Why do founders who came from nothing end up overcompensating with their kids?

Because the scarcity terror they lived through becomes a vow they keep without realizing it. Kris Kluver, in The Dysfunctional Family Office, has Robert Mitchell describe lying awake at night in his early years, terrified of how he'd pay rent or whether the car would start. He swore his kids would never feel that. He kept the vow. He also accidentally raised kids without the resilience the struggle had given him. The pattern is consistent across founders who built from nothing. The vow comes from love. The unintended consequence is kids who never had to develop the grit, fear management, or scrappy problem-solving the founder built unconsciously. Most founders don't see the trade until their adult kids are visibly different from who the founder hoped they would become.