Sherman (2016) - Conflicted Cultivation: Parenting, Privilege, and Moral Worth in Wealthy New York Families

Original Article
Conflicted cultivation: Parenting,

privilege, and moral worth in wealthy
New York families
Rachel Sherman
Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, 6 E. 16th St., Room 916,
New York, NY 10003, USA.
E-mail: shermanr@newschool.edu
Abstract Recent research on parenting and social class has identified cultivation
strategies that focus on expanding children’s skills and advantages, but such work has
not looked specifically at parenting among elites. Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews,
this article investigates the childrearing strategies and discourses of wealthy and
affluent parents living in and around New York City. Concerned about raising ‘‘entitled’’
children, elite parents employ strategies of constraint (on behavioral and material
entitlements) and exposure (to less advantaged social others) to produce morally ‘‘good
people.’’ However, these strategies stand in tension with another significant parental
concern: the expansion of both children’s selfhood and their opportunities. Ultimately,
though not quite intentionally, parents cultivate an appropriate habitus of privilege,
rather than significantly limit their children’s material or experiential advantages. Par-
ents’ discourses about constituting not-entitled subjects are important for two reasons.
One, they illuminate the struggles of liberal elites to be morally worthy in an envi-
ronment marked by extreme inequality, challenging assumptions about the instru-
mentality of their action. Two, they reveal the affective and behavioral bases of
legitimate entitlement more generally: what matters is how people act and how they
feel, not what they have.
American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2016). doi:10.1057/s41290-016-0012-8
Keywords: entitlement; habitus; inequality; morality; parenting; social class
Introduction
In recent years, scholars of the US and UK have devoted significant attention

to parenting strategies among middle- and upper-middle-class professionals,
especially as these strategies compare to those of working-class parents. But
2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

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Sherman
researchers have paid little attention to the childrearing practices and concerns
of elites. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with 50 affluent and wealthy
parents in and around New York City to explore practices and discourses of
parenting in this population, especially as they relate to the family’s social
advantages in the contemporary context of extreme income inequality. These
interviews were conducted as part of a broader project on elite New Yorkers’
lived experience of privilege, focusing on lifestyle decisions such as school
choice, home purchase and renovation, and leisure time (Sherman, n.d.).
Previous research would lead us to expect practices of intensive, attentive
parenting in this population, composing an overall approach that Lareau
(2002, 2003) has famously termed ‘‘concerted cultivation.’’ This approach is
usually understood (implicitly or explicitly) to be linked to instrumental motives
for maintaining children’s social advantages. The parents I interviewed,
especially those with school-age children, do enact these practices. But these
interviews also shed light on a previously unexplored, moral dilemma of
cultivation among the privileged: how to raise children who are not ‘‘entitled.’’
Although parents of all social classes are likely to share a concern with
children’s entitlement, my respondents’ children have significant and obvious
social advantages. These parents usually used ‘‘entitlement’’ to mean that their
kids would take these class advantages for granted. In contrast to entitled brats,
parents want to raise ‘‘good people’’: those who consume reasonably, under-
stand the value of work, respect others, and are aware of and appreciate their
social position.
To this end, I argue, parents use two additional forms of cultivation:
constraint and exposure. First, they talk about limiting children’s behavior and
their consumption of material goods, experiences, and labor. Constraining kids’
entitlement to consume will, parents hope, also constrain their sense of
entitlement more broadly. Second, parents want children to understand and
appreciate their own social advantages. Therefore, they try to expose kids to
others, in both imaginary and concrete ways, in order to help them understand
their social location and have a sense of what a ‘‘normal’’ life is.
However, for these parents, creating limits stands in tension with a more
conventional form of cultivation: expansion, or giving children more. As
previous research would predict, elite parents want kids to enjoy more
opportunities, have more experiences, receive more attention, develop more
skills, and they struggle with the idea of limiting these possibilities and thus the
child’s ‘‘boundless potential’’ (Nelson, 2010, p. 6). Furthermore, parents
themselves are conflicted about how much is enough – for themselves and
for their children – and about what exactly it means to be ‘‘normal.’’ Their
discussions are therefore shot through with ambivalence.
In this struggle, parents illuminate a tension around the concept of
entitlement (a tension that is reflected in the literature as well, as I will show).
Parents do not want their children to be ‘‘entitled,’’ but they mean this

