The Misery of Being Young, White, and Rich

A recent article by Liz Kulze on the Atlantic website gave counterintuitive information about abuse of prescription drugs in America.  It’s not those who are seeking to escape the misery of poverty or discrimination.  It’s not older people who inadvertently got hooked on pain meds.  It’s not gang members.  The group who is far and away the most likely to abuse prescription drugs are young, white, affluent males.

Substance abuse of all sorts can be viewed as an attempt to deal with a problem.  Often, it is an escape from something intolerable.  So what’s intolerable about a life of privilege?

Kulze suggests that privilege itself is the problem; having never been challenged, these teens and young adults haven’t developed any sort of resources to deal with even the ordinary struggles of high school and college.    She cites Dr. Madeline Levine, a psychologist who suggested in her book The Price of Privilege that an elite lifestyle is detrimental to character development.   According to Dr. Levine, “Indulged, coddled, pressured and micromanaged on the outside, my young patients appeared to be inadvertently deprived of the opportunity to develop on the inside.”  Research suggests that a childhood containing a modest amount of stress is associated with better long-term adjustment than childhoods with either severe stress or no stress.  For example, a study of Illinois Bell employees during a company crisis in the 1970s and 80s found that those who handled the turmoil well—staying healthy, keeping their jobs or quickly finding new ones—tended to have had fairly tough childhoods.  Indulging children doesn’t do them any favors; it leaves them ill-prepared for adulthood and, as often as not, perpetually immature.

Kulze also notes that, ill-prepared as they are for even average accomplishments, privileged children are often saddled with unrealistic expectations for success.  The gulf between capabilities and expectations seems unbridgeable; no wonder that anything that dulls awareness of this huge discrepancy is appealing.  I particularly like the following sentence:  “Bereft of any authentic sense of self and the grit it takes to form one, and relentlessly pushed to socially defined ends, a privileged adolescence becomes the consummate breeding ground for self-harm, however unintended.”  I wish Kulze had elaborated on her point about the deficient sense of self in privileged adolescents.   Selves are developed though such processes as consistently receiving accurate feedback, testing oneself against some challenge, or interacting regularly with those who are different from oneself.  None of these things are likely to happen regularly among those who are coddled, protected, and given a sense of entitlement.

As a psychologist, I haven’t worked very much with privileged children, but I have seen a number of parents who raised their children by giving indiscriminate praise, providing a surfeit of material goods, and foregoing any meaningful standards for mature behavior.  In nearly every instance, when grown the children coped poorly with college, work, or relationships; many were substance abusers.  Having been taught that they weren’t to blame for anything, most learned little from repeated failures.  We don’t do our children any favors when we treat them like little princelings.