Sit with that question for a minute, because most parents have an answer ready. It is usually some version of make sure they still want to work. A listener building a trust for his children, both in their twenties, put it plainly: he is adding a clause saying the trust cannot be their primary source of income. A friend of his went further and wrote in a requirement that his children have a prenuptial agreement, partly so the parent never has to raise the subject directly.
I think both instincts come from the right place. I also think the clause-by-clause approach solves less than people hope, and creates problems that show up long after anyone can fix them.
The Fear Is About Drive, Not Money
When parents tell me they are worried about leaving money to their children, they almost never mean they are worried the money will be wasted. Nobody loses sleep over a child buying a house.
The worry is narrower and more specific. If the trust buys the house, does your daughter still build the career that would have bought it herself? Does your son get the experience of grinding through the years that shaped you? That is the real friction. You want to help, and you do not want to help so much that you remove the reason to get up in the morning. You want them to struggle a little, and not too much, and there is no formula for where that line sits.
Overfitting the Model
The temptation is to close every gap in advance. If my son does this. If my daughter marries that person. If they are working, if they are not, if they move away.
Put enough of them together and you have built a one-size-fits-all plan that fits no one. In statistics, we call this overfitting: tune a model tightly enough to every case you can imagine and it stops working on the case that actually arrives. Estate documents fail the same way. You anticipate everything and end up governing nothing well.
When the Clauses Meet Real Life
The education requirement is the clearest example. A trust says distributions are available for a college degree. Then one of your kids skips school, starts a business, and builds something genuinely successful. Now the person who least needs supervision is the one locked out, and the only way to unlock it is to go enroll somewhere and check a box that has lost all meaning.
I have seen versions of this with residency requirements, employment requirements, and relationship requirements. The provision is not wrong exactly. It is just frozen at the moment you wrote it, while your children keep living.
Give a Trustee Room to Judge
The alternative I would push hardest is trustee discretion. Find a good independent trustee, then give them values guidelines rather than a rulebook. Write down what you hope this money does and what you hope it does not do, and let a thoughtful person apply it to facts you could not have predicted.
That way the question becomes whether a request fits the spirit of what you built, which is the question you actually care about. A rule cannot ask that. A trustee can.
Structure That Encourages Rather Than Restricts
You can add shape without adding restrictions. Staggered distributions are the standard version: some at thirty, more at thirty-five, more at forty, so nothing arrives all at once and each tranche meets a slightly more established adult.
I like matching provisions even more. If your daughter saves toward a down payment, the trust matches what she brings. Now the trust accelerates effort instead of replacing it. That structure says something a restriction cannot: we will help you go faster, and you still have to move.
Have the Conversations Instead of Legislating Them
Which brings me back to the prenup clause. Requiring a prenuptial agreement in a trust document is a way of outsourcing a conversation you would rather not have. But your kids are in their twenties. This is exactly the right time to have it directly.
Tell them why you think a prenup matters. Explain what a trust is and why any restrictions exist. Pass along the reasoning, not just the rules. Every value you successfully transmit now is one fewer clause you need to draft later.
I know that is easier said than done, and sometimes those conversations have already been tried. Then yes, add some structure. You can put nearly anything in a trust, and I have seen it all, from drug testing to family voting requirements to rules about where someone lives or who they live with. State law will shape what actually holds up, so that conversation belongs with your attorney, and it is worth running the plan past us, your advisors, at the same time.
Just keep one thing in view as you add each provision. Every additional requirement is one more attempt to control assets from the grave. That rarely works as intended, and it shapes how your children remember you long after the money has been distributed.
This post is adapted from a recent episode of the Scholar Wealth Podcast. For more perspective on building trust provisions that age well, listen to the full podcast episode here.