It was also the 1990s, so money pervaded. The older kids drove themselves to school in sparkly SUVs and some of the younger children had chauffeurs. The uniform was Gant or Gaultier and every Tuesday afternoon we went skiing. In retrospect I see that, as seats of learning go, it was borderline ridiculous but it felt normal at the time, with one exception: most of the children were miserable.
It figured that the boarders would be such, levered from exotic palaces into a draughty Swiss manor house, but why were the day kids so doom-laden? They had every material luxury going; bedrooms stuffed with gadgetry and large swimming pools around which to waste whole summers perfecting a tan.
Their parents adored them too, some obsessively so. By day these mums and dads commanded boardrooms at Procter & Gamble or the World Trade Organisation, but free time was for egging their charges on, monitoring report cards, barking at teachers for any perceived slight on their poppet’s genius and footing the bill for chichi extracurricular activities such as ice hockey lessons or tours of the ancient world.
Thanks to these alpha parents’ first-rate genes and nonstop cocktail parties, their scions were both very good-looking and highly adept at small talk — creating a fata morgana that they were charming and well adjusted.
Yet beneath the charm lurked something approaching despair; under their glossy, competent veneers my peers were empty vessels, often with no idea who they were at all. This manifested itself in endemic delinquency and depression.
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Some took the nastier varieties of class A drugs (methamphetamines, heroin), plenty of boys made full use of the country’s relaxed prostitution laws, while the girls yearned for but two things: a vodka tonic and an eating disorder. Even those without a specific vice floated about spiritlessly.
One evening, when I was 15, I remember watching as a handsome, madly wealthy boy in the year above, blitzed on horse tranquillisers, sat on a platform at the railway station dashing his head against a stone wall. When the police and ambulance men arrived he butted them too before being carted off to some distant sanitorium, never to be heard from again.
It was all very Bret Easton Ellis (the blood streamed down his patrician features and soaked his Ralph Lauren shirt right through), a fact I was reminded of last week when I read a new book by Dr Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege (HarperCollins US, available on Amazon). In this manifesto Levine, an American psychoanalyst, claims that children of affluence (she’s not talking millionaire fantasyland here, rather households earning more than £63,000 a year) are more prone than any other section of young society to suffer from depression, anxiety and eating disorders or to engage in substance abuse or self-harm.
The germ of the thesis arrived at her office a few years back in the form of a personable 15-year-old patient. The daughter of rich, loving parents, she wore her sleeves down over her fingers. When Levine asked her what she was hiding she pulled them up to reveal the word “EMPTY” that she had cut into her left forearm.
Levine says this was her “aha moment” and that, looking back over the previous week’s schedule, she realised her practice had become overrun with prosperity’s unhappy children. She called colleagues in other cities to see if they had come across the phenomenon and heard tales of Ferraris totalled by Chicago cheerleaders and a popular East Coast jock who, despite not needing the money, still chose to deal ecstasy after football practice. Most disturbing was the statistic that underpinned it all — adolescent suicide has quadrupled since 1950. She had uncovered an epidemic and the book is full of the research and statistics that prove it.
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But could parents with money be especially bad for a child’s health? Yes says Levine, who has identified the confluence of elements, specific to the wealthy, that create “the perfect storm” for rich kids — namely materialism, pressure to achieve, rabid perfectionism and a resulting value system that is so ugly and askew that it verges on the putrid.
This, she writes, has formed a generation of affluent children so disconnected and numb that “an alarming number lack the basic foundation of psychological development: an authentic sense of self”.
Before dismissing this as Californian hokum, think of the typical British private school with its intricate social hierarchies and monomaniacal focus on exam results. Then think of the aspirations of the parents who send their children to such schools. Is it so hard to imagine some rough side-effects?
Dirk Flowers, a Harley Street psychiatrist, says he has been treating the same kind of miserable golden youth that Levine identifies in Britain for the past decade.
