Marie Osmond stands by decision to not leave millions to kids; it breeds ‘laziness and entitlement’

Worth millions, singer and spokesperson Marie Osmond has made clear she doesn’t want that wealth along with “laziness and entitlement” passed on to her seven children and she recently defended that position as she asked, “Why would you enable your child to not try to be something?”

Growing up in the spotlight Osmond, now 63, has firsthand experience with the pitfalls of celebrity and previously voiced her concerns over unearned wealth in 2020. Recently she sat down with Us Weekly for an interview while promoting her lasting partnership with Nutrisystem and re-upped her insistence that inheritance would not be a benefit for her family.

“Man it must suck to be you,” Osmond recounted her son’s friend contending after her opinion had gone public. While said with a laugh, the performer went on in seriousness to state, “Why would you enable your child to not try to be something? I don’t know anybody who becomes anything if they’re just handed money.”

“To me, the greatest gift you can give your child is a passion to search out who they are inside and to work,” she continued.

The topic had originally come up for Osmond when she appeared on a 2020 episode of “The Talk” several weeks after the death of Kirk Douglas who had reportedly left a considerable amount of his multimillion-dollar fortune to charity.

“I think you do a great disservice to your children to just hand them a fortune because you take away the one most important gift you can give your children — and that’s the ability to work,” she said at the time.

“You see it a lot in rich families where the kids don’t know what to do so they get in trouble, so I just let them be proud of what they make and I’m going to give mine to my charity.”

The panel seemed mixed at the time with Sheryl Underwood expressing her own desire to “have a leg up” and Sharon Osbourne noting the wealth she built with her rock star husband Ozzy Osbourne “goes to my children,” because, “I don’t want somebody that never met my husband owning his name and likeness and selling t-shirts everywhere. No, it stays in the Osbourne family.”

Regardless of detractors, Osmond has remained adamant about her position and added to Us Weekly how she herself continues to take on new challenges and attempts to learn lessons from failures.

“That’s one of my rules with my kids. If you start it, you finish it, you don’t ever have to do it again, but you gotta finish. And, I just think all [an inheritance] does is breed laziness and entitlement,” she argued. ”

I worked hard and I’m gonna spend it all and have fun with my husband,” the singer joked before clarifying, “I’m actually gonna leave a lot of it to help people.”

Ultimately, she expressed, “I love them to learn. You don’t love something if you don’t earn it. And so, even when they get their first car, you pay for half of it, get a job, and learn that self-worth that that gives you.”

Kevin Haggerty

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