The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids Paperback – 1 Aug 2008

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Review ------ “Useful...clear, sensitive...” (Publisher's Weekly) “In this inful book, Levine eschews the temptation to dismiss problems of privileged teens as overindulgence.” (Book List) “[Written] with clarity and understanding of the culture of affluence and its pitfalls for parents.” (Library Journal) “Fresh and important ideas about parenting in the age of affluence…” (Mary Pipher, Ph.D., author of Reviving Ophelia) “Levine offers chapter after chapter of practical advice for dealing with family problems.” (Connecticut Post Online) “[Madeline Levine’s] ideas may be uncomfortable for parents to read, but they’re a wonderful wake-up call.” (Bay Area Insider) “Levine’s book explores some troubling and intriguing issues that certainly are worth pondering and discussing.” (Marin Independent Journal) “She treats her subjects as well as her subject with compassion and understanding.” (Chicago Tribune) “...[an] impassioned wake-up call to parents...” (The Gazette (Montreal)) “This book has resonated in affluent communities all over the country. [Levine is] clearly on to something.” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) Synopsis -------- 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.