TRANSCRIPT
A few people have asked that I make a video on rich people’s problems. A dangerous subject, I think. Most people don’t really particularly want to empathize with the potential problems of rich people. But the more I thought about it, the more I found one area in this subject matter that really calls to me. I’ve observed it a lot, and that’s the disadvantages for being the child of a rich person.
Not that it’s entirely disadvantageous to be the child of a rich person. There can be a lot of obvious advantages: better food, better schools, living in a safer environment, etc., etc., etc. If you have medical problems, a lot of times they’re treated in a much better and quicker way. But I’ve also really seen so many children of rich people having such obvious disadvantages, and I would like to do my best to explore them.
The first one that I’ve seen— not all rich people’s children, but a lot—end up socially isolated, socially alienated. Even think about my travels. Sometimes I’ve lived with rich people, and they live in compounds a lot, where there’s a wall and a gate and a fence and a locked door. The children are essentially locked into a kind of prison. I’ve seen this a lot. You see the children of poor people, the poor kids outside, all playing in groups and playing games and having fun. And the rich little kid is inside all alone, maybe playing video games or watching television. And maybe all the poor kids secretly want to be watching this, but the child is lonely and just wishes he or she could go out and play with the other kids, socialize, be normal, fit in, have fun. And in terms of their emotional development, it works against them.
Another thing I’ve seen is a lot of the children of rich people don’t get good parental role models. One is like if the parents work really hard to earn their riches, a lot of times the parents, or one parent, is basically never there, basically abandoning their children to the care of nannies and au pairs—paid people, people who are paid to raise their children. And while yes, I have talked to quite a few grown-up people who were rich when they were younger, in rich families who had nannies and au pairs who they said they loved, I’ve also talked to a number of them who said, “I wasn’t loved by these people.” These people were paid and just did their job, or even overtly resented me. Sometimes these nannies had their own children somewhere else far away, and someone was raising them, and they were being paid to raise me. And it was so unfair. It was so terrible. And sometimes the nannies, on an emotional level, really took it out on the children. But sometimes also faked it—faked being loving, faked being caring—but didn’t fake it at the same time.
I see this in New York City all the time. The nanny walking down the street on the telephone, the kid is crying in the stroller, and the nanny is completely uninterested or maybe even is sadistic. They’re like, “Hmm, you can pay me to make sure this child is clean. You can pay me to make sure this child is well-dressed. You can pay me to make sure that diaper is changed, but you’re not going to pay me to love the kid.”
Then I’ve seen another one with rich parents who don’t want formal nannies. They don’t want some poor nanny coming from the bad part of town. Instead, they want an educated, mature— in America, they say an educated, mature European person, a young, beautiful, blonde, white woman who’s going to come in and be there for you and give you all her attention for a year. And we’re going to pay her to live in our house, and she will be our live-in au pair. She will be your substitute mother. And sometimes for the first year of having an au pair, in that au pair’s one-year contract, everything goes great, and the children really attach to the au pair and love her. And I’ve heard the au pairs even say this: “It’s so awesome, and I love these children like my own.” But the au pairs are really naive. And then at the end of the year, the au pair goes back to wherever they came from—Norway or Sweden or Germany—and abandons the kid. The kid or children have been totally abandoned, and the children go through a shock. All the money in the world cannot make up for the shock they go through by being abandoned by this paid surrogate parent.
And then the parents say, “Oh no, it’s not a problem,” because the parents aren’t empathizing. The parents don’t really care. And then they bring in a brand new au pair. And this brand new woman, young woman—19, 20, 18 years old, even—comes from Europe and moves into the family and becomes the new stand-in mother. And the children are resentful and don’t like this new person and say, “I don’t want to attach to this new person.” And maybe you’re a lot more cautious about attaching emotionally in a deep way to anyone. And maybe it takes them six months to attach to this new au pair, and it’s like it doesn’t go so well. And then at the end of the year, boom, the au pair is gone, and a third one comes in. And then a year later, a fourth one comes in. I’ve heard a lot of these stories, and it’s like it’s really a twisted way to raise children. It’s traumatizing.
Then another problem that children of rich people have is the world doesn’t empathize. The world instead is jealous of them and says, “You have every advantage of the world. You have the best clothes and the best computers and the best phones and the best this and the best vacations. Why are you complaining? Why are you complaining?” Because they’re not seeing these children for the real deficits in their lives.
Then I think about another thing: the rich parents saying, “Oh, my child is having problems now. My child is expressing the effects of their neglects and their violations, and they’re expressing the consequences of my failure as a parent. Well, I’m just going to throw money at it. I’m going to send them to psychotherapy, and I can afford the best psychotherapy and the best child psychologist and the most expensive.” And I’ve seen many, many times the best psychotherapist is the psychotherapist who will never challenge the fundamentals of this system. Instead, what the parent really does is they buy a psychotherapist who will, the parent and the child, they’re paying someone a lot of money to go along with the sickness of the system, to not call out the fundamental problems that are going on in the system, not call out the fundamental abandonments and neglects and even overt violations that the parents are committing. Instead, they’re paying this therapist to shut up.
And I’ve seen it with a lot of these therapists who take the children of rich people. The therapists like the money; they’re addicted to the money. And what they do is they gloss over the fundamental issues, and they find different ways to bond with the children. And sometimes the children like the attention, so they like the therapist. But the therapist never in any way changes the fundamentals of this system. In effect, they fail at doing their job as a therapist.
