The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids

"Psychological development goes awry when children are pressured into valuing the views of others over their own.

"A superficial reading of this type of teenager might suggest that they are simply spoiled or overindulged. It is tempting to trivialize the problems of kids who have been the recipients of exhaustive parental intervention and have been liberally handed both material and educational opportunities. Yet the depletion I felt that Friday afternoon came... See more

Raising children has come to look more and more like a business endeavor and less and less like an endeavor of the heart. We are overly concerned with “the bottom line,” with how our children “do” rather than with who our children “are.” We pour time, attention, and money into insuring their performance, consistently making it to their soccer game ... See more

"Parents need to reassure their children that they will not “die poor and lonely” if they don’t get into honors math, or become school valedictorian, or go to Harvard."

"By allowing them to get occasionally bruised in childhood we are helping to make certain that they don’t get broken in adolescence. And by allowing them their failures in adolescence, we are helping to lay the groundwork for success in adulthood."

"Parents can be overinvolved and children can still feel isolated. Controlling and overinvolved parents typically leave kids feeling angry or alienated, neither of which is conducive to emotional closeness.

"For example, parents need to remember that kids love rituals and depend on them for a sense of continuity and connection. Perhaps the single most important ritual a family can observe is having dinner together. Families who eat together five or more times a week have kids who are significantly less likely to use tobacco, alcohol, or marijuana, hav... See more

"Intrusion and support are two fundamentally different processes: support is about the needs of the child, intrusion is about the needs of the parent."

"Materialistic kids have lower grades and higher rates of both depression and substance abuse than nonmaterialistic kids.”