us relatively early, yet not so quickly as to leave us scrambling.

My mother recently related to me that when she and my Dad used to go and visit his mother during her long battle with Alzheimers, on the drive home, Dad always said to her, “If I ever get like that, please shoot me”.

The cancer saved us from having to go through that, and Bosco’s passing, also likely from cancer, saved us a lot of tough times and extra heartache.

And the title for this blog? I borrowed it from my 13-year-old daughter’s Facebook post about the loss of her “old friend”.

Sometimes sad events allow us to appreciate how quickly our kids have matured while we were paying attention to other things.

Goodbye Bosco. It is better to have loved you and lost you, than to never have loved you at all.

 

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Solid Wealth Vs. Liquid Wealth.

While in Philadelphia with my teenage son this past summer, we visited the Franklin Institute and checked out some of their great science exhibits. They have a huge variety of things to see, as well as some live demos scheduled throughout each day.

I always make sure that we come up with some kind of a plan to see the most important stuff in some kind of a coherent fashion, and the last demo we saw really stuck with me.

It was about the changing nature of water through a range of temperatures, from ice to water, and then from water to steam. The guy doing the demo was the same man we had seen earlier in the day showing kids some cool stuff involving liquid nitrogen, and we both enjoyed his way of getting the little kids into it, and garnering a lot of laughs along the way.

I can’t say that either of us actualy learned anything new, but for some reason an important analogy popped into my head. As usual for me, the only way to do it justice is to write a blog about it.

Of course the ice-to-water-to-steam concept also applies to many other forms of matter, but I started thinking about how it applies to wealth, and more specifically family business wealth.

An established business, that is profitable and well run, represents a form of wealth that most people consider solid. When a family owns such a business, they often try to find the best way to pass this solid wealth on to future generations, as they see the value and potential permanence of the wealth that it holds.

Passing a business from one generation is often quite tricky, as the statistics surely bear out, but the stories of those that succeed are an inspiration to those who are attempting a similar feat.

In many cases, and for many reasons, passing the wealth down in the solid form of a business is not possible or practical. In many of these instances, the business is sold off to others instead, in what is often dubbed a “liquidity event”. How convenient for my analogy, that the wealth has gone from solid to liquid.

Liquid wealth has its own pros and cons, of course. The biggest advantage is the flexibility that it affords its owners, especially as far as diversification and asset allocation are concerned. Sounds great, so what are the cons?

My simplest reply is that the business, much like real estate, is viewed as solid, especially by the expected heirs, who expect to benefit from the profits, income and/or dividends it throws off, but very few members of the next generation ever consider the idea of selling pieces off in order to get their hands on the wealth.

Going back to the ice-water-steam analogy, here is how I think most of the senior generation members view this situation.

A business is solid, like a block of ice. If you can keep it in the freezer, it will last a long time, and it can even just sit there in a block, on a shelf. And you can even lock the freezer. Once it is liquid, you don’t have to keep it in the freezer anymore, and you can use it for more things.

But, it is also easy to spill, and you need some kind of a container to keep it in. And you need to beware of thirsty people coming by and asking for a sip. The related problem is that it is now subject to evaporation, one step closer to steam, and much more difficult to control.

The generation that is currently in control understands how easily it can disappear, and they struggle with how they can be sure that some of the wealth will be available to their grandchildren and future generations.

Keeping a family together around a business is one thing, keeping them together around money is much harder.

 

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The Importance of Offering an Informed Choice

Editor’s note: This blog post is essentially a translation of last week’s post that was written in French

Recently I have had the opportunity to reflect on the subject of offering an “informed choice”. It began while I was taking a conflict resolution course in which I had the chance to act as a mediator between opposing parties, in a variety of scenarios.

The course used “interest-based negotiation” as its foundation, and one of the instructors noted that one of the goals of the mediator is to ensure that the parties make what he dubbed “an informed choice”.

I had never thought of it in that way, so I actually wrote it down, in ink, in my course binder, and added the word “BLOG!” beside it. (I actually turned it into two blogs; or a “blogue” –last week, in French- and this blog).

Now taking notes in class is not something that I do very often, since I believe that if something is really important, I will remember it, and if I don’t, it probably wasn’t that important anyway.

