Melinda French Gates says she wanted her children “know that they were lucky”

Melinda French Gates knew that her three children were at high risk of detaching herself from reality, so she said that she took badly to keep them on the ground.

With the co -founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, like their father, Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe Gates were surrounded by a “crazy quantity of wealth” and lived in an “extraordinarily large house”, said French Gates at NPR “Fresh Air” this week.

Philanthrope is worth $ 14.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index. She said that she was thinking about her own childhood, and the principles that her middle class parents instilled in her, to understand how to avoid the law and the elitism of her children.

“I wanted them to have deep values. And I wanted them to know that they were lucky,” said French Gates in the interview, part of the advertising visit for his new book: “The next day: Transitions, Change and Forward.”

The French gates, who divorced Gates in 2021 and resigned as a cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last year, said that she had scored her children in local schools instead of studying them at home. She wanted her family to be part of the community and thought it would benefit her children, she said.

Her children took “blows” while she moved them between many schools looking for the “good school for the right child,” she said.

French Gates, who launched donations to engage with Gates and Warren Buffett, made sure to exhibit his children in the outside world, whether abroad or at home.

“We came out and saw what life looked like for other children,” she said. “And even in the community of Seattle, we were going to work with the homeless, working in a community refuge, being on the lines where they nourish people.”

These experiences opened their eyes to their luck and made them think about their role in society, said French Gates. She added that her younger daughter, Phoebe, worked in Rwanda for several summers in college and high school and lived with a local family there.

The French gates said that seeing the world gave its children a perspective on the harsh realities of life and the fact that Seattle was just a “tiny Speck on the map”.

“And so I tried to base them on this, to base them with tasks, to found them with an allowance,” she said, adding that she ensured that the hired aid also had good values.

French Gates also explained why she values ​​community work on the podcast “on Kara Swisher” this week. She said that helping the homeless, supervising or helping children do their homework and serving food for the less fortunate teaches precious lessons and makes people feel better to help.