Conflicted cultivation
behaviorally and affectively, not materially. Behaving appropriately means

acting as if one is equal, not superior, to others – being nice, working hard, not
demanding special treatment. It does not mean challenging children’s material
or experiential entitlements in any significant way. Ultimately, although not
always intentionally, parents are not only reproducing their children’s advan-
taged social position but also teaching them how to occupy that position
appropriately. Thus even as they seek to limit ‘‘entitlement,’’ I argue, parents
inculcate a habitus of legitimate privilege.
These moral discourses around cultivation matter for the study of culture and
inequality for two reasons. First, they illuminate a previously underexplored
moral dimension of the experience of privilege. Scholars often tend to read
wealthy people as essentially instrumental, intent on reproducing advantage for
themselves and their children, leaving out any moral dimension (Lamont, 1992;
Sayer, 2005). Yet the parents I interviewed experience their position in a
radically unequal distribution of resources as one of moral challenge. Their fears
about the moral corruption that privilege can engender and their desire to raise
‘‘good people’’ spotlight a more complex and conflicted experience of social
advantage than has previously been documented. These parents are, in a sense,
‘‘trapped in privilege’’ (Reay et al, 2007); they struggle interpretively and
practically to manage structural inequality on an individual level, in order to
remain morally worthy people.
Second, this exploration of upper-class parenting sheds light on widespread
cultural and moral legitimations of class inequality, at least in the US. Parents’
practices and discourses draw on a broader ‘‘cultural vocabulary’’ (Illouz, 1997)
of legitimate privilege. Legitimate entitlement is behavioral and affective, not
material or distributional. Behaving appropriately means acting as if one is
equal, not superior, to others – being nice, working hard, not demanding special
treatment. What matters is what you do and how you feel, not what you have.
In what follows, I situate this project theoretically and methodologically,
before exploring strategies of constraint and exposure and the tensions that
accompany them.
Parenting, Entitlement, and Moral Worth
In recent years, a number of scholars have explored childrearing strategies,

looking especially at the relevance of social class to parental choices (for a
comprehensive review, see Streib, 2013). Drawing primarily on ethnographic
data, Lareau (2002, 2003) developed the concepts of ‘‘concerted cultivation’’
and ‘‘natural growth’’ as class-specific parenting strategies. Middle-class parents
employ ‘‘concerted cultivation,’’ attending to their children’s activities, skills
development, personalities, social lives, and academic potential with great care
and effort. Working-class parents give kids more autonomy and expect them to

