What follows is a tragic story of abusive marriages, anorexia, depression and endless personal tragedy. Early on, the media dubbed Hutton the "Poor Little Rich Girl," a name that reinforced in our culture the notion that children raised with too much money and not enough parental supervision are doomed to lead rotten lives.

Today, with the number of affluent households in the United States greater than ever before, Hutton’s story still resonates as a cautionary tale. Yet her experience repeats with alarming frequency. That the children and grandchildren of America’s wealth creators should be ignorant of the values that made their families’ affluence possible is a cause of great concern for many parents, and rightly so. After all, for these wealth creators—many of whom were raised with middle-class values—affluence is the result of effort expended, often over the course of an entire adult life. In the absence of that expenditure, money can be a psychological albatross that distorts reality, saps ambition and diminishes any sense of self-worth. Fear of this sad result leads increasing numbers of high-net-worth parents to turn to wealth advisors, attorneys, psychologists and other professionals for help raising their children.

In this issue, we speak with four estate planning attorneys from Worth’s 2007 Top 100 Attorneys list about how they work with their clients on structuring estates in a way that makes wealth an opportunity rather than a burden for heirs. Though hardly a complete answer to the challenges that affluent parents face, the ability to bequeath comfort to their children without robbing them of the opportunity to learn through struggle has become a central goal of many estate plans these days. As part of our annual Top 100 coverage, lawyers Jon Gallo, Donna Morgan, Todd M. Villarrubia and Martin M. Shenkman offer excellent insights on the various ways parents can actually motivate their children.

As Gallo observes, using legal instruments such as wills and trusts to motivate children and teach them the value of money is a relatively new practice. In fact, prior to 1980, the notion that a lawyer—or for that matter anyone outside the nuclear family—should play any role at all in child rearing struck many as preposterous, a violation of the accepted norms of parental responsibility. The original goal of estate planning, Gallo says, was to keep the IRS from getting its hands on family wealth. By the 1980s, however, he says that his estate planning practice "increasingly involved parents looking for ways to motivate their emotionally and financially immature 20- and 30-year-olds." The tables had turned. Instead of using wills and trusts to keep their money from going to the government, affluent parents began using these legal instruments to keep all their money from going to their children.

It should be noted that in a society with a seemingly limitless capacity for schadenfreude, parents trying to deal effectively with this issue will find little sympathy outside of their peer group. Headlines about a debutante’s most recent trip to rehab only reinforce the all-American yet somewhat dubious adage that money cannot buy happiness, and they play well in the media. Yet beyond this often deafening background static, the affluent parents’ dilemma persists: How can we share our wealth with our children, but still teach them the values that brought us to where we are today?

Barbara Hutton died of a heart attack in May 1979, alone in a suite in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. It was widely reported at the time that of her $50 million inheritance, only $3,000 remained.