My Experience Raising Children of Privilege

Dear Readers,

I love your comments, because they make me think harder and more critically about what I’ve written. I especially love to read the interaction between readers who use my posts as a jumping off point to carry the discussion into the realm of new questions and new ideas.

In the comments to last week’s post,

Josh Blumenthal

and

Isabel Cowles Murphy

had a dialogue which included this question by Isabel: “…at what point does privilege lead to isolationism from the difficulties most people face?”

My thoughts immediately turned to privileged parents and their children.  Specifically, I thought of my wife and me and whether we had been excessive in deploying our privilege (affluence) to shield our three children—now in their thirties— from the slings and arrows of life faced by children of lesser means.

This question has been ricocheting across and against the walls of my mind, and like the man with a hammer who sees everything as a nail, I see it reflected in what I’ve been reading.

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I’m part of the

Simon Haisell

yearlong book group reading Hilary Mantel’s brilliant Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Cromwell figured prominently during the ever-fascinating reign of Henry VIII.  Mantel tells the raucous tale of that reign (the wives, the executions, the political and religious tumult) from Cromwell’s point of view.¹

Cromwell grew up in a London slum, circa 1500, regularly beaten near to death by his drunk, abusive father. At fourteen, Cromwell fled to Europe where he learned the wool trade in Flanders, then became a mercenary in Italy, and soon an all-around man of the world and an extraordinary problem-solver.  He absorbed knowledge like a sponge. He had to, in order to survive.

When Cromwell returned to England, his skills were recognized and he soon became a  man of importance and wealth. A man of great privilege.

In our book group chapter this week, Cromwell gets a letter from his teenage son Gregory who’s being tutored in Latin in bubbled comfort at Cambridge. Around his son’s age, Cromwell was absorbing languages by travelling alone on the polyglot, vagabond road.

Gregory’s an indifferent student at this point in his academic career.²  When Cromwell hears complaints about Gregory’s lack of progress, he says, “[Gregory]’s busy growing up.” Cromwell is mild and gentle with Gregory in proportionate reaction to the brutality Cromwell suffered from the blows of his father’s fists and boots.

I believe nearly all parents, if they’re not abusive, are like Thomas Cromwell in wanting to protect their children from hardships. Instinctively, we obey the evolutionary imperative. Our children carry our genes and we want them to survive, to flourish, and even to prevail.

For countless primeval generations, the strength of that desire to protect our children helped determine which genes would survive. In modern times, we have to guard against taking that desire too far.

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One of the first and most important choices privileged parents make is where to send their children to school. Cromwell sent his son to be tutored privately at Cambridge, my wife and I sent our children to New York City private schools, initially a Jewish day school, Rodeph Sholom, and then a secular high school, Riverdale. We didn’t consider public school. We could afford, with my mother’s help in the early years, three exorbitant tuitions. And we believed that you got what you paid for, and that private school was a privilege for our children worth paying for.

We did not worry about exposing our children to diverse socioeconomic or religious backgrounds. In fact, we liked that in the early years of their education, our children were at a Jewish school with other families who shared a desire for a curriculum that emphasized Jewish heritage and Jewish ethics.

And within the bubbled world of Manhattan private schools, Rodeph Sholom was one not one of the “prestige” schools. Because of that, in time, we found ourselves becoming one of the bigger fish in that smaller pond. We were very much at home there and liked that we had delayed exposing our children to the worst excesses of private school privilege.

Riverdale (where I was an alum) was a different story. There we encountered some families who lived quintessential, over-the-top lifestyles and who had no restraint about including their kids in every aspect of it. So there were kids who flew private and sat courtside at Knicks games and had their own credit cards without meaningful limits. Kids who were eager to let their classmates know all about it, sometimes in embarrassing detail.

I recall our children hearing specific numbers from certain classmates of what their family’s houses and apartments cost and how much their fathers earned. That gave us an opportunity to tell our children how inappropriate it was for their classmates to talk about such numbers. That it was a sign of poor manners. I don’t think we said “new money,” but we thought it.

Conveniently for us, until our children were in their late teens and early twenties, we did not have the ability to live such an extravagant lifestyle. Even if we had that option, I’d like to think that we would have recognized what was inappropriate.

In fact, the carelessness of other parents helped to shape our own parental habits.

When our children needed help with an essay, we helped with suggestions; we didn’t, as some parents did, hire a tutor to write it for them. Or write it ourselves which would have been quicker and easier.

