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The Price of Privilege______
How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids
By Madeline Levine
Well, pardon me if I don't get all weepy with the title of this book:The Price of Privilege.
I read it as much as I do any book that doesn't really grab me. And, I'll have to admit that some of this book made me more than a little sarcastic in my writing.
The book by Madeline Levine looks at why so many middle and upper middle class kids are unhappy. While it's true that these kids do have problems, all kids wrestle with the pangs of growing up, some more than others, but privileged kids do not have to live in survival mode like others do and that makes it harder to feel sorry for them. Many of the kids profiled are problems!!!!!!!!!!!!
We can't blame a kid because he's born into a family of wealth or privilege or both. A privileged kid tells his parents one thing and yet the total opposite is true. He is not going to class, is taking drugs, is depressed, and a candidate for who knows what. It's hard to feel sorry for these kids; and, yet, the lack of empathy is my problem and not theirs.
This book dovetails into this book I read AWOL: The unexcused absence of America's upper classes from military service which is basically about how the privilege disdain the military. (See review). The Price of Privilege could possibly be solved if kids had to involve themselves in something meaningful, as opposed to sitting around cogitating their navels and feeling sorry for their plight in life.
A kid of privilege goes off to college, the parents have certain expectations; the child feels the pressure and begins lying. Friends, if the kid has any, are other kids of privilege.
The parents make life too easy. The allowance is more than some household incomes. The kid has no responsibility and doesn't have to do anything.
The Price of Privilege is mostly a headtrip down the lane of more and more privilege. The author offers some advice on parenting styles and what might work; but, in my view, she is way to empathetic. I think a swift kick in the butt, a trip to a military recruiting office or a sign up with Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans just might put a different slant on a privileged kid's reality. I'm sorry but I have a hard time being in the corner of privileged kids; they need to be told to "get a life."
KT
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Book Reviews
Now Available: Newly revised paperback General Lee:Father of the Airborne.
