Quartz: How New York’s wealthy parents try to raise ‘unentitled’ kids

Yet these parents have a problem: How to give their kids these advantages while also setting limits. Almost all of the 50 affluent parents in and around New York City that I interviewed for my book Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (2017), expressed fears that children would be ‘entitled’—a dirty word that meant, variously, lazy, materialistic, greedy, rude, selfish, and self-satisfied. Instead, they strove to keep their children ‘grounded’ and ‘normal’. Of course, no parent wishes to raise spoiled children; but for those who face relatively few material limits, this possibility is distinctly heightened. [...]

But in the past few decades this homogenous ‘leisure class’ has declined, and the category of the ‘working wealthy’, especially in finance, has exploded. The ranks of high-earners have also partially diversified, opening up to people besides WASP men. This shift has led to a more competitive environment, especially in the realm of college admissions.

At the same time, a more egalitarian discourse has taken hold in the public sphere. As the sociologist Shamus Khan at Columbia University in New York argues in his book Privilege, it is no longer legitimate for rich people to assume that they deserve their social position based simply on who they are. Instead, they must frame themselves as deserving on the basis of merit, particularly through hard work. At the same time, popular-culture images proliferate of wealthy people as greedy, lazy, shallow, materialistic, or otherwise morally compromised. [...]

The best way to help kids understand constraints, of course, is to impose them. But, despite feeling conflicted, these parents did not limit what their kids consumed in any significant way. Even parents who resisted private school tended to end up there. The limits they placed on consumption were marginal, constituting what the sociologist Allison Pugh in Longing and Belonging called ‘symbolic deprivation’. Facing competitive college admissions, none of the high-school-age kids of parents in my sample worked for pay; parents were more likely to describe their homework as their ‘job’.

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