Sherman
manage their own time; these parents are less assiduously involved in the
institutions (particularly schools) that govern their children’s lives. Using in-
depth interviews, Margaret Nelson also compares these practices by class. She
highlights tensions in ‘‘professional middle class’’ parenting practices and beliefs:
between independence and surveillance, protection and pushing, ‘‘fun’’ and
achievement. These contrast to a less contradictory approach on the part of
working-class and middle-class parents, who care more about self-sufficiency
than passion, are not so invested in their children’s every move, and experience
fewer conflicts about their own authority (Nelson, 2010, p. 7).
The twin concerns of economic insecurity and social inequality frame this
literature. Nelson, for example, shows that parents are anxious about children’s
achievement partly because of economic uncertainty (see also Cooper, 2014;
Heiman, 2015; Lareau, 2003; Vincent and Ball, 2007; Weis et al, 2014). In her
analysis of highly cultivated ‘‘hothouse children,’’ Cindi Katz historicizes what
she calls ‘‘parental involution’’ – ‘‘the over-elaboration of the work (and play) of
childrearing’’ (2008, p. 10). Katz (2001, 2008, 2012) suggests that cultivation
strategies are essentially a distraction from the withdrawal of the state from
social reproduction and the sources of economic insecurity, which parents feel
acutely. In her recent book on insecurity, Marianne Cooper demonstrates that
even the wealthy parents she interviewed felt anxious about the future, and used
extreme economic and emotional investment in their children’s education and
future as part of a strategy of ‘‘upscaling insecurity’’ (Cooper, 2014, Chapter 4).
Some of these authors have also linked strategies of cultivation explicitly to
the reproduction of inequality. Many scholars focus on privileged parents’
direct pursuit of particular forms of educational advantage, leading middle-class
children to receive more resources than working-class ones (Johnson, 2006;
Lareau and Weininger, 2008; in the UK context see, e.g., Devine, 2004; Reay,
1998, 2005; Vincent and Ball, 2007). Identifying a more indirect process,
Lareau argues that middle-class ‘‘concerted cultivation’’ produces not only
particular skills, such as verbal abilities, a facility for abstract reasoning, and
‘‘the ability to interact with authority figures’’ (2003, p. 5), but also ‘‘a sense of
entitlement.’’ She means primarily that kids feel that they have a ‘‘right to
pursue’’ their own interests and preferences, that they deserve the attention and
engagement of adults, and that it is reasonable for them ‘‘to actively manage
interactions in institutional settings’’ (2003, p. 6; see also Calarco, 2011;
Johnson, 2006). She compares these children to working-class and poor children
who (like their parents) distrust institutions and do not feel empowered to
engage with or question authority figures. Lareau argues that the sense of
entitlement produced by concerted cultivation is likely to lead to advantages
later in the child’s life.
Despite the themes of insecurity and inequality, however, most of these works
have not looked explicitly at elite children. Instead, researchers have focused on
the practices and advantages of ‘‘middle-class’’ or ‘‘professional middle-class’’

families relative to ‘‘working-class’’ ones, and have typically defined class in

broad strokes.1 Others have also looked at variation within ‘‘middle classes,’’
especially in the UK (Ball et al, 2004; Irwin and Elley, 2011; Devine, 2004). But
because they contrast the (broadly defined) ‘‘middle’’ to the ‘‘working’’ class,
scholars of parenting tend not to identify any stratum above the middle class.2
They thereby collapse more privileged people into the ‘‘middle’’ category and
elide the question of significant privilege. We know very little about parents in
the top 1 or 2 or even 10 percent, for example, except for Cooper (2014) on the
aforementioned question of insecurity, and Pugh (2009) on children’s con-
sumption in affluent families. Popular books and elite publications address how
wealthy families should raise their children, explicitly discussing their privilege
and access to resources (e.g., D’Amico, 2010; Gallo and Gallo, 2001; Hausner,
1990; Carlyle, 2012; Lieber, 2015), but the academic literature is lacking in this
area.
Furthermore, this literature tends not to concern itself with the moral
imperatives parents might face. Thanks largely to its emphasis on insecurity,
much of the research focuses largely on parents’ fear of children’s losing social
advantages and thus (implicitly or explicitly) on the instrumental motivations
behind particular parenting strategies. Lareau seems to see concerted cultivation
as stemming from a desire both to give kids useful skills in a risky world (2003,
p. 249) and to raise fully realized adults. Indeed, moral and instrumental
motives are unlikely to be mutually exclusive. But scholars do not devote much
attention to these questions or to the moral values parents may also try to instill
(especially among elites). By the same token, few scholars look at constraint as a
mechanism of cultivation (but see Pugh, 2009).
Scholars of education, in contrast, have both studied elite young people and
raised questions that link advantage, morality, and habitus. A tradition of
research beginning with Cookson and Persell (1985) and culminating in several
recent ethnographic monographs (Aries, 2008; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009;
Howard, 2010; Khan, 2011) has explored class affects and advantages in elite
private schools in the US. In his study of St. Paul’s boarding school, for example,
Khan (2011) analyzes its ‘‘new elite’’ students – not the pseudo-aristocracy of
earlier years but the ‘‘diverse,’’ supposed meritocracy of the early twenty first
century. He contrasts a now-uncommon sense of ‘‘entitlement’’ with ‘‘privilege:
a sense of self and a mode of interaction that advantage [students]’’ (p. 14). The
core of this privilege is a sense of ‘‘ease,’’ which is cultivated in this environment
(and in others, such as families); those without this sense of ease are excluded.
1
Lareau (2002) defines the ‘‘middle class’’ by education and occupation. Nelson (2010), using
education as the defining feature, theorizes a professional middle class as distinct from a middle-class
one.
2
Indeed, this is impossible if education is the central indicator (rather than income and/or wealth).

