Being “rich“. Is that really the best we can hope for our children?

Recently, my husband emailed me a link to an article, “Will Your Child be Rich or Poor? 15 Poverty Habits Parents Teach Their Children” by Tom Corley. It’s uncommon for him to send me whole articles, as he usually prefers to text me inappropriate pictures or screen shots of Tweets he considers gut-busting, but he’s not alone in his enthusiasm. The article boasts 398k likes on Facebook. The title was somewhat off-putting to me; I figured it might be a case of click-bating and dove in with eagerness.

But the article left me feeling fairly queasy. I don’t really care about the writing style, or the heavy reliance on the statistics from the self-conducted study. What was so unpleasant was the tone. The simplistic and childish assumption that all rich people are happy and classy, and all poor people are miserable and gross.

I can only assume that this article is a very brief summary of the kinds of things Mr. Corley discusses in his two books: “Rich Kids – How to Raise Our Children to be Happy and Successful in Life” and “Rich Habits – The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals.” The books were written using data from a study that Mr. Corley’s website (richhabits.net) says he culled by the following method: “For five years, Tom observed and documented the daily activities of 233 wealthy people and 128 people living in poverty. During his research he identified over 200 daily activities that separated the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots.’ ”

After a brief introduction, the article lists some depressing statistics from Mr. Corley’s study. Things like, “72% of the wealthy know their credit score vs. 5% of the poor”, “62% of the wealthy floss their teeth every day vs. 16% of the poor”, “79% of the wealthy believe they are responsible for their financial condition vs. 18% of the poor”, etc.

Mr. Corley then goes on to explain to parents how to structure children’s lives so that they can avoid falling into the heinous and irreversible trap of becoming poor. To prevent such ruination, Mr. Corley provides us with 15 bullet points.

I readily acknowledge that I agree with a lot of the suggestions. In my opinion, many of the things he says are just good common sense ways to help your kids develop into nice and healthy grown-ups. Mr. Corely urges us to limit screen time and junk food, let our kids know that it’s ok to make mistakes, set aside one hour a day just to chat, have them exercise daily, help your child open up a bank account, and have kids write thank-you notes.

But much of the list seems stifling and wrong-footed. I’m not sure if Mr. Corley has any children of his own, but it seems as if he hasn’t ever met an actual child. Also, I’m not sure what age group he’s suggesting these tactics be unleashed on. The list doesn’t seem appropriate for younger kids, but it doesn’t seem right for teenagers either.

Mr. Corely wants our kids to set monthly, annual, and five-year goals, work or volunteer 10 hours a week, save 25 percent of their earnings and gifts, read two “educational” books a month, create daily to-do lists that must be monitored by parents, require kids to participate in two non-sports related activities, have parents punish children when they lose their tempers, and have parents teach their children that wealth is good and it’s important to pursue the “American Dream”.

My husband and I have two boys. I like to think we’re raising them to be kind, polite, empathetic, hard-working, and happy. Does anyone really think that being rich automatically makes them happy? As long as we’re somewhat responsible, shouldn’t we focus on being fulfilled, rather than wealthy? It surprised me that my partner would want to enforce this money-hungry, Gestapo-like regime on any person, much less our own children.

And I can’t imagine a more perfect breeding ground for intense resentment and rebellion than the schedule prescribed by Mr. Corley.

A Day in the Life 

• 5:30 am: Wake up. Write up daily to-do list and submit it to Mom for approval.
• 6:30-7:30: Have breakfast, and get ready for school. Make sure khaki pants have perfect pleats.
• 8:00-3:00: School (think he’s allowed to have fun or just, you know, suffer?)
• 3:30-4:30: Homework (which Mom has to help with)
• 4:30-5:30: Non-sports related activity, pottery making. Mom will drive him, of course.
• 5:50-6:30: Soccer practice, because we need to squeeze in that daily exercise. Mom continues to chauffeur.
• 6:30-7:30 It’s time to volunteer. Mom carts the little guy over to the local nursing home where he empties bed pans for an hour.
• 7:30-8:30: Dinner. Mom still has to make a healthful meal.
• 8:30-9:30: Chatting. Not sure what there is to discuss since kid had spent most of the day driving around with Mom.
• 9:30-10:45: To-do list. Oh, man! He didn’t take out the garbage, write a thank you note to grandma, balance his check book, or read a chapter in his educational tome, “The Youngest Millionaire in the World.”
• 11:00 pm: Floss the crap out of his teeth and go to bed. Hopefully, this little man is so worn out he falls asleep quickly, because 5:30 comes awful early.

