Passing down healthy habits is the most enduring inheritance. Research shows generational health, not just wealth, shapes lifelong well-being.
For generations, families have prioritized passing down wealth — carefully structuring inheritances, minimizing estate taxes, and setting up trusts to secure financial futures. The recent One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Congress has brought major changes to inheritance taxes, estate planning, and charitable giving, reshaping how wealth transitions between generations. But while financial legacies fluctuate with policy and markets, there’s one inheritance that remains timeless and unescapable: generational health — and new research shows we’re failing to pass it on. Fortunately, the very tactics that preserve capital can be repurposed to preserve well-being — if families start treating preventive care and healthy habits as aggressively as they treat portfolio rebalancing.
The Shifting Landscape of Wealth and Well-Being
A landmark study published in JAMA in July 2025 delivers a stark verdict: the health of U.S. children has slid backward on nearly every front during the past 17 years. Researchers examined 170 separate indicators — from mortality and chronic disease to mental health, obesity, sleep quality, and even the timing of puberty — and found a steady, cross-cutting decline. The erosion is neither confined to a single diagnosis nor limited to one demographic; it is a broad-based downturn that spans the entire pediatric population.
Pediatric cardiologists report rising hypertension rates, especially in those with unmet social needs, while another study reports that nighttime screen exposure is eroding attention function and cognitive performance in high school standardized tests. At the other end of the spectrum, rural counties face severe pediatrician shortages, forcing families to drive hours for routine care. The common thread: money alone is a weak vaccine against lifestyle-driven disease.
Estate planning dominates conversations about generational wealth, yet these findings suggest we’re bequeathing our children a far more troubling inheritance: a health crisis that’s worsening with each generation. Unlike financial assets, health isn’t something future generations can easily rebuild once lost. And while tax codes evolve, the fundamentals of well-being — nutrition, movement, preventive care, and emotional resilience — remain the bedrock of a thriving life.
Why Health Is the Ultimate Inheritance
The JAMA findings underscore that wealth means little without health. Consider:
Chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, once considered “adult-onset,” now appear routinely in children
Mental health crises have surged, with anxiety, depression, and behavioral disorders limiting potential
Lifestyle-driven diseases (obesity, sleep disorders) are often preventable but require early intervention
Developmental milestones are being disrupted, with earlier puberty and reduced physical activity
“This broad scope of deterioration highlights the need to address root causes,” the study authors note. The solution? Families that prioritize health pass down not just genes but behaviors: shared meals, active routines, stress management, and regular medical care. These habits compound over lifetimes, reducing suffering and medical expenses.
Building a Health Legacy: Where to Start
The axiom “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” has evolved from folk wisdom to a national imperative. As former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona observes: “We focus a lot more now on the noninfectious, non-communicable diseases that are largely driven by our behaviors: sedentary activity, weight gain, type-two diabetes, living in a stressful environment, not eating healthy food. All of those things have a significant toll. And so prevention is in the forefront today.”
Model Healthy Behaviors – Children mirror parents. Cooking nutritious meals, limiting processed foods, staying active, and managing stress sets a blueprint. Each home-cooked meal reduces exposure to processed foods. Replacing just one sugary drink daily with water could result in a meaningful reduction in caloric intake and associated weight gain.
Health insurance: Make robust coverage a generational priority—do an annual audit for network fit (must-have specialists/centers), mental-health access, out-of-network caps, prior-authorization hot spots, and travel/evacuation coverage; assign a benefits point person and fund HSAs as “health reserves.”
Treat Prevention Like Portfolio Rebalancing – Schedule annual physicals, dental checkups, and mental-health screenings with the same rigor you schedule a Q4 tax-loss harvest. Catching hypertension at 12 saves thousands later in medication, lost workdays, and premium surcharges.
Foster Open Dialogue – Break stigmas around mental health and body image through honest conversations.
Engage Navigation Allies – Patient-navigator programs, widely used by self-funded employers, cut avoidable emergency-department visits 43 percent in pilot studies. Think of navigators as family-office equivalents for care: they book follow-ups, decode bills, and keep relatives on evidence-based paths
Investment philosophy of health: Treat health like a long-horizon portfolio — compound small daily habits, stay invested with routine prevention, rebalance as life changes, and hedge big risks (vaccines, safety, insurance).
The Long-Range Return on Prevention
Consider the math. Beyond the medical bills — estimated at $283,000 over a lifetime — young Americans who develop type 2 diabetes forfeit roughly $160,000 in lifetime earnings, according to a 2012 KFF Health News study – that’s almost $227,000 in 2025 dollars. Scale that among siblings and cousins, and you’re suddenly talking enterprise-level capital preservation.
Call to Action
We can’t legislate healthy dinners, but we can choose them. We can’t vote away every structural determinant, but we can demand perks and policies that make the healthy choice the default. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act may dictate how wealth moves between generations — but generational health will determine whether that wealth fuels vitality or medical bills. The ledger is clear: Every nutritious meal, every stroll, every candid conversation about stress is a deposit in the most resilient trust fund money can’t buy. The question isn’t whether families can afford to elevate health to the top of their estate-planning checklist — it’s whether they can afford not to.