But the idea that one of the roles of a mediator is to make sure that the parties choose to accept or reject any offer ONLY after having understood all of the issues and consequences, well this was new and almost revolutionary to me.

Those who know me well know that I believe that communication is the most important subject for business families. Too often the lack of communication and poor communication become sources of major problems for such families.

The result of these communication errors is that people end up making decisions based on perceptions of the facts that are far from informed and clear, but rather erroneous and misinformed hypotheses.

When I work with families that are not at the point of requiring mediation, I encourage them to share their ideas and points of view, and to communicate regularly on these points.

This is always done on the premise that the best choices and decisions are made after reflection, in a situation where each person can say that they are acting with all of the information available, and that they are in fact making a fully informed choice.

Hidden somewere in this whole area is another important point. In many typical situations that require mediation, the parties are unrelated, and one party or the other may have a certain advantage when it comes to the information they have, their understanding of the situation, and the alternatives available.

When dealing with members of the same family, I feel that it is even more important to ensure that each individual has the opportunity to make a choice based on the same facts.

I recently listened to a presentation on the web by a Toronto colleague of mine, Jeff Noble of BDO, on shareholders’ agreements. In it, he mentioned a stunning statistic, saying that according to some lawyers, 80% of shareholders’ agreements prepared by these lawyers are never signed! But why not?

The goal of his presentation was to convince business families to work out their agreements in cooperative fashion, together, while sharing each other’s perspectives. This way, they can arrive at an agreement that each person will actually sign, willingly.

And that is why I title this blog “The Importance of Offering an Informed Choice”, and not simply “The Importance of an Informed Choice”.

What is both very important and sometimes very difficult is to make sure that all parties actually have the proper attitude and the spirit of cooperation necessary to arrive at these truly durable decisions.

You may believe that when you are dealing with members of the same family, it will always be very easy to achieve this, but unfortuately it is not always the case.

Thankfully for those families, there are people trained in mediation, coaching, and facilitating family meetings who are available to help.

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Off the Grid, Without a Paddle (Part 2 of 2)

Last week we finished up with my tech problem partially solved, but in a very sub-optimal way. The toll free number of the overseas company left me with a bad taste in my mouth (curry?) so I tried Microsoft’s support website again, because at least it was free.

There was a place to click for a “live chat”, and I wondered if it would actually work. I had used this type of feature a few times in the past, usually on websites that are trying to sell you something, as it is a good way for the company to answer questions.

What the heck, so I click on OK, and start typing my problem. It took a minute or two to get a reply from “Melinfor” (which I concluded was probably his real name, as the headshot of him did look like someone named Mel).

Live chats are much cheaper for the company than phone calls because the agents can work on a number of different customers’ issues at the same time, since there is usually plenty of downtime resolving these things.

I didn’t mind waiting for Mel to get back to me for a minute or so, because he quickly understood my problem, proposed the solution, and wrapped it all up in under 15 minutes.

He could not revive my old hotmail address, because it is technically impossible to do so. But he got me the next best solution. And I learned a lot of lessons through this ordeal, which I will gladly share.
1. You don’t need to speak to someone to get something accomplished. Technology today allows so many options that do not involve talking on the phone.

When I look back on my insistence on “calling someone”, I am reminded of my father, whose preferred method was to speak to someone, but those were the days when you could easily call and speak to a live person, and the alternatives were going to the store or writing a letter.

2. I don’t miss the spam. When you have the same email address for 15 years, you get a lot of spam. Most of it is easily filtered, but the best side effect of this incident is a lot less crap in my inbox.

3. When you die, you are dead. When I clicked on “remove” for my old address, after already having made the other address my primary one, it was overkill for what I wanted to do. I had not realized the implications of that one click, and after doing it, I was “dead”.

There are some actions that you cannot come back from. For every time I have seen those messages “Are you sure?” when I was deleting something, I would have appreciated at least one heads-up on this one. Moral: You don’t always get a heads-up or a warning. Be careful!

4. What you think you see is not always what it appears to be.

I called a toll-free number for support, which I had wrongly assumed was a Microsoft number. I was stressed by my situation, and fell for a trick, but I have to say that the trick is pretty clever.

