Trophy Kids and Other Casualties
Madeline Levine’s The Price of Privilege tries to dissect the malaise of affluent adolescents in the 2010’s, and occasionally succeeds. Its most useful moments are scattered insights: “the best gift you can give your kids is a good marriage”, or her indictment of “maladaptive perfectionism”—the silent plague of the well-off.
Her core claim is that psychological control corrodes, while authoritative structure builds. Parents, she argues, should anchor their children emotionally—“serve as the emotional ballast”—while prioritizing their child’s value, effort, and only then performance. Self-efficacy is emphasized as equal in importance to self-esteem.
She skewers performative parenting: “Consistently making it to the soccer game while inconsistently making it to the dinner table”. The book paints a picture of “the toxic brew of pressure and isolation” that defines many upper-middle-class upbringings, and can provide a backdrop for things like the spike in youth suicides in Palo Alto.
But the book has limitations. Much of its ground is well-worn. Her use of research is inconsistent—there’s a lot of advice but not much rigor, and what science she does cite is often poorly presented.
Read in 2025, it is a 2010s prequel to The Anxious Generation, written before we fully grasped the digital accelerants of all this. A diagnosis lacking the latest lab results, and another way to get parents’ hands wringing.
Quotes
- “Maladaptive perfectionism”
- “The toxic brew of pressure and isolation”
- “Consistently making it to the soccer game while inconsistently making it to the dinner table”
- psychological control: using guilt, shame or other emotions to ensure behavioral compliance.