Sherman
Khan’s definition of entitlement contrasts importantly (and perhaps confus-

ingly) with Lareau’s. Khan means by ‘‘entitlement’’ a belief that one is entitled to
social advantages by virtue of heritage, including ‘‘the ‘right’ breeding,
connections, and culture’’ (p. 14). Entitlement, for Khan, is exemplified by a
student’s imagining that something is owed to him simply because he is from a
wealthy family, in contrast to thinking he has to earn it through hard work. This
usage has a negative valence among his informants (and in general, I’d suggest).
Lareau means something more akin to Khan’s ‘‘ease’’ – a sense of belonging in
particular environments and a feeling of the right to ask questions and receive
attention. This is not only an analytical but also a normative distinction, which
runs through my informants’ accounts as well, as I’ll discuss.
This literature looks at explicitly moral dimensions of privilege. Students
studied by both Khan (2011) and Gaztambide-Fernández (2009) relied heavily
on moral ideologies of individual merit and hard work to justify their privileged
social position (see also Ho, 2009). However, Khan primarily frames ‘‘hard
work’’ as a relatively shallow justification of privilege, not a real struggle.
Taking moral conflicts more seriously, Gaztambide-Fernández and Adam
Howard illuminate another justification of a privileged social position, beyond
being a hard worker: the imperative to be a ‘‘good person’’ (Gaztambide-
Fernández and Howard, 2013; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009; Howard, 2010).
Good personhood manifests partly in a benevolence toward poor people, which
demonstrates moral character (Gaztambide-Fernández and Howard, 2013).
This literature on schooling thus addresses moral discourses and practices of
worth and affective dimensions of privilege. But these works look at the
perspective of students, and sometimes teachers, not parents. Thus, these
discourses, practices, and affects have not been linked to parenting strategies.
The broader literature on the cultural and moral dimensions of social class
(see, e.g., Lamont, 1992, 2000; Sayer, 2005; Perrier, 2012; Reay, 2005; Skeggs,
2004) tends not to address moral conflict elites may experience empirically.
Lamont’s (1992) study of French and American upper-middle-class men usefully
brings in morality as a corrective to Bourdieu’s focus on essentially competitive
deployments of cultural and economic capital (see also Sayer, 2005), but
Lamont analyzes moral definitions of worth as the basis for exclusionary
behavior, not as a site of personal struggle (see Hitlin and Vaisey, 2013).
Research on elite philanthropy acknowledges a moral dimension to giving, but
without investigating moral conflict, and often reproduces the focus on
exclusion (Ostrander, 1984; Ostrower, 1995; Kendall, 2002; but see Ostrander,
1995 on progressive inheritors). Other relevant recent studies of the wealthy
primarily extend Lamont’s focus on symbolic boundaries and mechanisms of
exclusion (Rivera, 2015; Sherwood, 2013; Kendall, 2002). This paper helps fill
this gap by investigating wealthy parents’ moral discourses and strategies in a
moment and a context of extreme inequality.

Methods and Sample
Recent debates about interviewing have centered on the utility of interview

