A few months ago I picked up my ten-year-old granddaughter after school in New York. The school (public) is surrounded by a double fence. As I approached the gate  I saw a large group of people (almost entirely women) gathered to collect the kids. The interesting thing about this group of at least sixty women was that half—if not more— were not of the same skin color as the white kids they were collecting. It was a diverse mix of Black, mixed race, Asian, South American, and so on.

My conclusion was easy to reach: the women whose skin color did not match that of the children were paid caregivers—nannies, babysitters, possibly some maids. In New York City it is especially easy to witness this phenomenon because any child under age eleven must be accompanied to and from school by a responsible adult.  Other large cities  probably have a similar, but less visible, demographic.

In America white children have been cared for—and often raised—by women of color for centuries. In the South, before the end of the Civil War, the children of slaveholders were largely raised by slave women—even nursed by them.

In 1999 I wrote a book for The Inheritance Project, now out of print, called Like a Second Mother: Nannies and Housekeepers in the Lives of Wealthy Children. I interviewed wealthy adults who had  been raised by caregivers; I interviewed nannies, babysitters, maids; I even interviewed a few mothers who spoke frankly about their relationships with their children’s caregivers.

What I learned was astonishing, moving, and sometimes disturbing. Although it is hard to generalize too much, many of the caregivers—living or dead—were Black women. (At that time most of them were American-born. That pattern has changed significantly.) When a caregiver comes into a child’s life at an early age, the child may not be aware of racial differences; what they know—and what they care about most— is who loves them. Because many children spend more of their waking hours with their caregivers than with their own mothers, if the caregivers are warm and nurturing, and if their mothers a) aren’t home much; b) are distracted by their careers or their social life; c) are not particularly interested in spending much time with their children, the kids end up bonding with the caregivers.

Bonding with a paid caregiver—particularly a caregiver who is not white—can have profound consequences for a child. One man I interviewed referred to the Black maid who was a constant in his family for many years, “my Black mama.” He told me:

I got a lot of my mothering from Josephine because my mother is aloof and unemotional. She wasn’t a hugger, so I’d go to the kitchen to get my hugs. I think my mother realized intuitively that Josephine was giving us something she couldn’t give. One of my earliest memories is of falling down and scraping my knee. Josephine was coming around the corner, and I jumped into her her arms. Josephine was the one who consoled me, not my mother. . . . In some ways I think she was more advanced than my mom and dad. She was better able to connect with me at a soul level. I felt kind of conflicted because there were so  many qualities I saw in her that I felt were lacking in my parents.

I recently read the novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett—now also a movie. I couldn’t put the book down, partly because I rediscovered what I  had already learned when I talked to the people who are in my book: Black women raising white children, and loving them (though not always), white children being more attached to their Black caregivers than to their own mothers, and white children observing how their parents treated ”the help” in ways that were demeaning. If you haven’t yet read this wonderful book, please do.

In the previous blog post I recommended inter vivos trusts, or “living trusts,” as the best option for wealthy parents (or grandparents) who want to give money to their offspring in trust.

Once again, this is not a simple subject: there are, in fact, a number of kinds of revocable trusts that may be distributed to inheritors. The two most commonly used kinds of revocable living trusts are: simple trusts and what are usually called “stepped-in trusts.”

A simple trust is generally simple in nature: a certain amount of wealth is distributed to the beneficiaries at a certain age. The most common ages for distribution are eighteen and twenty-one. Such trusts may allow the beneficiaries full control of the assets, or they may pay out distributions (normally, distributions of income) at set times—for example, every six months or once a year. (With all trusts there always has to be a trustee: either an individual or an “institutional trustee”—most commonly a trust company.) Giving beneficiaries full control of their assets is very risky, and I would not recommend it. It is far too easy—and has happened far too often—for beneficiaries with full access to their wealth to run through their money in a few months, or a year or two. It can be a learning experience, for sure, but the many down sides outweigh this “advantage.”

A stepped-in trust is structured to distribute amounts of money over a period of time—every four or five years, for example. Often these trusts are dissolved when the beneficiaries reach a certain age—twenty-five or thirty, for example, or thirty-five. At that point the beneficiaries receive full control of their assets.

In  the book Labors of Love: The Legacy of Inherited Wealth, Book II, a parent and inheritor, Diana Garrett (a pseudonym) describes how she and her husband created trusts for their children. The lawyer they chose to work with recommended “that it was probably a good idea to make sure that the children would have to work as young adults. That was a wise thing to have planted in our heads when we were young adults, and it has proved its wisdom. . . . [Each of our children would get] a chunk of money—not enough to be dangerous—when they’re twenty-one. It’s just about enough to buy a car. And when they’re twenty-five, the trusts . . . will distribute to them, but even then they will receive fairly small amounts—enough to go to graduate school or buy a house.”  The Garrett family is blessed in a number of ways: all the children—now adults—are happy and productive. Much of their success and happiness can be attributed to the good parenting they received, but it can also be credited, in part, to the structure of their trusts.