# The Difficulties of Giving > [!deck] > How unspoken assumptions can make a gift a burden. Most gifts are given with little thought for how they will land. A parent who treats a child as a lifelong responsibility gives to discharge that duty and takes quiet pride in having done so. But the child seldom reads the gesture the same way. Consider a parent helping with the deposit on a first home. To the giver, settling on the right sum is a deliberate act of care; the parents mulling over the right amount to give, what is too little, what is too much, and what do they need. To the recipient, it is a windfall. Or take money set aside for a child's education, framed as an investment for their future: the giver intends generosity and freedom of choice, but the recipient inherits a silent expectation of growth, of progress reports, of dividends—a loss of agency no one requested and no one explicitly imposed. The misunderstanding takes root in that silence. It grows into burden, embarrassment, or entitlement—antithetical to the spirit of a gift. To give safely, one must give explicitly. A gift of wealth devoid of clear, mutual intention is not a gift, it's a transfer. > [!source] Inspired by the reading of *Complete Family Wealth*.