“I am currently seeing five teens from the same class at one top London school. Anorexia, depression, extreme competitiveness — it’s a nightmare, but also very predictable. At schools like that, academic success equals being competitive, and while that might be fine on sports day, socially it’s a disaster. What these schools are teaching children to do is put one another down. This means that real friendships are substituted by social success, or what they call being ‘popular’, and that labels and material goods become important as a way to gain influence or to be envied.
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“The kids become spoilt and anxious trying to please their parents, their teachers and their peers, and if they ever stop and think about why they’re doing it all they can lose motivation altogether. They find drugs. They become remote. And all the while they can seem totally fine on the surface, keeping their grades up, smiling, while becoming entirely vacuous underneath.”
A young friend tells me: “There were people in my year who got into a lot of trouble and had to be expelled, but there were lots more of us who never get caught.” She says she gets stoned most mornings before class at her leading public school and is, like many of her friends, a devoted shoplifter. But her grades are terrific so her parents haven’t noticed. Anyway, more worrying is when this picture-perfect teen says: “I don’t really know what to do with my life. I don’t have, like, an interest. I guess I’ll go to LSE in two years’ time because my dad went there.”
While Flowers is hard on the schools, Levine blames pushy parents. “We would do well to remember,” she writes, “late bloomers like Albert Einstein and John Steinbeck. Sometimes a nudge is helpful, a shove rarely is.”
But shoved is what moneyed kids are, albeit in more subtle ways than their hoodie counterparts. “Why aren’t you taking higher maths, you’d be great?”; “You should play rugby like me, you’d love it!”; “I bet you’d look so lovely if you lost a bit of weight darling.” The tone is always breezy, says Levine, but the effect is devastating.
And affluent parents are the worst for dishing out this kind of stealth criticism. If their money is the result of career success, they are often deeply competitive themselves and firm believers in the cult of self-betterment. Though they deny it, they are far more likely to view an accomplished child as a personal gewgaw.
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Levine singles out wealthy mums as being particularly guilty of this, as they tend to be either competitive stay-at-home mums or successful career women. The stay-at-home variety, particularly women with domestic help stuck for something to do, will live vicariously through their child, projecting their own thwarted desires (prima ballerina with a double first from Cambridge?) onto them.
The second villain (of course) is the time-poor working mother. Levine says that what often happens is that through a kind of misguided love the time-constrained relationship with her child becomes centred on the homework table or transporting a child to music lessons, places where the focus is on making the child achieve.
This results in helicopter mothering (ie, always hovering), where the guilty parent substitutes time, understanding and letting the child make its own decisions for “improving” her child’s life through extra accomplishments. In this crusade for success the basic bits of parenting — hanging out, imparting values, letting a child work out right and wrong and who they are, get squeezed out. And in households where money is plentiful children have fewer and fewer actual duties, let alone organising their time in the way they wish.
This is the crux of the problem: rich kids have been stripped of all responsibility. All their life choices are made for them by ambitious parents — what to study, who to marry, even what to dream about. In the years that they should be developing personalities, their paranoid parents, and bitchy social lives, destroy any chance of building an actual personality. When it comes to their inner selves — the part that makes choices, has feelings, interests, the real them — Levine finds a terrifying vacuum.
The later life results of this, she says, are tragic: bad marriage choices, poor job performance, alcoholism (40% of alcoholics begin in their teens), drug addiction and a greatly increased risk of suicide.
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The idea that children need to be shielded from the possibility of failure by being alternatively hot-housed and mollycoddled could mean that — far from raising the perfect creatures they crave — affluent parents are raising a generation of middle-class depressives and drug addicts. Levine says a large part of the problem is that rich parents have stopped trusting their own common sense and they should forget reading silly parenting guides and just spend more time finding out who their children really are. And even more importantly encouraging their kids to do the same. Levine’s book is a wake-up call. Parents, children, teachers — read it.