If your company has people who can “help” computer users solve their problems, what better way to get them to call you could you come up with?

There are lots of forums online where people ask for tech help, and sometimes those people are looking for a phone number to speak to someone. So you go on these forums pretending that you are just a regular contributor answering a question, and post your number, and people call you.

I just wonder, though, if they put their company name there, along with their number, and told people it was support that they had to pay for, how many calls would they get? Answer: Fewer.

I won’t get fooled again.

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Off the Grid, Without a Paddle (Part 1 of 2)

When you make a mistake and it costs you, the worst thing that you can do, in my opinion, is to fail to learn from it. If you can learn from it, and even help others learn, the cost can become well worth it.

This week I made such a mistake, and it cost me a bit of money, and a LOT of time to clean up. And while the end result is not perfect, it has some added benefits that make up for its shortcomings.

This week I will try to give you a quick “Reader’s Digest” version of the events, and next week I will cover the lessons learned.

I have been working with a Hotmail account since before Microsoft bought them, literally in the last century.

Nowadays you can use their Outlook service with any email address using an “alias”, and I wanted to make my sl@stevelegler.com address the primary one, but I went one click too far, and accidentally deleted my old Hotmail address.

“Ooops! I better put it back”. But it was not possible to do so online. Aaaargh. After a few hours on Monday evening, I gave up and went to bed, figuring I would try to call and speak to someone the next morning.

I could send emails out, but I couldn’t receive any. A few years ago, this would not have bothered me, because when you run a family office, you usually don’t want to be found. But now, as a family business advisor, building a client list, this was a problem.

At about 4 AM, I woke up and could not get back to sleep. Was it because I was “off the grid”? Or was it because I was trying to figure out how I was gonna get back on the grid?

On their customer support website, it is nearly impossible to find a phone number, because it costs them a lot of money to help you that way. They prefer to minimize those interactions, but I was hell bent on calling someone, because I was hoping that they could revive my old email address, and that was the simplest solution.

So I googled “hotmail support phone number” and just like that, I came upon an answer with a toll-free number. I called, and “Jessica” told me this was a “paid support” line.

Now I had a live person, and I just “knew” that my problem only required a quick fix, so how much could that cost, I wondered. But I had that live person and did not want to let go, so I said OK.

Half an hour later, she was finally at the point where she understood my problem almost as well as I did. Another 20 minutes or so later, her tech friend, to whom I could hear her speaking in another language, had supplied me with a new hotmail address, which I could have done on my own, had I concluded that this was my best choice.

Oh well, we are almost done, so I let them finish up. Another 10 minutes with “Harry” to give him my Visa number to cover the $149.99 to pay their company, not Microsoft, but some randomname-noname.com service company.

I felt like I had been had, but at least I had something workable, and they did spend time helping me, and I had agreed to pay.

But my fun was just beginning, as I now had a new Hotmail account that could receive and send emails. However, my other account, where I had all my contacts and dozens of folders of saved emails, could only send emails.

I still needed to somehow “fuse” them together.

So do I call them back, or try another solution?

Hint:
Next week: How Microsoft saved the day, and how I learned that you don’t need to actually speak to someone to get things done.
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The Father-Daughter Ikea Assembly

Last week I came across a Tweet about how sitting can kill you, complete with all sorts of stats that made me think about my own habits and how sedentary they are.

A news report then followed, touting the benefits of treadmill desks that some companies have installed for workers, that has them walk slowly but for long periods of time, with great results.

In an effort to see if something like this was actually doable for me, I looked for a way to try this out with the treadmill that I already have at my office. So it was off to IKEA.

I purchased a small table that attaches to a wall, and brought it to my office. My 13-year-old daughter has assembled lots of her own IKEA stuff, and she offered to come to my office and do most of the work. What follows is our separate accounts of the experience.

His version:

What can you expect from an eighth-grader? Well, when she is MY daughter, I expect quite a bit. And she rarely disappoints, and she did not disappoint this time either.

She assembled the pieces perfectly with no instructions or supervision from me. So now it was time for me to get involved because it was time to attach it to the wall. It was also time for things to begin to go downhill.

“Oh, so those screws don’t come with it?” I asked. “No, I guess we need to go to the hardware store”. Off we went. But first I checked to see that I did have the plastic shields to put into the gyproc to make sure the screws would hold well. Check.