methods, particularly in relation to what people actually do versus what they
say (Jerolmack and Khan, 2014; Khan and Jerolmack, 2013; Vaisey,
2009, 2014; Pugh, 2013; Lamont and Swidler, 2014). Yet in-depth interviewing
remains the best method for investigating, in the words of Lamont and Swidler,
‘‘where people live imaginatively – morally but also in terms of their sense of
identity – what allows them to experience themselves as good, valuable,
worthwhile people’’ (2014, p. 159). As Pugh (2013) points out, in-depth
interviews also illuminate emotions, including anxieties, in particular cultural
and social contexts. Because the goal of the larger project from which this paper
is drawn (Sherman, n.d.) was to understand how respondents’ feelings about
privilege, social location, and appropriate entitlements are linked to their
lifestyle choices, in-depth interviews were the logical choice.
It is notoriously difficult to gain access to elites for research purposes (Mikecz,
2012; Page et al, 2013), especially for projects like mine that investigate lifestyle
decisions and feelings about privilege. I thus recruited participants via snowball
sampling. I decided to confine the study to New York both because of the high
level of inequality in the city and because I wanted to talk with people who
shared a cultural context. The sample is neither random nor representative
(impossible in a sample of this size in any case (Small, 2009)), and therefore is not
generalizable. However, the study generates conceptual and empirical insights
that are theoretically important in themselves and can be used as the basis for
larger-scale comparative research, as I will discuss in the conclusion.
I sought parents of children under 18, particularly younger children, with the
expectation that these parents would likely be making important lifestyle decisions,
particularly regarding home purchase and children’s education, for the first time,
and thus would be thinking more explicitly about these issues. I defined ‘‘privileged’’
as being in about the top 5 per cent.3 I began by looking for people with house-
hold incomes of $250,000, which was in the top 5 per cent in 2010,4 and was
3
The elite are often defined as the top 1 per cent or even 0.1 per cent. This may make sense for studies
of political influence, for example; but those in the top 5 per cent or even 10 per cent, despite
garnering lower returns in recent years than the top 0.1 per cent, remain extremely privileged relative
to the rest of the population. Rivera (2014) advocates defining elites as the top 20 per cent.
4
Estimates of the top percentages vary significantly depending on how and when they are calculated.
Lisa Keister uses Survey of Consumer Finances data to place the top 5 per cent cutoff nationally at
$205,335 household income in 2010 (personal communication). Emmanuel Saez claims that, in
2012, $394,000 was the bottom of the top 1 per cent nationally; $161,000 was the bottom of the top
5 per cent (Saez, 2015). According to Business Insider, in 2015, to be in the top 1 per cent in New
York City required $608,584, while being in the top 5 per cent required $246,596 (Elkins, 2015).
The top strata of wealth are also hard to define; Keister (2014) draws on SCF data to set the top 1 per
cent at $6.8 million in 2010, when she also calculated that the cutoff for the top 5 per cent was
$1,863,800 (personal communication).

Sherman
nearly five times the median income in NYC of about $52,000.5 I also sought
respondents with assets (not including home value) of over $1 million, regardless of
income. I was interested in occupation, class background, and political beliefs as
potential sources of variation, but adjudicating among the effects of these
co-varying characteristics would not be possible in a sample of this size. Thus, I
tried to focus on obtaining variation in whether wealth was inherited or earned.
The sample I ultimately generated consists of 50 parents in 42 households in
New York City and the affluent New York suburbs, including both members of
several couples. All were partnered; all heterosexual respondents were married.
The vast majority of respondents (43) were identified through my personal and
professional networks or through respondents themselves.6 I also interviewed
30 providers of lifestyle services, from personal concierges to interior designers
and real estate brokers, about their work and their relationships with clients,
although I draw only sparsely on their accounts here.
The sample has a median household income of about $625,000, which is
twelve times the New York City median of about $52,000. The estimated7
median net worth is $3.25 million, compared to $77,000 in the US as a whole in
2010 and $126,000 in 2007 (Keister, 2014). Forty-two respondents had
household incomes of over $500,000 per year and/or assets over $3 million;
about half earned over $1 million and/or had assets over $8 million.
Approximately half had significant inherited wealth (from $3 million up to
over $50 million), facilitating comparison with those whose primary assets
come from income. Most respondents are what Khan (2011) calls ‘‘new elite,’’ in
that they believe in diversity, openness, and meritocracy rather than status based
on birth. Even the inheritors of wealth, for the most part, were not from old
money families, having gained their wealth in the previous generation or two.
My respondents and their partners work in a wide range of occupations, from
high-level positions in finance and business to corporate law, advertising,
academia, the arts, and non-profits. Sixteen are stay-at-home mothers, primarily
married to men who work in finance and related sectors. All respondents are
between the ages of 33 and 54, with an average age of 42. About 75 per cent are
women. About 20 per cent are people of color. The sample includes nine same
5
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/3651000.
6
Seven respondents were contacted via one of two non-profit organizations that work with wealthy
liberals and progressives. I initiated the snowball sample by consulting primarily with colleagues and
friends who attended elite colleges or live in elite areas about their friends or acquaintances who were
making significant lifestyle decisions, especially about home renovation. Some of the inheritors in the
sample could easily be in my own social and professional circles; those earners working in finance
and business were less likely to be. It is hard to know whether people might change their way of
speaking because of assumptions they would make about me, and if so how. For more discussion of
these issues, see Sherman (n.d.).
7
I have estimated net worth based on what respondents told me about their income, assets, and debt,
and on public records of property values. I believe these are conservative estimates (see Sherman,
n.d.).

