Although these parents often expressed their concerns as behavioral imperatives such as saying please and thank you, they conceptualized such behaviors as signs of a deeply rooted nonentitled disposition, a fundamental understanding of self and other. Eliana described this disposition succinctly. When she said she did not want her children to be “entitled,” I asked what that meant. She responded, “To take privilege for granted. To think it has something to do with you.” She laughed. “Instead of just luck. I think one of the things that really concerns me is the many different faces of supremacy. And so, anything like that. If you think you’ve got anything on anybody else. Like, lack of respect. And not just respect, but full consideration. That all humans are as valuable as each other.”
Asked what she wanted for her kids, Monica talked about the kind of people she wanted them to become rather than about their professional paths or other achievements, and she linked behavior to a generous disposition. She said, “To think about other people when they make their decisions. Even now, with their friends. Their tone of voice when they speak to people. Just be conscious of it. It’s not that you’re always going to do the right thing. But, just catch yourself. And thank people, or—you know, that kind of thing.” She continued, “You can’t just exist. You have to give. However that is. Emotionally, your time. It’s not a financial gift. It’s more of yourself.”
One very significant aspect of shaping children’s dispositions, of course, is shaping their consumer desires and entitlements.6 Helen said, “I think we all worry. My husband and I worry about our kids, like, falling into this kind of thought that, like, you can just order everything online, and it all comes. And, you know, money feels a little bit like it grows on trees kind of thing.” Ursula said, “You have kids that talk about they never fly, you know, commercial planes or they’ve never flown coach. I think it’s crazy. … We [she and her husband] really know the value of what we have and understand how fleeting some of this can be and how important it is to not, you know, feel like you have to keep up with the Joneses, because you just—there’s no stopping. But for young people whose minds are not fully mature, it’s work.”
Nearly all my interviewees portrayed themselves as setting limits on their children’s consumption as a way of forestalling an excessive sense of entitlement.7 Olivia, for example, did not want her children to become “trustafarians.” Asked how to prevent that, she said, “I mean, I think the biggest thing is, they just don’t get everything that they want.” Chaz said, “I think by just living in New York, it’s easy to be overcome with too many luxuries. And you’ve got to make sure that they don’t get everything they want at this particular moment. Make sure that kids understand that they have to have fun, but nothing is to be given. You’ve got to earn things.” Some parents with older children used an allowance to help them learn limits. Eliana not only gave her children an allowance but required them to “spend some, save some, give some.”
Not surprisingly, these parents also used consumption in order to enforce appropriate behavior. Zoe described herself as having strict limits. She said, of her children, “I don’t buy them random things for no reason. We definitely wait for birthdays. Or, even an ice cream. Like, [her daughter] has to earn it. Yesterday we promised her an ice cream, but then she behaved horribly. And I said, ‘Then I’m sorry, ice cream is for girls that behave. And that’s not you today. Maybe tomorrow.’” As Zoe’s comment indicates, consumption not only depends on appropriate behavior but also is framed as a birthday “treat.”
Like Lucy, many parents were concerned with the possibility that their children would not want to work. Scott said, “That’s one of the things I think about and talk about a lot. Is, like, how do you instill in your kid, in your wealthy kid, the desire to work? You know, just the satisfaction that comes from, like, ‘Paycheck. Yes. I did it again.’ It’s a very deep-seated feeling. I don’t know where it comes from. And I’m terrified that my kids aren’t going to have it.”
These concerns with consumption, reciprocity, and the work ethic came together in the question of how much of other people’s labor children had the right to consume. Olivia said, referring to both politeness and labor, “The manners thing, I think is really important. And entitlement. Like, you shouldn’t feel entitled to leave your stuff at the table, or not clean up after yourself. And you know, the worst thing is when you say [of the family’s assistant], ‘Look, Nancy’s going to [do it].’ No, no, no. I will make it so that Nancy doesn’t come. You know, you will take care of this.” Danielle told me, of her two young children, “I mean, they live in an incredibly entitled environment. So yeah. Squash it down, every time I see any, I go squash.” She laughed. I asked, “When do you see it? How do you do that?” She responded, “They say, ‘Get me a —.’ I say, ‘You have legs. Your legs ain’t broke, you get that. You put that away. You pick it up.’”