So we get there and I locate some good strong screws, ignoring the packs of screws that come with shields, since I already had those. Let’s go put in these 6 screws and our work will be done.

Except that the big screws did not fit with the shields I had installed, so we had to start over, with four big holes in the wall. We hit another patch of frustration due to one of my screw-ups, the details of which I no longer recall, resulting in more holes.

Long story short, we finally got the wall-mounted table attached, after more sweat (no tears or blood!) and a few muffled bad words.

She gets a 9/10, I don’t know if I deserve a 5/10.

Her version:

My father bought an IKEA desk, and seeing as I’m the IKEA expert of the family, I offered to go to his office and help him build it and hang it up.

When we got to his office, I decided to start off the building of the desk. I’d dealt with IKEA furniture before, so I completed it with ease, but it still needed to be mounted. The treadmill then needed to be turned 90° so that the desk could over-hang properly.

We realized that the screws required to hang the desk were not included in the box, so we were off to the hardware store!

We got big sturdy ones that could support the weight of the fixture. We came back and put in shields, but they didn’t go in properly, but we still tried to hang the desk and failed miserably. So we took them out, and moved it an inch to the right, and tried again. One of the shields broke, another one went straight through the wall.

At this point, I thought we were pretty much screwed. But then, we tried one last time, and we went a bit upward and took our time. It worked!

The desk is now hanging more or less properly over the treadmill (I’d give us an 8/10). I had an over-all great day with my dad, and I’m looking forward to having some feedback from my father about his brand-new treadmill desk.

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Doing the Dishes: A Family Affair

This past week our family was at the cottage, where we do not have all the comforts of home (although we are far from roughing it!)

I was washing the dishes after supper one night, and I had a flashback to my childhood, making me realize how much things had changed in just one generation. I started out thinking about doing dishes, but then thought about all kinds of other family issues too.

When I was a kid, we were the last family on our street to get a colour TV. I remember that we were lobbying our parents for that colour TV, but my mother wanted a dishwasher.

I don’t actually remember if we ended up getting the TV or the dishwasher first, but I do clearly remember the fights I had with my sisters over whose turn it was to dry the dishes each night.

All sorts of memories came back, about my Dad forcing us to create a calendar to keep track of whose turn it was; complaining that there were more dishes on the nights when it was my turn; thinking that maybe if I “accidentally” broke some plates, I might “get fired”.

So here I am at the cottage, washing the dishes by myself, and I never even asked my able-bodied teenagers to join me. Was I just sacrificing myself , so they could enjoy the last few days of their summer vacation, or was I trying to avoid the whining that would surely result in my asking for help?

After I had washed them all, they were drying in the rack, so I just left them there overnight, and put them away the next morning. This made me wonder why I was forced to dry dishes 40 years ago in the first place; did we not have the patience to let nature take its course and let them dry themselves? In retrospect, it seems like there was a lot of fussing over nothing.

But of course the real question that arises is whether we are we spoiling our kids by not making them help out more, or is this just the way people raise their kids these days, or both?

And what about that “colour TV” we wanted, not many families are having that discusssion nowadays, as TVs are becoming passé, with such a variety of screens all over the house.

I remember watching the old Spiderman cartoons with my young son a decade ago, where episodes featured the words “In Colour!” and I had to explain to him that back then, everything used to be in black and white.

We have come a long way with technology, and few would argue that so many of the changes have been positive.

What about the family, and not raising the kids to help out? I am not sure if that is such a good thing. We want our kids to become independent, but we don’t always help them by doing so much for them.

In wealthier families, this can be even more of an issue, as the kids can begin to think that household tasks like mowing the lawn, shoveling the snow, and keeping the house clean are somehow beneath them, as they are all things we pay “others” to do.

Back to me doing the dishes that night, at least my kids were not thinking, “Wow, Dad is doing the dishes!” as if it was something that should automatically be Mom’s job. That is one thing that has definitely changed since my father’s generation.

Somehow, though, I am pretty sure my son is hoping he will end up finding someone like his grandmother, who did view that as part of the woman’s role. But they don’t make them like her anymore, do they?

/by