sex parents. They live in Manhattan, brownstone Brooklyn, or the wealthy New
York suburbs. Their children range in age from infancy to 18, but in over two-
thirds of the households all the children were under 10, usually younger than 6.
Excepting those who live in the suburbs, nearly all send their children to private
schools. Slightly over half the respondents were raised Catholic or Protestant, a
third had been raised Jewish, and the remainder identify with some other
religion or come from mixed backgrounds. Fewer than one quarter have a
consistent religious practice.
New Yorkers are liberal, and my sampling strategy was especially likely to
generate liberal and progressive respondents. So it is not surprising that my
respondents are liberal socially relative to their class (Page et al, 2013). Most
identify as Democrats, while a few locate themselves to the left of the
Democratic Party. Yet several are Republicans or independents or are married
to Republicans, and many are economically conservative even if they vote
Democratic. Also perhaps characteristic of New York elites, my respondents
possess high cultural capital. All have completed college (nearly all at
prestigious institutions), and more than half have advanced degrees, largely
MBAs but also PhDs, JDs, and a range of MA degrees. They are worldly,
culturally omnivorous, and like to travel widely.
However, there is also significant variation within the sample, not only in
terms of political stance, religion, race, and sexual orientation, as noted, but
also in terms of the source of income (earned or inherited), class mobility, and
diversity of networks, all of which are related to choices and feelings about
privilege in complicated ways (see Sherman, n.d.). My respondents have also
chosen different lifestyles. For example, some of my respondents are progressive
inheritors who live in Brooklyn and work in creative jobs, while many are
earners who work (or whose husbands work) in finance or related occupations,
live in Manhattan or the suburbs, and summer in the Hamptons.
Most interviews started with a focus on home purchase and renovation and
shifted into other aspects of lifestyle and consumption choices, including
decisions about children’s upbringing and education. They lasted anywhere
from 60 min to 4 h, with an average length of 2 h. All were digitally recorded
and all but one8 were conducted in person, most commonly in the respondent’s
home (33 of the total sample) or in a café or restaurant, or in an office (mine or
the respondent’s). I refer to respondents with pseudonyms, and I have modified
some of their characteristics to preserve anonymity.9
8
I conducted one interview with a male respondent over the phone because he did not have time to
meet with me in person.
9
I do not identify named respondents by race in order to preserve anonymity.

Sherman
Worthy Selves and Conflicted Cultivation
In the larger project, I found that my respondents were concerned with

