Bill Belew has raised 2 bi-cultural kids, now 34 and 30. And he and his wife are now parenting a 3rd, Mia, who is 8.

“Born with a silver spoon”: Some kids are born into an aristocratic or a very rich family. This is indeed true, but the extended truth of this saying goes much father than just being born rich.

In days when the peasants were dying in large numbers from plagues and illnesses the rich & affluent would give their babies a silver spoon to suck on to boost the immune system. This is a partial reason why the wealthy didn’t die when plagues were killing off most of the population, they could afford better sanitation and silver spoons, the peasants could not.

The idiom born with a silver spoon in his mouth means born rich. It means that one was born into a wealthy and influential family and was therefore able to enjoy privileges and advantages that only the wealthy can enjoy.

At the same time, there exist people like Obama, who weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth, still did well and did their parents proud. Maybe this explains why he used to eat dogs. Eating horses was reserved for rich kids. Romney is sensitive to perceptions that he grew up wealthy, so Obama’s “silver spoon” remark could strike a nerve. On the campaign trail, the former Massachusetts governor sometimes talks about his father, George, growing up poor and driving across the American West looking for work. When Mitt was born, the family was middle class, moving from Detroit to the tony suburb of Bloomfield Hills only after Mitt was a teenager, when his father took over American Motors. Although Mitt’s parents helped fund his college and graduate education, and helped him and his wife, Anne, buy their first home, he did not inherit his parents’ wealth; he amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune on his own, working at Bain Capital.

Thus, there are two sides of the coin, one where kids who were born with a silver spoon became super successful in life and two, some of them turned in to spoiled brats and make very little to no efforts to work hard on a career so they have seen it the easy way. The value of things from their eyes is way different from kids who have struggled all their life to get the basic necessities of life, forget the luxuries. Thus, the truth of the matter is, luxury or no luxury at birth, one can do great for himself, if he decides to make a difference.

Fact of the matter: Rich kids will always have things that you never will.

Talk to Bill and others about their experiences raising bi-cultural Japanese-American kids.