ARE YOUR CHILDREN CHOOSING THE FAMILY BUSINESS OR BEING ABSORBED BY IT?

The question every family business patriarch eventually has to face

Do you know what your children's passions are? What are their goals and dreams? What would they do even if they weren't being paid for it? If the subject of the business doesn't come up in conversation, what do your children talk about the most? What are they good at, really good at?

Almost every family business patriarch I have ever worked alongside struggles with that question. They either refuse to admit, even to themselves, that the question exists, or they have no way to articulate it, and they don't want to.

No matter how much you run away from it, as the patriarch in a family business, the question is still there. It always will be. It always should be. It tends to surface in private. Your child pauses before answering a friend's casual enquiry. A look across the dining table that lasts a fraction of a second longer than it should. A discomfort is briefly noticed and quickly buried when a child accepts a role in the enterprise with a smile that doesn't quite reach their eyes.

I know the question because I was the child, and then the patriarch. I lived on both sides of it across thirty-six years. And the question deserves to be asked and answered honestly by the person best positioned to do so before the answer no longer matters.

If my children were being absorbed by the family business, rather than choosing it, how would I know?

You might not find the answer by asking your children. Children, especially the children of patriarchs, are extraordinarily skilled at producing the answers their context requires. Their apparent enthusiasm for the enterprise is not evidence either way.

What you can examine is the environment in which they were raised. Genuine choice requires 3 things that most family business systems, however loving, struggle to provide in a reliable form:

• A real alternative to weigh.

• The structural permission to pursue it.

• And the psychological formation is sufficient to trust their own judgement over the weight of what has always been expected.

Evaluate the environment, not the child 

Do the alternatives genuinely exist, with the same level of family investment in their possibility?

When the child shows interest in something else at fifteen, at seventeen, at twenty-one, does the family system treat that signal as a serious option, or does it bend the signal back into the gravitational orbit of the family enterprise?

Are the child's psychometric results, academic interests, and early career experiments treated as data about who this person is becoming, or as detours to be patiently endured before the real path, the expected path, is resumed?

These are uncomfortable questions. The discomfort proves you're looking in the right place. A child who is genuinely choosing is a child whose alternatives are real. A child whose alternatives were never quite real has not yet chosen. Without deliberate intervention, they are likely to be absorbed rather than to choose freely.

Have I been doing something wrong? Do I not love them well enough?

That question is almost always the next one to surface, and it will derail an honest examination if it is not addressed directly.

The gravitational field of the company is not a moral failure. It's not a consequence of insufficient love. In my own family, the love of my father and grandfather for the enterprise, and for the sons who would inherit it, was real and considerable. And yet the gravitational field operated anyway. It operated through:

• The things they didn't realise they were doing

• The texture of dinner-table conversation

• The assumption embedded in the use of pronouns

• The geography of school holidays

• The unexamined certainty about what a man's life was supposed to look like.

None of it was deliberate. All of it was powerfully effective.

The same is true in your family. The company's gravitational field operates through the structure of the system, not through the intentions of the people inside it. You can love your children completely and still have produced, by the sheer ambient pressure of a multigenerational enterprise, the conditions under which their choice has not been, and may not yet be, genuinely free.

Recognising this is not an indictment of your love. It is a recognition of the structural fact that love alone does not produce choice. Choice requires the deliberate engineering of conditions under which the child can experience themselves as separate from the family enterprise long enough, and substantively enough, to make a decision that is honestly their own.

What we do not transform, we transmit. — Richard Rohr

Richard Rohr names the mechanism with precision. Mark Wolynn, writing on inherited family traumas, shows how it is transmitted across generations. In an ordinary family, this transmission is psychological. In a business family, it's built into the structure of the enterprise itself, into the shareholdings, the succession arrangements, the assumed continuity. The patterns do not transmit through deliberate replication.

They are transmitted through silence, the unspoken assumptions, and they are absorbed before they can be examined. They quietly affirm that the business and the child are not separate things, but rather a single entity that doesn't require renegotiation.

The bridge generation, the generation between the founders and the incoming generation, doesn't merely receive what came before and pass it on unchanged. It decides, consciously or unconsciously, what is absorbed, transformed, or allowed to end.

Is it too late?

This is the most painful question that needs answering. I won't pretend that the answer is a comfortable one.

For some, the honest answer is partly yes and partly no.

Yes, the gravitational field has already operated. Your child is already inside the enterprise or has declined it in a way that may have been reactive, rather than a genuine, carefully thought-through decision.

