Several years into working with a young adult client, I realized there was an entire part of his life we had barely touched.
We had talked about relationships, family expectations, work, and the complicated task of becoming his own person. Yet something still felt unnamed. When we began talking directly about money and family wealth, a deeper layer of the work opened.
He spoke about uncertainty around when to disclose his financial background and fears that people might judge him, use him, or make assumptions about his character. What had looked like ordinary relational anxiety began to make more sense as a struggle around trust, belonging, privilege, and the fear of being misperceived.
That conversation gave language to dynamics that had been present all along. It also led me to think more deeply about three questions:
- What meaning does money carry for the children and families we serve?
- What do psychologists bring into these conversations ourselves?
- How can we ask about money in ways that are developmentally appropriate and clinically useful?
It required me to look honestly at myself.
As psychologists, many of us are trained to ask about family systems, culture, identity, and development. Conversations about money can feel unusually private and emotionally loaded. Wealth can raise additional questions about privilege, inequity, status, and power.
We naturally bring our own experiences into these conversations, and the research increasingly reflects that. In a recent qualitative study, Avital (2026) found that discussions of money could evoke shame, guilt, envy, and other reactions in psychotherapists, while clinicians had limited opportunities to examine their own relationship with money. Yager and Kay (2022) similarly describe money as relevant to assessment, case formulation, treatment planning, and supervision, while noting that trainees often receive little guidance on addressing money in clinical care.
Social class can shape the therapeutic relationship in ways that are easy to miss. Liu and colleagues’ Social Class Worldview Model highlights how our beliefs about class, opportunity, and status can influence how we understand clients. Research also suggests that clinicians may view similar clients differently depending on social class (Thompson et al., 2019), and that differences in how clients and clinicians understand a client’s social position can affect the therapeutic relationship (Nakash et al., 2021).
For psychologists, self-awareness creates space to notice when our histories and assumptions are shaping what we hear, pursue, or interpret.
For me, that work is personal. As a child of refugees, I have had to examine inherited money narratives about scarcity, safety, obligation, and what it means to have “enough.” I have learned to pay attention to the assumptions I carry into the room. Equating wealth with ease could obscure the person in front of me. Viewing financial hardship primarily through the lens of individual choice could obscure structural constraints. My own discomfort with money could also reinforce the silence that keeps important family dynamics unexplored.
Asking about money gives us another way to understand the psychological lives of our clients.
Children Learn About Money Before We Teach Them
Children and adolescents learn about money long before adults formally explain it. They are constantly observing, absorbing, and making meaning from what happens around them. They notice who has choices, who is expected to sacrifice, and who gets to make decisions.
Research on family financial socialization identifies parental modeling, parent-child conversations, and direct financial experiences as important ways children develop financial attitudes and behaviors. Children understand that money carries meaning well before they know a family’s bank balance. They are already forming ideas about safety, responsibility, and fairness.
Money is developmental, relational, cultural, and emotional.
This matters as families navigate both significant economic inequality and a major intergenerational wealth transition. Cerulli Associates projects that approximately $124 trillion will transfer through 2048. At the same time, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances continues to document substantial disparities in household wealth.
A psychologically informed conversation about wealth includes attention to inequity as well as emotional complexity across the socioeconomic spectrum.
Families with fewer resources may struggle with chronic stress, instability, and shame. Families with more resources may struggle with guilt, entitlement concerns, or fears that money will distort relationships. Families experiencing upward mobility may face loyalty conflicts, survivor’s guilt, and the disorientation of becoming the first in a family to have access to certain choices.
The circumstances differ, but many of the developmental questions overlap. How do we help children become grounded, capable, and responsible adults? How do we talk about privilege in ways that support perspective and responsibility? How do young people learn about obligation, generosity, and stewardship?
These are child and adolescent psychology questions.
Preparing Children, Alongside Assets
Within wealth advising and family enterprise, technical planning represents one part of preparing the next generation. Estate plans, trusts, and governance structures can be thoughtfully designed while families also navigate the emotional and developmental questions that accompany them.
When should parents talk to children about wealth?
How much information is developmentally appropriate?
How can families prepare adolescents for responsibility?
As child and adolescent psychologists, we have something important to offer. We understand that a seven-year-old, a fourteen-year-old, and a twenty-four-year-old make meaning of money in different ways.
A developmentally informed approach helps families ask better questions. What is this child ready to understand? What values are the parents hoping to transmit? How do culture, trauma, migration, or earlier experiences of scarcity shape what money means in this family?