And I sincerely hope Mom doesn’t mind having zero time for a life, job, partner, or other children.

Like I said above, I’m not in favor of letting kids do whatever they want or fostering a completely self-centered existence. But when you force a kid to do anything, it sucks. They hate it and a ton of your parental interaction time is spent on tedious nagging. As a parent sometimes you have to insist. But this is an ENTIRE DAY of forced labor and boring busy work. Whether they end up rich, poor, or something in-between, how can such a parent involved, over-scheduled childhood make a happy, self-sufficent adult?

Instead of teaching kids how to become wealthy, a specious goal at best, how about we give them some room. Sometimes, kids and teens need to be alone, or do nothing, or go lay in the grass and daydream. Sometimes they need to be selfish, go play, stare in the mirror, or waste time. More than sometimes, really more like a lot of times. How about they read books because it’s fun, or we talk when we feel like it? Why not take the that twenty dollars from Grandma and blow the whole thing on bulk candy and a video game? Why not enjoy being young? It’s such a short and precious time.

And what happens when you release this carefully controlled animal into the wild? Will he be able to navigate college without you and your incessant nagging? Will he call you every night crying to come home? Or will he dive headfirst into the fun he’s so long been denied and never call you again?

If kids never have a chance to stop and let their minds wander, how will we they discover who they are and who they want to become? If they’re always working, how will they ever know that yucky feeling that comes from too much lolling around? How can a child or teenager so tightly harnessed ever make the mistakes that we’re supposed to teach them are ok?

Here’s a fantastic essay from Motherlode, the parenting blog on the New York Times site. It’s called, “What’s Your Teenager Doing This Summer? In Defense of ‘Nothing’ “by Julie Lythcott-Haims. Mrs. Lythcott-Haims spent a decade as the dean of freshman at Stanford University and saw first-hand how crippling over-scheduling and over-parenting can be. I suggest that you give it a read. It’s very well-written and definitely something that’s actually worthy of being shared on Facebook. I plan on sharing it with my husband tonight.

Follow Sarah on Facebook: This Fit Mom

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ColumnRead a book. Occupy your mind.

What is the endgame of the American Dream? If our cherished national narrative is indeed one of rags to riches, aspirations to the realization of prosperity, then what lies at the end of the rainbow if not a pot of pure gold? There are other performance metrics, to be sure, but it’s no secret that in the land of the free, we by and large define victory in terms of fame and fortune. Yet as winners’ dreams are realized, and the rich continue to get richer, there is clearly trouble in paradise.

As having vs. having less (and less) has once again fallen into extremely high relief, a small percentage of 99 percent have ”occupied” Wall Street, demanding the wealth be spread, the crimes be prosecuted and “the system” changed. Many in thought and some in deed have put what few eggs they have left in the movement’s basket, or at least in the enough! concept it represents. But American culture on the ground remains what it is. Turn on the television, surf the “news,” even read a bestseller, and ask yourself this: How do the rich occupy us? Why do we stare at them so? What part of our dreams have they already bought and paid for (along with an endless supply of our bows and curtseys and get-out-of-jail-free cards)?

Sociological and psychological data points notwithstanding, you would be hard-pressed to find a source that could offer more insight into the codependence between the 1 percent and the rest of us than the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gaze (or, for some of you, look again) through Fitzgerald’s lens and you’ll see deeply into the twisted folie that remains our collective dream. So much of his work explores how and why we deify and then, stunningly left out of the equation (we protest!), publicly eviscerate our champions and by proxy the system that keeps us (apologies to one in ten of you) on the not-quite-long end of the stick.

As for the how, try this on—it’s not from an OWS pamphlet. It’s from Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, published nearly a century ago. He was 23 and it was 1920, the dawn of the Jazz Age:

We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can’t. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It’s worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food.

Yes. You can say that again.

As for the why, Fitzgerald’s greatest work explores the relationship between the dreamer, the dream and those who occupy the choice seats. His main characters demonstrate what it means to desire and glorify wealth, and, like the poor dog that pursues the speeding car, what one can and cannot do with it on the rare occasion that it’s chased down. Moreover, he explores our illusions about money and prestige from the inside out, exposing how, free from day-to-day struggles, the wealthy can often exemplify the worst of our human selves, as they are set free to enjoy the hubris and vagary that come from not having to earn a living. Our desire as individuals to climb to such sickening “heights” provides the brilliant foil and tragedy in his fiction.

