This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
I once heard of a case like this from people around me:
There was a family of three. The parents were ordinary small traders who worked from dawn to dusk running a breakfast shop, yet earned only a meager profit.
Sometimes, at the end of a month, the couple had been busy from morning to night and still could not save any money; they could not even bring themselves to order a meat dish when they ate, let alone buy clothes or go shopping to treat each other.
Yet these very parents, so stingy with themselves in every way, when their university-student daughter came home and demanded the latest iPhone, forced themselves to pull from their pockets the hard-earned money they had painstakingly saved over half a year to satisfy her demand.
“An iPhone starting at 8,000 yuan drained this poor couple’s blood almost in an instant…”
In China, the number of “rich second generation from poor families” is overtaking the genuine rich second generation at a frenzied pace.
These children come from ordinary families, and although their parents’ incomes are not high, they all have the standard trappings of luxury in their lives:
their phones must be the latest iPhone, their shoes the trendiest Adidas or Nike, their cosmetics the top-of-the-line “miracle water”…
Many children from families of modest means live lives of top-tier pleasure, at the cost of parents who trade their lives for money and give almost everything they have, just to pamper their children’s vanity.
The parents truly fear their children suffering hardship, yet it is equally true that they are ruining them with their own hands.
“It is hard for a poor family to produce a distinguished son”: in this age, this is no idle talk; it has actually become the truth.
Don’t let the indulgence of poor parents ruin their children
Some say that the family of origin determines a child’s character; the influence of their upbringing flows in their bones and will not change for the rest of their lives.
So children of poor families have lost half the race before they are even born.
And precisely for this reason, parents who have feared poverty all their lives worry more, the poorer they are financially, that their children will be outshone by others, and feel all the more that they owe them something.
Doting and pampering become the most reasonable explanation; they are afraid their children will develop an inferiority complex, so however hard and tired they themselves are, they must satisfy the children’s demands.
But what these foolishly loving parents do not know is what kind of ungrateful wolf the theory of “however hard things are, never let the children suffer” will end up raising.
“If I come home and don’t see an iPhone 7, you’ll be my son, got it?”
A few years ago a video like this went viral online:
Because his father, a courier, had not bought him an iPhone 7, a 16-year-old son made his father stand outside the door as punishment, and even swore at him and ordered him to kneel before him and admit his mistake.
“Look at the state of you, as useless as can be!”
“Forget Nike or Adidas, even Li-Ning would have done, but you bought it at the morning market, and you have the nerve to ask me why I don’t wear it?”
“Remember this: if I don’t get an iPhone 7 this year, you’re no father of mine!”
Just because his father had not bought him brand-name goods, the son beat and scolded his father and even made him kneel and admit he was wrong.
Faced with such conscienceless, unfilial behavior, beyond their anger, more people sighed that the old saying does not deceive us: “To raise without teaching is the father’s fault.”
There is a detail in the video: when the son viciously abused his father, “Do you know you were wrong?”, who would have thought that the father would stammer in reply:
“I was wrong, son.”
Plant a root for 16 years and you reap 16 years of fruit.
Look at the precious darling who was once “held in the mouth for fear he would melt, held in the hands for fear he would fall”: blind giving and indulgence finally spoil him into scum who wants to squeeze the last drop of blood out of you.
And poor second-generation children who force their parents to buy them expensive luxuries are not isolated cases.
In Malaysia, a 14-year-old girl once dragged her mother around a shopping mall, insisting on buying an iPhone.
She declared stubbornly: “All my friends and classmates have one and I don’t. You have to buy me one today, otherwise how can I save face in front of them?”
Her disabled mother could not afford it and could only kneel before her child, begging her to give up the idea, while the daughter stood beside her, haughtily berating her trembling mother.
In the eyes of these vicious ungrateful wolves, their parents’ giving is a debt owed to them by birth, so no matter how outrageous their demands, the parents ought to bear them.
Some parents spoil their children into heartless demons, while others turn their own flesh and blood into good-for-nothings.
There was once shocking news of a 23-year-old man who, after both his parents died and no one looked after him, starved to death at home.
Twenty-three, an age in the prime of youth.
Lucid and able-bodied, Yang Suo had been pampered by his parents since childhood; when others brought him food, he wished they would also feed it into his mouth.
The villagers said: he didn’t starve to death, he died of laziness.
Just how lazy could he be?
After one full meal he could go two days without moving;
for convenience he relieved himself on the spot and covered it with earth;
he wore his clothes until they were filthy before changing, whether or not they already stank and had gone moldy;
to keep warm he burned everything in the house, even his own bed, preferring to starve or freeze to death rather than lift one more finger…
If his parents knew of this in the underworld, they too would surely regret their “crippling education” back then.
Buying things is a small matter; losing a life is a big one.
Would you believe that, in an environment of parental indulgence and doting, a child can end up being raised who will turn murderous toward his own parents?
Parents poisoned by their son, who could not be saved
A university student, whom his parents had toiled to raise for over twenty years, simply because he did not know how to earn money, had the sudden idea of poisoning his parents to collect a large insurance payout.