Starting the Conversation
Money can be clinically relevant even when it is absent from the presenting concern.
Clinicians can introduce the subject during routine contextual assessment, alongside questions about work, education, housing, and family roles. Normalizing the reason for asking can help:
“We ask everyone about financial stress and family messages about money because they can affect relationships and emotional well-being.”
Other entry points might include:
“What did you learn about money in your family growing up?”
“Are there ways money affects stress or decision-making in your family?”
“What do you hope your child understands about saving, sharing, or spending?”
These questions remain firmly within psychological practice. Our role is to explore the relationships, developmental needs, and family patterns attached to money. Clients seeking investment, estate-planning, or other technical guidance can benefit from our collaboration with other qualified professionals.
As a Board-Certified Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychologist, I have come to see the psychological dimensions of money and wealth as an extension of my specialty. My involvement with the Financial Therapy Association and, more recently, the Purposeful Planning Institute has shown me how often financial professionals encounter questions that are fundamentally human: trust, belonging, and preparation of the next generation.
Psychologists who want to deepen their understanding can begin with the American Psychological Association’s resources on socioeconomic status, the Financial Therapy Association, and the Journal of Financial Therapy. APA’s guidelines for psychological practice with people with low income and economic marginalization encourage psychologists to examine their own assumptions and biases related to social class and economic circumstances. Comparable guidance for working with affluent or high-net-worth populations remains limited, making broader research on social class, financial psychology, and family systems critical.
Money is already part of the psychological lives of the families we serve. It shapes opportunity, identity, relationships, belonging, and legacy. Thoughtful questions can give families permission to explore stories they may rarely discuss elsewhere.
What I learned from that young adult client was the importance of recognizing when money is carrying additional meaning about trust, belonging, and safety.
Preparing the rising generation includes preparing children for the emotional, relational, cultural, and developmental realities that accompany resources and responsibility.
Psychologists already have many of the skills this work requires. We know how to approach family narratives, developmental readiness, and the gap between stated values and lived behavior.
We can begin by asking one more question:
What did your family teach you about money, and what did no one ever say?
The answer may open a part of the family’s story that has been present all along.
References
Aladangady, A., Bricker, J., Chang, A. C., Goodman, S., Krimmel, J., Moore, K. B., Reber, S., Volz, A. H., & Windle, R. A. (2023). Changes in U.S. family finances from 2019 to 2022: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. https://doi.org/10.17016/8799
Avital, S. (2026). A qualitative exploration of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists’ subjectivity in relation to money matters and the implications thereof on the analytic process. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 42(1), 76–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.70010
Cerulli Associates. (2024, December 5). Cerulli anticipates $124 trillion in wealth will transfer through 2048. https://www.cerulli.com/press-releases/cerulli-anticipates-124-trillion-in-wealth-will-transfer-through-2048
Juntunen, C. L., Pietrantonio, K. R., Hirsch, J. K., Greig, A., Thompson, M. N., Ross, D. E., & Peterman, A. H. (2022). Guidelines for psychological practice for people with low-income and economic marginalization: Executive summary. American Psychologist, 77(2), 291–303. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000826
LeBaron, A. B., & Kelley, H. H. (2021). Financial socialization: A decade in review. Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 42(Suppl. 1), 195–206. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-020-09736-2
Liu, W. M., Soleck, G., Hopps, J., Dunston, K., & Pickett, T., Jr. (2004). A new framework to understand social class in counseling: The Social Class Worldview Model and Modern Classism Theory. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 32(2), 95–122. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-1912.2004.tb00364.x
Nakash, O., Cruz-Gonzalez, M., Lincoln, A. K., Banerjee, S., & Alegría, M. (2021). Similarities in client-clinician perceptions of subjective social status and its association to similarities in the quality of working alliance and client anxiety symptoms. Psychotherapy Research, 31(8), 1079–1091. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2021.1900618
Thompson, M. N., Chin, M. Y., & Kring, M. (2019). Examining mental health practitioners’ perceptions of clients based on social class and sexual orientation. Psychotherapy, 56(2), 217–228. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000222
Yager, J., & Kay, J. (2022). Money matters in psychiatric assessment, case formulation, treatment planning, and ongoing psychotherapy: Clinical psychoeconomics. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 210(11), 811–817. https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0000000000001552
Huong Diep, PsyD, ABPP
Correspondence: huongdiep@gmail.com