In his masterpiece, the compact and near-perfect The Great Gatsby, we witness a man who takes a stab at the heart of the beast, subjugating and even erasing his “common” reality to obtain the dream. So personally overwhelming is his quest, that its goal arguably becomes interchangeable with the idea of love itself. Of his great desire, Daisy, Jay Gatsby’s declaration followed by narrator Nick Carraway’s observation:

‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. … High in a white place the king’s daughter, the golden girl…

Fitzgerald’s Nick Diver, tragic hero of the later, some say greater, and definitely more intricate Tender is the Night, is another 99 percenter who dares to stake a claim, this time through the form and family of the damaged and complex Nicole Warren. Sadly, as Nicole’s sister, Baby, notes, “When people are taken out of their depth they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.” Does Nick really stand a chance?

What makes these characters—Gatsby, Diver, and Paradise’s Amory Blaine—so powerful is not simply their juxtaposition to wealth. That would be maudlin, at best, or simply trite (see pulp, then and now). Rather, the way in which they embody what we might now finally call the American Tragedy is by their extreme love-hate relationship with it all. Like we do with our “winners” today (be they Trumps, Hiltons or the vilest insider traders), these timeless icons elevate the dream masters, lifting them high to ogle and adore, allowing them their dalliances and their misdeeds. Why? Because they think that they can play, too – that the thrill can somehow be more than vicarious. But of course the game is rigged, and they find themselves left out, their noses pressed against the glass, the dream merely an illusion.

Today, as we rage against the 1 percent, it’s perhaps wise to ask ourselves, how did we get here? Why are there class crimes in progress with the violators and predators getting away Scott free, as it were? What is it about our dreams and heroes that has us insanely circling back here again and again, in a cultural and class dialectic that seems to lack any final synthesis? Perhaps it’s an expatriate like Fitzgerald who in the end can see it best. After all, by spending time outside the church, it’s easier to see how gods are created – and served.

Whether you’re considering a Fitzgerald refresher (no, not a martini) or wanting to pick him up for the first time, here are some quick takes on what are arguably his three finest novels:

This Side of Paradise, 1920

An immediate and mammoth success when it was published, Fitzgerald’s first novel is seen by many as the opening bell of the Jazz Age. The story is of Midwest-born, egotistical and aggressively social Amory Blaine, who travels east to boarding school and then Princeton to assume his rightful place in the world. Upended by superficiality and then the Great War (the storyline of his experience overseas is loudly absent), he struggles to find love and personal authenticity in the face of a warped and overbearing culture. An anthem for the youth of the day, the two-book, three-part story, was ahead of its time in experimental form (part of it is presented as a script) and reads as a highly charged, postmodern pastiche.

The Great Gatsby, 1925

Many have made the case that The Great Gatsby is the finest American novel. Perhaps rightly so. Returning war veteran Nick Carraway tells the story of his time in Long Island’s ritzy West Egg, where he moves in next door to a great mansion and its beautiful, enigmatic and larger-than-life owner – the fabulous Jay Gatsby. A taught and seamless narrative, Nick’s unfolding relationship with the mysterious Gatsby and the latter’s obsession with across-the-bay flapper Daisy Buchanan is pure American legend. Read this short, yet glorious novel in a single sitting. It is fundamental to who we are and quite possibly were destined to be from our first landing on this side of the Atlantic.

Tender is the Night, 1934

Fitzgerald’s last finished novel, Tender is the Night, wades deep into the heart of ethics and compromise as it follows the lives and marriage of Dick and Nicole Diver. Written in part during his wife Zelda’s hospitalization for schizophrenia, many events of this at times intricate and always-nuanced novel are clearly autobiographical. Tormented during its writing for many reasons, not the least of which his alcoholism, Fitzgerald sets up and then examines without mercy what appears to be the perfect couple of the late-1920s – French Riviera-bronzed, party friendly and easily loved by all who surround them. A rollercoaster of pleasure of pain and twisted and changing love roles, the novel is a flourish of language and storytelling, soaked in the psychology of love, wealth and “place.”

Editor’s note: News & Culture contributor Scott Adelson’s biweekly feature, InPRINT, reviews and discusses books new and old, as well as examines issues in publishing.

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Top image: Bastián Despreciable Cifuentes♡

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