And then there’s another one. Then there is psychiatry. I don’t have the statistics, but I’ve heard people talk about it—people I respect in the mental health field. And I think about my own observations, watching people out in the world, especially in poor countries, where the more money families have, the more likely it is their child who is having problems—problems being an expression of what’s going on inside of the family system—that child is going to get a psychiatric diagnosis and is going to end up in the office of a psychiatrist and is going to end up on a psychiatric medication or two psychiatric medications. Or when that doesn’t work, the psychiatrist is saying, “Well, you know, they’re having this problem and this problem,” not saying it might be resulting from the drugs and certainly not saying it’s resulting from the emotional dynamics going on within the family system. Instead, “Oh no, we need to give this kid another diagnosis and another drug.” And I’ve seen this with a lot of the children of rich people in poorer countries especially, but sometimes in America too. They end up going down the slippery slope and becoming psychiatric patients, and no one ever.
What is the fundamental emotional dynamic problem in this family? When the people have more money, well, a lot of times the mental health professionals are more likely to side with the people who have the power in the system—the parents—because it’s financially to the advantage of the professional. And also, it’s dangerous to the professional if they start calling out the parents.
Well, immediately, one thing is, the first thing the parents do, often I’ve seen this, is when the parents get criticized and the therapist, who’s being paid a lot of money, says, “No, it’s not appropriate what you’re doing. You’re being deficient. You’re neglecting your child. You’re abandoning your child. All your money is not helping you be a better parent.” The parent gets offended.
And, well, the simplest thing that they do is they can pull the child out of therapy immediately. “Ah, this is not what I’m paying for!” And they also can criticize the therapist. They have more power in the system, even more legal power to go after the therapist’s livelihood. And certainly, they’re not going to be referring all the children of their rich friends to this therapist or this psychiatrist.
I also think that a lot of times the mental health professionals who end up working with rich people have less integrity. They are the kind of people who it is easier to buy, buy their lies, buy their manipulations, get them on their side. I think sometimes when people who have less money go to therapy, there’s less—well, there’s less of a financial incentive for the therapist to—and they can be more direct about what’s really going on.
Now, another problem that I have seen with the children of a number of rich people is that on an emotional level, they can inherit the arrogance of their parents. Their parents, who think that just by nature of being rich, they’re better people, they’re better than others. And a lot of poor people can think this about rich people too. These rich people have won. They’re the pinnacle of society. Everybody wants to be them. And so the parents can think they’re just inherently greater, better people. Their human fabric is better.
The children growing up with parents like that believe it because this is what they see in their society. And I’ve seen a number of children of rich people, sadly, be very arrogant and have no awareness of it. Brag about their parents, brag about their money. I’ve seen them brag to me about how much money they have and how fancy they are. Brag to me, look, the children even say, “Oh, you have a terrible old phone. My—” and they’re seven years old—”my phone is better than yours, and it’s a lot better.” And through this, they alienate a lot of people. They can become socially alienated.
And then I’ve seen a number of them, when they get older, when they become teenagers, when it’s time to start transitioning into adulthood, it can be a pretty rough transition, especially if they haven’t built up a skill set in terms of a trade at one level or an emotional skill set even to figure out how to, well, achieve the lifestyle—the financial lifestyle—that their parents have. It can be very hard for them to go to work and do lower-paying jobs like a lot of us who grew up who didn’t have money have to do—working in restaurants and doing delivery work and cleaning up after people and washing dishes and doing things that, well, a lot of rich children have never done and don’t want to do.
They want to skip the line like their parents have the liberty to do. And by skipping the line, or wanting to skip the line, to not do the work that young people a lot of times have to do while they’re getting their education, while they’re building up their skill set, they don’t get really important socialization. They don’t learn how to interact with peers. They often don’t even have peers.
And then I’ve seen this a lot of times—the rich parents even want to help the children avoid this, and they try to buy the children’s way out of these problems by just throwing more money at the children, setting up trust funds. And I’ve seen a number of children—rich kids—who grow up and become trust fund kids and want to skip the line and want to start their own businesses and become rich, get-rich-quick kind of schemes, and want to become fancy in some ways without really knowing how to build their business or to build their ideas.
They haven’t gotten enough proper feedback from the world to learn about their weaknesses and grow their weaknesses, convert their weaknesses into strengths. And then what happens is these young people grow up and often fail pretty bad. Their parents might have learned to build businesses from the ground up that the children didn’t learn. They want to skip the line, and it can be very, very painful.
I’ve also seen some of these rich people having no way to deal with their failures, sometimes not even acknowledging that they’ve made failures, and instead blocking out their failures with drugs and alcohol. And sometimes just trying again and failing again and trying again and failing again, and sometimes just plain giving up and living—well, how would you say it?—just living on the money without doing anything, living on the trust fund without becoming functional adults in a productive way.
And then the last thing, the last big problem I have seen with a lot of children of rich people, the adult children of rich people, especially if they continue to get money from their parents, it’s very hard for them to differentiate themselves from their parents, to critique their parents, to look at their parents in light of their parents’ flaws. Even, heaven forbid, to confront their parents. It’s hard for them to break away from their parents when they need to do it in certain ways, or sometimes really even in big ways, because they know that their parents will reject them. They will lose the money train.
It’s hard for anybody to confront their parents. It’s hard for anyone to break away from their parents, especially when they really, really need to do it. But it is, well, in general, from what I’ve seen, a lot, lot harder for the children of rich people. And because of this, often they end up staying, sometimes for their whole lives, dependent children.