The Price of Privilege

Parenting has always struck me as intimidating. 

It involves so much of everything you have: money, time, energy, work, emotion, responsibility, and everything else, so much of your life.  And even if you do everything right, you still have the chance to profoundly fuck something up. 

I’ve never wanted kids – frankly, it’s never occurred to me.  I’ve never had that “parental” instinct, and I don’t feel a lot of affection for little kids either.  I like the kids I deal with – seniors in high school on the cusp of the world, kids who are (for the most part) pretty functional and self-sufficient. That’s about it.  The overwhelming responsibility of raising my own kids, the effort involved, the expense, the idea that someone out there is relying on me for every single thing in their life… no, thank you. 

I can’t even handle the emotional responsibility of a dog; how on earth could I have a kid??

There are those in my life who have undoubtedly decided that this lack of interest in kids indicates something profoundly fucked up about me, and really, I’m okay with that.  I know who I am, and a parent is not part of that. 

This book, The Price of Privilege, is one of those books that confirms all my fears about parenting, solidifying my lack of desire to produce one of my own.  At its heart, The Price of Privilege is about what happens when parents try to do everything right, and how those kids can (and do) still end up screwed up. 

The Price of Privilege deals with children of affluence, those kids who tend to be psychologically ignored due to the obvious and serious issues faced by children of poverty and other poor circumstances.  But the children of affluent parents, affluent lives, struggle with just as many issues as children in other circumstances and their problems have largely gone unstudied until Dr. Madeline Levine noticed a pattern in the patients coming into her private therapy practice. 

Her patients seemed to have everything: their parents were well off, they went to good schools and lived in good neighborhoods, they were involved in activities and extracurriculars, and they wanted for little.  Often they had strong social skills and good grades too.  There was no reason for these kids to have problems, and yet they were deeply unhappy, many dealing with anxiety and depression, involved with drugs and alcohol, or worse. 

Parents, as a group, are under immense pressure.  The ability to raise a functional, well-adjusted person to adulthood stuns me, especially when I consider that it happens fairly routinely.  But sometimes – often, perhaps – things go wrong, and that’s where people like Levine come in, the therapists who must try to collect the broken pieces and somehow re-create a whole person. 

The phenomenon she describes seems to happen when parents have money to support their children but lack the time to devote to them.  In those cases, children can develop the sense that they are being bought off – a car to cover up the fact that a parent missed their birthday, an allowance being spent to buy drugs while the parents are out of town, endless funds devoted to club sports and equipment but no attendance at games, the list goes on.  Over time, this sends a clear message about what’s more valuable, and the kids respond accordingly. 

(There’s so much more to this in the book, so much psychology and detail that I can’t begin to recreate here.  Suffice it to say that the book is a smooth, interesting, and educating read, one well worth your time.)

It is not a universal practice, thank goodness – parents with money are not destined to treat their kids like like, nor are children of privilege doomed to being ignored emotionally but overflowing financially.  But the pattern is clear, and it’s scary. 

There’s a wonderful article in The Atlantic called “How to Land Your Kids in Therapy” (here) that dovetails nicely with this book; it’s a great read that breaks this down into a more manageable size if you can’t get to the book J

I do sometimes wonder about how much of these issues are truly, at heart, the parents’ faults.  

Throughout the book, the ability of kids to make choices is essentially removed from the equation.  So I can’t help but think: what about those situations where the parents are great, involved but not too involved, balanced between emotional functionality and giving their kids independence, but their kids screw around anyway?  I guarantee it happens, but that’s not discussed much here. 

In fact, I see it on a near-daily basis at my job.  Since I’m a high school teacher in a pretty affluent area, I watch all of this happen (that’s how I ended up reading the book in the first place).  I definitely see students whose parents are great but they suck anyway.  It’s a fact of life: kids make choices that aren’t always smart, regardless of the way they were raised. 

Levine is clearly going for a broad picture of this issue, a generic of how this works and how to fix it, but it runs the risk of placing kids into a broad category. 

This book also ignores those kids who have great lives but suffer from depression or anxiety anyway, and I see those kids all the time too.  I have many great kids – smart, capable, independent, friendly – who struggle immensely anyway.  I’ve seen kids hospitalized for anxiety, placed in emergency care due to suicide risk, or something worse.  What things like that happen… well, too often the parents seem to be awesome (at least from what I see).  They’re scared, clueless about what went wrong, and often it was nothing they did.  That falls by the wayside too.   

I know that this isn’t an all-encompassing book, but still.  Sometimes parents do everything right, and that should be acknowledged and celebrated too. 

Levine writes a short section about how to try to address mistakes in the back of the book, a section that I found more interesting than I was expecting to.  The ideas of responsibility and boundaries, the ideas for how to push kids to find independence, to find themselves, are all things I can work to incorporate into my classroom.  Teachers may not be kids’ parents, of course, but we do still see those kiddos a lot – it’s just as easy for me to assess how a kid’s doing emotionally as academically, so I’m glad to have a guide for offering the support and structure that can help them grow and heal. 

It’s a worthwhile book, especially for parents and teachers, and seeing as I’m not planning on leaving my school district anytime soon, it is definitely a resource worth incorporating.