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iQuestions Faculty, Ron Blue 
 
 
Question: 
 
Should I always treat my children equally in regard to finances? 
 
Answer: 
 
You know, we have five children, and they’re all married and have 
grandchildren, and we’ve gone through the parenting process. We now 
have the opportunity to see our children as adult children, and ask the 
question, “How did they do?”  
 
Dr. Howard Hendricks says that you don’t know whether you’ve been 
successful as a parent until your children have raised their children. 
 
Well, when it comes to wealth transfer and estate planning, you’ve got 
to ask the question, “How are the kids doing? And what principles can 
we use making our decisions relative to estate planning and wealth 
transfer. 
 
We asked our oldest son a number of years ago, “Tim, you know, 
people tell us we did a pretty good job of raising you kids. Can you tell 
me, what did we do right?” 
 
His answer, quite frankly, surprised us, because it wasn’t something 
that we did intentionally, in terms of saying, “We’re going to do this,” 
but he said, “You always took me seriously.” And what he meant by 
that was we treated him as an individual, not as a part of a group of 
five.  
 
Judy and I have developed a principle that comes from the wealth 
transfer and estate planning issue. We said that if you love your 
 
 
children equally, you will treat them uniquely—meaning that they have 
different needs, different personalities, different circumstances, and so 
just to treat them equally, from a financial standpoint, is in effect 
saying they’re not a unique individual. It is, in effect, dishonoring to 
them.  
 
We believe, and what we’ve communicated to our children, is that 
because we love them equally, we’re going to meet the needs that 
they have, we’re going to help them as they have needs, and we’re 
going to help them uniquely. 
 
This means that if we have child who has a particular need—maybe it’s 
a handicapped child or something, or we have a single-mom daughter, 
for example. Well, she has needs that are far different from her other 
siblings. Whatever we do for her, the other siblings understand that it 
doesn’t mean we’re going to do the same thing for them. Why? 
Because we love them equally, and we’re going to treat them as 
individuals. 
 
This is a really hard thing, when it comes to estate planning, because 
the tendency is to say, “I’m going to do everything equally.” I’m not 
saying doing it equally is wrong, but I think you do need to think 
through what you’re communicating, and make sure that you 
communicate whatever it is that you’ve decided with your children 
ahead of time. 
 
What Judy and I have communicated with our children is that we love 
them, we’re there to support them, but whatever we do for one of 
them is not necessarily what we would do for the others, because we 
want to be there as a parent, helping to meet their needs uniquely. 
 
We love them equally, and so we’re going to treat them uniquely. 
Blue -2- 
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