What strong fathers really give their kids—and what data say about it

What are the financial implications of having a strong father figure in the home?

I’ve spent three decades interviewing CEOs, central bankers and family-business patriarchs for a living and if there’s one pattern that holds across every balance sheet I’ve ever looked at, it’s this: The healthiest households are the ones where the father runs his role less like a benevolent ATM and more like a disciplined portfolio manager—allocating capital (his time, his money, his attention), managing risk and crucially, knowing when to let an asset—his own child—take a calculated loss.

Equal partners

The first job of a strong father, long before he ever changes a diaper, is making his wife his equal. Not performatively. Operationally.

It doesn’t matter if he out-earns her 10 to one, or if she’s the one paying the mortgage while he handles the school run. A secure man doesn’t treat the family ledger as a scoreboard for his ego. He doesn’t need to be the bigger number to feel like the bigger man.

Turns out this isn’t just a nice sentiment—it’s empirically the difference between a marriage that lasts and one that doesn’t. A widely cited Kansas State University study tracking more than 4,500 couples found that arguments about money—not kids, not in-laws, not even infidelity—were the single strongest predictor of divorce.

The fights that sink marriages, in other words, aren’t about how much money there is in the bank account at 15th and 30th. They’re about whether both people feel it’s being handled fairly. A father who insists on being the sole decision-maker simply because he brings home the bigger paycheck isn’t running a tight ship. He’s running a silently chaotic household.

Filipino women have, for most of the past decade, outranked men in overall financial inclusion—account ownership, use of formal credit, even financial literacy scores, according to Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) surveys. Bank accounts specifically saw men briefly close the gap around 2021, but BSP’s latest 2025 survey shows women’s bank account ownership has overtaken men’s once again.

My take? A strong father isn’t threatened by a wife who out-saves or out-invests him. He’s quietly part of the reason that streak holds.

And for the fathers whose wives chose to stay home: There’s a reason economists have spent decades trying to put a number on unpaid domestic and care work. One widely cited estimate—admittedly a few decades old now—placed its value, in the Philippines, at roughly 38 percent of gross domestic product. A strong father treats his wife’s unpaid labor as exactly that: Labor, with real economic value, not a favor she owes him for the privilege of his paycheck

Training, not teaching

The second job is harder and it’s where a lot of well-meaning parents get it wrong: Training a child to be independent is not the same as teaching them to be independent.

Teaching is a lecture. Training is letting them fall, on purpose, while you’re standing close enough to make sure the fall doesn’t kill them.

This is the part that would make any behavioral finance professor proud. You cannot lecture a person into having an appropriate risk tolerance. It’s built the way calluses are built, through actual, felt friction. A child who has never once felt the sting of a bad decision will make far worse ones at 25, when the stakes are a mortgage instead of a missed curfew.

As a mother? I have nightmares imagining any of my children going through painful failure. I try my best to step aside so they can, with trembling insides.

I think often of something Jacob Ng once mentioned to me, almost as an aside—the youngest of the three Ng brothers now running the Rebisco empire their father built. He talked about how their fingers used to ache from packing biscuits after school, as kids, long before any of them sat behind an executive desk. Nobody handed him a department. He earned sore fingers first.

Megawide’s Edgar Saavedra is refreshingly unbothered about whether his own kids ever join the family business. “They are very young,” he told me. “If you force them to manage the business eventually, you could be setting them up for failure.”

That’s not indulgence, it’s actually the harder, more disciplined position. A father who lets a child fail at the right scale, at the right age, is doing risk management. One who either does everything for his kids or throws them into the deep end too soon is just mismanaging the timeline.

There are real data behind this, too. A Brigham Young University study published in the Journal of Family Issues, surveying nearly 2,000 young adults, found that those who learned proper money management from their parents—budgeting, saving, the unglamorous basics—didn’t just end up more financially stable. They also reported more fulfilling romantic relationships in their 20s and 30s.

Apparently, the discipline that keeps your wallet in order also keeps your love life calmer. Who knew compounding worked on intimacy, too?

In my years interviewing self-made founders and second-generation heirs, I’ve noticed a pattern, not a rule: fathers, more often than mothers, seem to default to exposure over protection. It’s not that they love less. It’s that they seem more willing to let the bruise happen now, on the theory that a bruise today is cheaper than a bankruptcy at 40. Mothers, understandably, often find this approach borderline barbaric. Both instincts are right. The trick is having both in the house.

Cutting the financial umbilical cord

The third skilland arguably the one that determines whether all the above actually matters, is the hardest for any parent to execute: teaching a child to cut the financial umbilical cord. Living on their own money. Earning their own keep. Getting into debt if they must, but paying it off themselves, without a parental bailout disguised as a “loan” everyone privately knows will never be repaid.

This is getting harder everywhere, not just here. A 2023 Pew Research study found that only 45 percent of American adults aged 18 to 34 considered themselves completely financially independent from their parents, despite this generation being more educated and higher-earning than their parents’ generation was at the same age. If it’s that bad in a country with no extended-family safety net to speak of, imagine the temptation in a culture built on utang na loob (debt of honor).

The entanglement starts earlier than most of us realize. A Unesco study, reported in this very paper a few years back, found that more than a third of Filipino families borrow money just to send their children to school, reportedly the highest such share among the countries surveyed. Money and parenting are tangled together here from the very first tuition deadline. A father who breaks that cycle, who teaches his kids to manage debt instead of normalizing it as a permanent family fixture, is doing something genuinely rare.

This is the strange math of strong fatherhood: he shelters his children most by refusing to shelter them completely. He stress-tests them while the stakes are still small: a part-time job, a budgeting mistake, a credit card bill they have to untangle themselves, so the real stress test later, the one with a mortgage or a business loan attached, doesn’t break them.

None of this, of course, describes every father, just as not every mother fits whatever mold we assign. Plenty of fathers are wonderful in ways that have nothing to do with moneyand plenty fall short in ways no column should pretend to diagnose.

Like mothers, fathers are complicated, individual people, not a composite sketch. But this Father’s Day, it’s worth leaning, just for a weekend, toward the strengths we already know how to recognize, instead of cataloguing every father’s shortfall against a standard none of us could meet either.

Looking for a gift this weekend to show your appreciation for all these things? Skip the necktie. He has six he’s never worn. If he taught you any of the above—to be his equal, to fall before you fly, to pay your own debts—the actual return on that investment is something no department store wraps in a paper bag.

Get him a health card or a wellness fund instead, something that protects the asset, so to speak. Or just take him to the movies, popcorn includedand let him pick the film. After a lifetime of teaching you to stand on your own two feet, the man has earned two hours of someone else doing the deciding. —CONTRIBUTED

(Salve Ibañez hosts Business Outlook on ANC and cohosts a program on dzMM Teleradyo. She runs Empower and Transform, OPC, a financial literacy and inclusion platform.)