Sugar: Well-off parents spoil their children’s work ethic

AFFLUENT parents should stop spoiling their kids so they don’t lose their work ethic, Lord Sugar has said.

The 76-year-old Apprentice presenter has said parents have a responsibility to ensure they don’t spoil their children and should help them succeed by showing off their own accomplishments.

He also condemned the younger generation’s sense of entitlement and added he had not spoiled his own children.

The businessman said he noticed a “different culture” in today’s youth, who didn’t want to “put the graft in and get there through hard work”. He criticised people’s “lack of hunger” and desire for a “quick fix”.

When it came to selecting candidates for the BBC show The Apprentice, Sugar revealed he looked for “good old-fashioned hard-graft culture”. Speaking to Mail Online he said he hadn’t learned anything from the contestants, except “an array of excuses”.

Sugar, whose net worth is estimated to be more than £1 billion, was born in Hackney, east London, in 1947. He left school at the age of 16 to join the civil service. He started selling car radio aerials out of the back of a van before setting up electronics company Alan Michael Sugar Trading, or Amstrad, at the age of 21.

When asked whether coming from nothing makes someone more ambitious, he said: “Not necessarily. If people are part of a very affluent family they’re affluent because their fathers or mothers are clever.

‘If people are part of a very affluent family, they’re affluent because their [parents] are clever’

“Children should have seen what they’ve done in order to achieve. It’s down to the fathers and mothers to make sure they don’t spoil them.”

He referred to his own children, Daniel, Simon and Louise, as “role models”. Sugar said: “I’m very proud of mine. They’re a role model of working hard and not being the proverbial rich man’s son, snorting cocaine and driving Ferraris.