Money was never discussed in our house. I don’t mean we were poor and the subject was painful — though there were years that were tight. I mean that the actual facts of our financial life were maintained behind a closed door that nobody knocked on. My parents paid bills in private. Discussions about cost happened in lowered voices. When I asked what things cost, the answer was usually ‘enough.’ I arrived at adulthood with a good education, a reasonable work ethic, and absolutely no framework for understanding money as something that could be examined, planned for, or discussed without anxiety.
The closed door of the family finances
Financial secrecy in households of the 1960s and 70s generation was so common it barely registered as unusual. Money was an adult matter, and children were not adults. To discuss finances openly was to burden them with worry that wasn’t theirs to carry, or to risk the dignity that came from appearing to manage, regardless of the reality behind the appearance.
There was also class anxiety embedded in the silence. In working-class and lower-middle-class households especially, the management of money was a private performance of adequacy. You might be closer to the edge than anyone knew, but you kept that knowledge close. To speak about it was to make it real in a way that felt dangerous.
Research on financial socialization published in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues has consistently found that adults who grew up in homes where money was not discussed openly show higher rates of financial anxiety, less confidence in financial decision-making, and a greater tendency to avoid financial planning — not because they lack intelligence or discipline, but because they never acquired the basic vocabulary for treating money as a manageable domain.
What silence about money teaches
The silence taught several things simultaneously. It taught that money was a source of shame, regardless of how much or how little you had. It taught that financial difficulty was private, to be managed alone. It taught that asking about money was rude, intrusive, somehow common.
And it taught, most consequentially, that financial reality was something that happened to you rather than something you shaped. The family finances were a closed system — opaque, managed by adults, apparently beyond discussion. The child who grew up inside that opacity didn’t develop a relationship with money. They developed a relationship with the anxiety money produced, which is a different thing entirely.
The anxiety that arrived without a name
What I carried into adulthood wasn’t financial incompetence — I learned the mechanics of budgeting and saving through necessity. What I carried was a specific physical response to financial decisions that had no rational basis. The dread before opening a bank statement. The avoidance of looking at credit card balances. The way conversations about money in relationships produced a low-grade panic that I managed by changing the subject.
I was in my forties before I understood this as inherited anxiety rather than personal weakness. Before I connected the closed door of my parents’ finances to the closed feeling I had whenever money required my attention.
Financial therapist Brad Klontz’s research on money scripts — the unconscious beliefs about money transmitted through family systems — identifies avoidance and silence as producing what he calls ‘money vigilance’ and ‘money avoidance’ scripts that operate in adults largely below the level of conscious awareness. These scripts, he argues, are among the most significant predictors of financial behavior in adulthood.
How the inheritance transfers
The financial silence transfers across generations with remarkable fidelity, because it transmits not through instruction but through atmosphere. Children don’t learn to be anxious about money from what their parents say. They learn it from what their parents don’t say — from the lowered voices, the subject changes, the way the room shifts when the topic comes up.
Many adults who grew up in financially silent households are now raising children they want to protect from the same inheritance. But protection, it turns out, isn’t the same as openness. The impulse to shield children from financial reality reproduces the silence even when that’s the last thing the parent intends.
Breaking the silence
What financial therapists and educators consistently recommend is something that feels, to people of this generation, almost transgressive: talking about money. Actually, directly, age-appropriately talking about it. Not to burden children with adult anxiety, but to normalize money as a subject that can be examined, that has a logic, that is manageable with attention and planning.
The families that do this produce adults with a fundamentally different relationship to financial reality — not necessarily wealthier, but less afraid. Less avoidant. More able to look at the numbers and respond to them rather than away from them.
Final thoughts
The silence around money in those households wasn’t malicious. It was protective, in the only way those parents knew.
The inheritance it created is real. But inheritances, unlike genes, can be consciously refused.