The son bought nitrite and prepared a “Hongmen banquet” for his parents.
With his own hands he put the poisoned beef into his parents’ bowls, but he never expected that his parents, loving him too much, would not bear to eat a bite.
An ordinary person would surely have had a pang of conscience at this point?
But in his madness he came up with another plan: in a fit of rage he mixed two glasses of water with nitrite and poisoned his parents to death with his own hands.
He watched coldly as they struggled in agony, did not call the police or take any measures to save them, and instead turned on the gas to fake an accidental death by gas poisoning.
The cold-blooded heartlessness and moral depravity of it all are truly appalling!
You should know that in some people’s eyes, the only meaning of parents’ existence is a large compensation payout.
If one day you are of no more use, even though you are the benefactor who bore and raised him, he can abandon you without the slightest hesitation.
The more parents dote on their children, the more easily the children develop fragile psyches.
Souls that grow up in such a family environment have no capacity to withstand pressure at all; once they face life on their own, the wind and rain of the world will grind them down and push them into the abyss: at best their minds become twisted, at worst they turn to crime.
Sometimes, blindly choosing to “raise rich” is bringing destruction upon the child and the family.
The richer people are, the better they know how to refuse doting
In this world, the most frightening thing is not poverty, but that people richer and more outstanding than you actually work harder than you.
While today’s “rich second generation from poor families” pick up the bad habits of the dandies of the past one after another, there are some hardworking children of the wealthy who truly amaze the world.
Mario Ho, “the son of the King of Gambling,” stunned the world as soon as he appeared on The Brain.
This young man, admitted to MIT at 18, not only has an extraordinary mind and an illustrious family background but is also a byword for low-key hard work.
As a student, it was common for him to study hard in the library until five in the morning.
Behind graduating from four years of coursework in only three and becoming the youngest master’s graduate at MIT was the result of his striving day and night.
Before the cameras of media interviews, Mario Ho answered in a refined and slightly shy manner:
“Actually, I study very hard so that my father can be happy. He’s really strict with me.”
The more solid a family’s foundation, the less it relaxes in disciplining its offspring.
Even with a family fortune of 48 billion, Mario Ho still cooks for himself and cleans his own room; when going out he takes the subway, and he flies economy class, never extravagant or wasteful.
His father, the King of Gambling Stanley Ho, once said:
“I often teach the young ones to work hard. Wealth may not stay with you all your life, but study always benefits you.”
Mario Ho followed his father’s teaching; this is how he acted, and he has indeed benefited greatly.
His favorite saying is: “While you were asleep, I was working; while you are working, I have already put in twice the effort you have.”
What reason would such a person have not to succeed?
In fact, thinking carefully about the backgrounds of these children of the wealthy only makes one sigh all the more.
In fame and financial power, which of them is not among the elite at the top of the pyramid? Yet which of them has ever been arrogant because of the halo of being a rich man’s child?
On the contrary, they bow down to the dust and work harder than ordinary people.
They work hard not because they lack anything, but because they understand that what one has gained should be cherished all the more.
The reason behind these real-life contrasts lies precisely in the vast differences in parents’ education.
May all our children become rich
In fact, these days it is not at all that it is hard for poor families to produce distinguished sons, but that raising children richly in poor families has produced far too many wastrels.
In family education, raising a child richly in spirit is truly a hundred or a thousand times better than raising a child richly in material terms.
Many poor parents enrich their children materially:
they spend their whole lives giving their children the best conditions they can provide, not knowing that “giving a man a fish is not as good as teaching him to fish.”
Even a vast fortune will be eaten away if one keeps taking without striving to improve, and instead the children will be doted on and pampered into gluttonous, lazy good-for-nothings.
What these wealthy families enrich is the child’s spirit:
instilling in them the right outlook on the world, on life and on values, and teaching them to stand on their own as people. Even with family wealth and background, they also have the ability to face storms and accept setbacks.
They make them understand: society is a cruel arena, and if you do not work hard, whoever you are, you will be eliminated.
Some may say that well-off families can by themselves provide good educational resources for their children and more opportunities to see the wider world.
Their children are born with a silver spoon in their mouths, something others simply cannot match.
But the poor of the past did not make such excuses for themselves.
Go back a few decades: most families then were poor and blank, yet today’s famous tycoons all fought their way through wind and rain from there:
our family is not well off, so all the more we must study hard, be good people and strive to make something of ourselves.
No one’s success is destined at birth; it is just that people today are more willing to push the responsibility for failure onto opportunity and luck, while throwing away the effort and drive they once had.
That is why even those tycoons with vast fortunes today, in this age of material abundance, still insist on starting their offspring’s education by cultivating a most diligent and humble ordinary person.
And most ordinary families, even if they raise their children poor, should teach them to support themselves.
Even if you are poor, please don’t take all the blame for financial lack upon yourself; excessive doting and shouldering their burdens will in the end only produce cowards who accomplish nothing.
May all parents, however poor and hard-pressed, raise children who grow ever richer in spirit and in material things