No, in the sense that almost nothing between a parent and an adult child is irreversibly fixed in stone. The conversation that should have happened at seventeen can still happen at thirty, or forty, or fifty. It will be a different conversation. It may be a harder one. But it is still available.

For others, the answer is, unfortunately, more likely to be only yes. The patterns are already operating in the next generation as they operated in the last. The grandchildren are even now absorbing what your children absorbed before they could examine it for themselves. And the momentum of the system is producing a further generation that will be absorbed by the same gravitational field. If you are in that position, even if it's too late for the children, it's not too late for the grandchildren. The work of interrupting the pattern can begin at any point in the sequence, and the generation that does the interrupting is the one that decides what is, or isn't, carried forward.

The mistake is treating the question of whether it is too late as a yes or no question. It's not. It's more nuanced than that.

There is a relationship with the older child, which is in one condition.

There is a relationship with the younger child, who is in another.

There is the conversation that has happened and the conversation that has not happened.

There is the trust structure that has already been signed and the trust structure that has not yet been finalised.

Each of these is a separate axis, and the work required is to examine each axis honestly, rather than to retreat into a global verdict.

What is too late for some things may still be early for others. The discipline is to find which is which.

What do I do now?

A general principle is more evident and more useful when seen in action, so here's what I did.

When my sons, Mitchell and Cameron, entered the orbit of the Dickinson Group, I realised that the gravitational field that had absorbed me was beginning to operate on them.

The decision I made was not a single dramatic act. It was an accumulation of smaller decisions taken over several years. Each decision small enough not to be seen as historic, but cumulatively sufficient to interrupt the pattern.

The first decision was structural

Before any formal engagement with the family enterprise became possible, both sons would have had independent careers in fields unconnected to the family business. For a substantive period of years, they could experience themselves as competent in their own right, under conditions that belonged entirely to them. This wasn't some token gesture. And it wasn't optional.

The second decision was financial

The shareholding architecture would not bind them. The proceeds of the eventual sale of the Dickinson Group would be held in trust, on terms designed to deliver optionality rather than obligation. They wouldn't inherit a recapitalisation requirement. They'd inherit financial possibility in the service of lives they were free to design for themselves.

The third decision was relational 

My love for my sons would be unconditional; in a way, it hadn't always been in the generation before mine. Worth would not be calibrated to function. The relationship would survive and outlast their decision about whether to enter the business or not. This was the hardest part of the work for me. I had to dismantle the conditional patterns I'd absorbed without being aware of them.

The governing principle across all 3 was a single phrase: invitation, not inevitability.

Mitchell entered the business. He did so with his eyes open, after his independent experience outside of the company. His role within the company is genuinely his, rather than symbolically conferred. Cameron is forging a new, independent path, rather than following an inherited map. Both choices are equally honoured. And that's the difference between invitation and inevitability.

Neither outcome was guaranteed. Either son could have chosen differently. The point, though, was not to engineer a particular result, but to ensure that whatever result emerged was the result of genuine choice, not gravitational absorption. The outcome was not the success of my decision. The success was the presence of choice. The outcome of that choice belongs to my sons.

Giving or not giving choice is daunting for a father. It comes from deep love and concern. But 2 things will always be true: a father is a father for the rest of his, or his children's, lives, and he may never know whether he got it right.

What is the cost of not asking?

The cost of not asking whether your children are choosing the family business, or being absorbed by it, is the cost of continuing the patriarchal succession pattern. Unless someone, somewhere in the sequence, interrupts the pattern. The pattern is incapable of interrupting itself. It transmits, intact, across every generation that fails to question it.

Are your children choosing the family business or being absorbed by it is not, in essence, a question about your children. It's a question about the structural conditions you have either deliberately constructed or unconsciously perpetuated. The children are the inheritors of the conditions. The conditions are yours to examine.

Where, in the conditions your children grew up inside, were, or are, those conditions operating without your knowledge?

That question is not an accusation. It's an invitation. Your answer is not a verdict on your parenting. It should be the foundation the next generation deserves.

Once the question has been honestly asked, it can't be unasked. And the families who have asked it, in my experience, are not the families whose children have been absorbed by the enterprise. They are the families whose children, eventually, choose freely. The families with whom I work are not distinguished by unusual circumstances. They are distinguished by the decision to ask the question that most family business systems are structured to avoid.

What cost are your children paying?