This emphasis on self-sufficiency and work also meant requiring labor of children in the form of chores. Asking me if I had read a recent New Yorker article that described a 6-year-old child in the Peruvian Amazon who cleaned, fished, and cooked,8 Lucy said, “That article changed my life. I’m not kidding you. I was like, ‘My six-year-old doesn’t know how to do anything.’ So the next day, I was like, ‘You are doing your own laundry. Here’s the liquid detergent. Have at it.’” She laughed. “And now he does. He does his own laundry.” She and her husband had also instituted a system of points their son had to earn for making an effort in areas where “he feels he needs to improve” (e.g., participating more in school), which he could redeem for activities of his choosing, such as art classes—activities he had gotten for “free” when he was younger.9
Frances had been raised upper-middle-class and attended private school and an Ivy League college, but her family’s current lifestyle was far beyond what she had grown up with. (She told me, “We were well off, but not to the extent that my nuclear family is now. It’s pretty different.”) As her own father had, Frances enforced expectations for her kids through their allowance. She said,
Yes, my kids definitely have an allowance. And it’s tied to their chores. Which is something that I carry over from my own childhood, which I really value. It’s a huge pain in the ass for me. But I fine them when they don’t do their chores. … Everything has a value. It’s like, “If you don’t turn off your lights, if you don’t make your bed, if your clothes aren’t in the hamper,” those are fines. “If you don’t set the table, if you don’t clear the table, if you don’t put your sports bag away,” those are all fines. … And every time I describe to friends what I do, they think I’m a nut job. That I’m crazy to spend the time I’m spending. But that’s how I grew up, and it is a huge pain, but I’m hoping that it pays off, and that they appreciate—that they get something from it later in life (laughs). I don’t know.
Like Lucy’s points scheme, the system Frances has created constitutes constraints on her children’s entitlements. Though the system creates work for her, she hopes it will “pay off” for them, although she cannot exactly articulate how.
As this example indicates, respondents who were raised with less money than they have now often referred to their own upbringings in talking about their children. Many who had grown up facing material limits now imposed symbolic ones on their kids. Miriam insisted that her two daughters share a room, a decision she attributed explicitly to her own upbringing and her discomfort with her own privileged financial position, as well as to her desire for her daughters to have “normal values”:
I just wanted them to share a room. I always shared a room growing up, and I have weird feelings in general about—like, I didn’t grow up with any money, and I didn’t set out to make money, but I do make a lot of money. And it’s a weird thing. And I’m like, what does it mean for my girls to grow up with money? What does it mean for them and their values, and how do I instill normal values in them? So I was like, they need to share a room. … I think I just feel like [sharing a room] will show
them that they’re not the only person in the world. That, you know, they can’t have everything they want. Maybe they feel like they should have their own room ’cause their friends have their own room. Well, too bad.
Miriam also criticized parents who said they “had to” give their kids separate rooms because they would fight otherwise. “I’m like, you don’t have to do anything. You know? We didn’t have the option when I was growing up, and so we fought and we had to share a room.”
Like Miriam, other respondents drew boundaries between themselves and other parents who seemed to indulge their kids. Willa said she had known other kids growing up whose rooms had been built to be the maid’s room (as is the case in many prewar buildings in New York). But now, she said, “people don’t want to put their child in a maid’s room. Talk about entitled. Because it’s small, it’s in the back, it’s next to the kitchen.” Zoe deprecated “mothers cooking three different meals, depending on what their kids want.” She said that she, in contrast, would send her daughter to bed hungry “if she doesn’t want what I cooked for dinner. … I’ve put her to sleep many times without eating dinner. I’m not afraid to do that.”
Yet, as we saw in chapter 3, parents also framed children’s needs as especially legitimate. Therefore, despite their commitment to limits in general, these parents were torn about what specific limits were appropriate, especially when these constraints stood in tension with the children’s happiness, comfort, or sense of belonging, as well as their enrichment. As Olivia said, using the example of refusing to buy an iPhone for her children, “I think that’s actually one of the biggest challenges, you know, in terms of spending money and making decisions, like, when do you say, ‘All right. No. We can, but we won’t. And here’s why.’”
Frances had had no problem refusing to buy her teenage daughter a $400 ski jacket, which seemed too extreme. But she struggled to set limits when they might affect her daughter’s social life. She told me, of her daughter’s obsession with brand names:
I definitely entered that [phase] with her, where—you know, if it doesn’t say Ugg on the boot, it’s not actually a boot. [She laughs.] If it doesn’t say Hunter, it’s not really a rain boot. And that drives me crazy. Because my parents never bought me any brand-name anything. I’m weak on that score, though. Because she’s a good girl. She’s a nice girl. She works hard. And I cave. Because it’s easier to buy the Hunter boots than it is to say, just on principle, “You’re gonna be the one girl in [her school] who wears the rubber boots from K-Mart, because that’s how I grew up.” And I’m sure I’m doing her a disservice by letting her have all the brand names. But again, it’s one of those things where you pick your battles. … I tried very briefly, when she was in fifth grade or so, to buy the non-brand-name stuff. And then she didn’t have a lot of friends, and she got all these pimples, and I just [felt] like, “You know what? Okay. You can have the Ugg boots, as long as you appreciate that you got them for your birthday!”
Frances is trying to establish a sense of constraint that echoes the limits she grew up with, but she does not want to make her daughter suffer in her social milieu by not fitting in.10 She thus resigns herself to buying the boots, though she wants her daughter to “appreciate” that they are special, a birthday treat. This kind of consumption, she hopes, will not be taken for granted. It is also notable that she describes her daughter as a “good girl,” “a nice girl,” who “works hard.” Because her daughter does not act behaviorally “entitled,” she becomes materially entitled to the boots.