We negotiated an allowance with our children pursuant to an agreed upon budget, and we mostly resisted rounding it up when a particular week’s allowance ran out early, even though it was always tempting just to slip our child a twenty rather than listen to the seemingly endless kvetching.

Yet, looked at from any perspective, these are rather fine distinctions. If the most careless parents set a standard of excess within the bubble, they did no favors to the more careful, yet still affluent, parents who refrained from that excess out of either prudence or necessity.

Because when the standards of an excessive lifestyle are set so high, it can become the basis of comparison, a reverse invidious comparison. I can recall my wife and I telling ourselves in the mid 1990s, that we were not the sort of family who had a weekend house in the Hamptons. Instead, we had a weekend house for a few years in rural South Salem in Westchester as if that constituted some sort of moderation. ³

And as for the children, they might look at their most privileged peers and think that their own family’s lack of a weekend home compared to a Hamptons estate or lack of a fulltime housekeeper compared to a large household staff meant they were relatively less privileged. Which is a natural feeling, even if it’s ridiculous, because they were merely living in a different place within the same bubble.

It’s nearly impossible to avoid some degree of isolation from hardships for your kids when you’re a privileged parent. But it’s not hopeless!

First of all, being a parent, properly understood, takes great amounts of time, thought, and energy. It is at times grueling and it should be. If a parent thinks it’s easy, they’re likely clueless.

When parents have an abundance of resources, my experience is it takes a concerted effort to sometimes choose the more time-consuming and more personally inconvenient approach in addressing your children’s struggles. It is important to go against your instinct to make all problems go away.

At the same time, there’s no use in trying to hide your affluence. No parent is that clever, and your children are far too keenly observant to be fooled. They’ll think you’re being hypocritical. (Hypocrisy is a favorite indictment of parents by children!)

You can, however, try to model politeness and respect for everyone, especially those less fortunate. That can be authentic, because it can be a consistent part of your life. It may also help develop empathy.

This is different than episodic exposure to the poor, for example by volunteering with your children at a food pantry. That can be morally instructive, but it’s always going to be an extraordinary event. A few hours here or there, and then back to your family’s regular life, in a different universe, far away from the food pantry.

I can say that my wife and I succeeded in modelling respect and empathy for our children. And we know this because of the vicious way our children pounced on us whenever we failed to be empathetic ourselves.

God help me if I took my frustration out on a waiter and was rude to him. This happened at my son’s graduation from college. My son refused to talk to me until I made amends.

Or there was the time at the dinner table when I mentioned that a driver from a car service (pre-Uber times) had received a ticket while waiting for me as I’d instructed. My son asked me if I’d paid the ticket since it was my fault. I hadn’t and I realized he was right and corrected my mistake.

Perhaps avoiding obvious excess and practicing respect and instilling empathy is the best we can do for our children of privilege. It’s also a good way to avoid breathing life into the saying of “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” ⁴

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I’m 61 now, and I see signs of my inner curmudgeon appearing now and then. Impatience at inconvenience, being upset at the shortfalls in comforts I’ve become used to.

Luckily, my wife and my three grown children do a good job of keeping that inner curmudgeon of mine on a very short leash. I’m chastised even for reflexive scowling at moments they deem inappropriate.

So my last observation is that by trying to model respect and empathy for your children and then inevitably falling short at times along the way, you can develop your children into becoming your most fierce (and acerbic) critics.

And that is a precious thing.

For the Comments: How would you address Isabel’s question of “at what point does privilege lead to isolationism from the difficulties most people face?”

1. The book group started just ten days ago. Simon is doing a wonderful job of providing background and moving us along. if you’re a fan of Hilary Mantel or the Henry VIII period, I highly recommend it. Here’s Simon’s first post.

2. Per Wikipedia, Thomas Cromwell’s son Gregory turned out to be highly nimble in accumulating wealth and playing the politics well enough to stay in the king’s good graces, even after his father had his head chopped off. Gregory died of what they called the “sweating sickness” as a wealthy and respected man, married with five children.

3. A few years ago, we did become one of those families with a place in the Hamptons. And like virtually everyone we know out there, we deny being part of or knowing anything about the “Hamptons Scene.”

4. Per Oxford Reference, “Proverbial saying, early 20th century; meaning that wealth gained in one generation will be lost by the third.”