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

Madeline Levine has been a practicing psychologist for 25 years, but it was only recently that she began to observe a new breed of unhappy teenager. When a bright, affluent 15-year-old girl, a seemingly unlikely candidate for emotional problems, came into her office with the word ‘empty’ carved into her left forearm, Levine was shaken.

The girl and her cutting seemed to personify a startling pattern Levine had been observing among her teenage patients, all of them bright, affluent, and clearly loved by their parents. Behind a veneer of strength, many of them suffered extreme emotional problems: depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. What was going on? Meticulous research confirmed Levine’s worst suspicions. Privileged adolescents nation-wide are experiencing epidemic rates of emotional problems, more than children from any other socio-economic group, including those in dire poverty. The various strands of this perfect storm – materialism, pressure to achieve, and parental difficulties with attachment and separation – point to a crisis in America’s culture of affluence, a culture that is as unmanageable for children as it is for their parents, particularly their mothers. While many privileged kids have the ability to make a ‘good’ impression, alarming numbers lack the basic foundation of psychological development – the self. They are bland, disinterested, uncreative, and most of all unhappy. And their parents often fail to see that anything is wrong. A controversial look at privileged families, this book disposes of the ‘overparenting’ paradigm now in vogue, exploding one child-rearing myth after another. Author Biography Madeline Levine, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who has been in practice in San Francisco and Marin County for 25 years. Dr. Levine is a frequent lecturer on child and adolescent issues and has appeared on many national radio and television shows, including PBS and the BBC.

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Recent studies have shown that 22 percent of upper-middle-class adolescent girls (three times the national rate) suffer from clinical depression—a stark illustration of the old saw that money doesn’t buy happiness. Psychologist Levine draws on clinical research, hundreds of case studies, and 25 years of treating troubled adolescents from well-to-do families to explore the rise in mental and emotional disorders among privileged youth. Levine offers portraits of adolescents from homes of parental involvement and material advantage in which the children nonetheless suffer from addictions, anxiety and eating disorders, depression, and self-destructive behavior. Levine makes the case for why these young people are as much “at risk” as those from lower economic backgrounds and how the culture of affluence can stifle self-development. She offers advice on effective techniques to reduce pressure from parents to succeed in school and to heighten adolescent autonomy and self-discipline. In this insightful book, Levine eschews the temptation to dismiss problems of privileged teens as overindulgence. Vanessa Bush

Author Biography

Madeline Levine, PhD, is a clinician, consultant, and educator; the author of the New York Times bestseller The Price of Privilege; and a cofounder of Challenge Success, a project of the Stanford School of Education that addresses education reform, student well-being,and parent education. She lives outside San Francisco with her husband and is the proud mother of three newly minted adult sons.