In this conversation, both because I remembered my own anxiety about not having the “right” clothes at that age and because I wanted to be sympathetic, I said I could see her daughter’s point of view. Realizing that we were the same age, Frances and I ended up reminiscing about what it was like to be teenagers and be denied the brand-name items that were fashionable (for us, Tretorn sneakers, all the rage in the mid-1980s). In a telephone conversation a few days after the interview, in which I was following up on a couple of questions, Frances mentioned without prompting that that part of our conversation had “crossed my mind a dozen times.” Saying, “This is so messed up,” she admitted feeling that since a “well-educated, hard-working” person (i.e., me) had sympathized with her daughter’s position, she felt better about buying the name-brand clothing rather than getting it at Target. I had not expected that my opinion would loom so large in Frances’s mind. Her comment signaled to me that she was genuinely worried about the situation and looking for reassurance—from a particular kind of source. Because I was coming from a position opposite to the one her daughter was in—that is, I had been denied these items—she could have read me as evidence that if she wanted her daughter to become “well-educated and hardworking” she would refuse her child’s requests. In fact, she had said that maybe she herself was a better person for not having been given these goods. But instead somehow she was able to read my sympathy for her daughter as the green light to stop worrying about these purchases because it legitimated the daughter’s psychological need.
Protecting kids from thinking or worrying about money—itself another form of privilege—was a priority among these parents and demonstrated another dimension of their concern for their kids’ psychological well-being. Several told me they did not want to talk about money with their young children. Donovan, an inheritor and earner of wealth of over $10 million, said of money that he had tried to give his kids “the gift of allowing them to ignore it.” But again, this approach sometimes conflicted with the notion of setting limits. Karen had been “raised with a money problem” and struggled to decide how to restrict her daughter’s spending after school at Starbucks. She said, “I mean, I definitely don’t want her to feel worried about money. But I also want her to feel like there’s some real limits to what she can spend.” How to impose the “limits” without also imposing the “worry” was the dilemma.11
STRATEGIES OF EXPOSURE: LOCATING THE SELF
Many parents I interviewed also used strategies of exposure as a way of mitigating entitlement. They wanted their children to be “aware” of and “appreciate” their privileged stance relative to others and to inculcate a sense of what kind of consumption was “normal” in the world. Ursula, for example, said, “I do sometimes worry the kids feel everybody has a house in the Hamptons [as she did]. That this is normal. And it’s not. So we try to teach them that. But I don’t know if it’s getting through.” Questions about exposure emerged in relation to consumption decisions and the social environments kids were in, especially schools, as well as the possibility of working for pay.
Consumption and What Is “Normal”
My respondents saw consumption decisions and the constraints discussed earlier as important for how kids would locate themselves in relation to the rest of the world. They tried to model appropriate consumption for their children, often using the word “normal.” Gary and his family were invited to a wedding in India that he and his wife “would have loved to go to.” But they did not attend, in part because the wedding fell just a few weeks after another international family trip but also because it felt “over the top.” Gary said, “it was this feeling that, what’s the message we’re imparting to our kids?” Parents struggled frequently over these decisions, which, like Gary’s dilemma, often clustered around leisure travel.
One very wealthy mother said her biggest disagreements with her husband were about spending money. When I asked for an example, she first reiterated how confidential our conversation was. She then recounted:
Like, he would fly privately all the time. And I want our kids to not get too used to that. Every once in a while. But, I don’t know. I value that I went to public school, and I slept in many motels, and I drove long distances in cars. And the way I grew up is still much more affluent than the way most—but I feel like I have somewhat of an understanding. I think it’s important to understand the way everyone else lives. That doesn’t sound right, but … but … so, I just don’t want o
ur kids to go to college and never have cleaned a toilet. And never have slept in a motel instead of a hotel. And then to appreciate that there are some kids that don’t even ever sleep in a motel. I mean, so I just want our kids to have—you know, a reality check every once in a while.
This mother resists her husband’s desire to live lavishly in order to instill an understanding of how “everyone else lives” in her kids. In talking about his clients’ conflicts around money, Robert, a real estate broker, spoke approvingly of this kind of modeling. He said, “I have some healthy clients. I have one client—very rich people. She said, like, when they fly with the kids … they fly coach. When the husband flies by himself, he flies first class. They’re constantly struggling to set an example for their children that, ‘just because we have, not everybody else has.’ They’re trying not to turn their kids into assholes.”
Many parents encouraged their children to interpret such experiences as “special.” Olivia said her family flew business class “a lot.” She told her kids, “‘It’s a privilege that you get to do this. And it’s great that we can do this as a family. But I expect behavior and good manners.’ And they [behave]. There’s no wild acting out. And it’s a big treat.” Olivia asks her children to experience this travel as both a “privilege” and a “treat”—typically defined by being exceptional—even though it is something they do often. Furthermore, she is teaching them that high-end consumption is acceptable as long as it is inhabited appropriately in a behavioral sense.
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