inhabiting their privilege in a morally worthy way, including working hard,
consuming reasonably, and ‘‘giving back.’’ Concerns over how to be a morally
worthy privileged person surfaced especially strongly in the case of children, a
subject respondents often brought up spontaneously. The words entitled and
entitlement came up constantly in interviews, usually unprompted by me.
Parents’ usage of the term had almost unfailingly negative connotations, nearly
always echoing Khan’s sense of illegitimately believing one should receive
certain benefits by virtue of who one is, rather than Lareau’s feeling of
empowerment. Many saw this problem as especially serious in New York,
because of the presence of astronomical wealth. This fear of children’s
entitlement was remarkably consistent across the sample.
Respondents’ accounts implicitly delineated several dimensions of entitle-
ment, which included kids thinking they could have everything they wanted,
being rude and obnoxious, and lacking a work ethic and expecting others to do
everything for them. Parents also worried that children would not understand
their advantages relative to others, and have an incorrect sense of what kind of
consumption is ‘‘normal.’’ The ‘‘good people,’’ parents wanted to raise, in
contrast, are the mirror image of entitled brats: they work hard, are not snobby,
obnoxious, or materialistic, and understand that they are lucky to have the
advantages they do. These concerns signal parental preoccupations with
morality in their children, and show that parents do not care only about
instrumental ends such as hedging against risk or pursuing advantage.
Presumably parents across classes share the desire to raise morally worthy
children, and fears of ‘‘entitlement’’ are of course not unique to the rich. But for
my respondents, the child’s moral self cannot stand apart from questions of
social advantage and social reproduction. Thus, my respondents implicitly and
explicitly described an appropriate habitus of privilege: in which children are
moderate in their consumption, hardworking, and ‘‘aware’’ of their advantages.
These parents cultivated this moral, not-entitled self, in two ways. First, they
tried to establish limits for children, regulating their consumption and their
behavior. Second, they attempted to expose children to their advantages relative
to others, in the hopes of inculcating appreciation for what they have and a
sense of obligation to those with less. But these practices of constraint and
exposure stand in tension with the kind of ‘‘concerted cultivation’’ Lareau and
others have identified. Such cultivation responds to an imperative of expansion
– of children’s individuality, their opportunities, their experiences, their
selfhood, and their potential – primarily through extracurricular activities,
adult attention, and challenging school programs.

In what follows, I look first at strategies of constraint – limits on behavior and

consumption. Parents express a strong desire to limit kids’ entitlements in these
areas, but this desire can conflict with a desire to preserve their psychological
well-being, especially among peers (Pugh, 2009). I then discuss strategies of
exposure. While parents want kids to be aware of people who are different from
themselves, understand what is ‘‘normal’’ in the ‘‘real world,’’ and ‘‘appreciate’’
what they have, they are often conflicted about whose reality is ‘‘normal’’ as well
as which others their kids should or could be comparing themselves to. Finally, I
look at how constraint and exposure come into conflict with imperatives of
expansion, leading struggles especially over schooling and paid labor. In the
end, I argue, these contradictory practices of cultivation, if successful, are likely
to produce children who occupy their privileged position appropriately, in terms
of affect and behavior. But they do not change children’s material, educational,
and experiential advantages.
The slippage between the two usages of ‘‘entitlement’’ is central here; parents
want to avoid entitlement in the negative sense (Khan’s) but not the sense of
entitlement that produces advantage (Lareau’s). Therefore, the paper not only
exposes parents’ struggles about these issues but also reveals one of the key
discourses of legitimating privilege. Legitimate entitlement to material advan-
tage entails, essentially, acting like they are not entitled; it means occupying that
privilege with modesty, reciprocity, ‘‘awareness,’’ and hard work.
A note on judgment: readers may be skeptical that these struggles were real,
partly because of concerns about interviewing, but also because we often
assume that wealthy people are interested only in accumulation or domination.
Such assumptions imply that the conflicts or non-instrumental motivations they
describe are simply ‘‘justifications’’ or ‘‘rationalizations’’ and thus not deeply
felt. But, while it is likely that respondents talked with me in particular ways, it
is unlikely that their discourses are solely strategic or unconnected to real
feelings and practices. Indeed, my respondents offered many kinds of examples.
Many alluded to how private these questions of money and privilege felt and
how difficult they were to talk about. And lifestyle experts I interviewed tended
to confirm their accounts with stories of their own clients.
More important, skepticism about what wealthy people say about their own
lives both stems from and reproduces negative moral judgments of wealthy
people – judgments my subjects are trying to avoid, as they try to be (and raise)
‘‘good people.’’ I contend, however, that such classification actually legitimates
inequality, by representing some individual rich people as ‘‘good’’ while others
are ‘‘bad,’’ rather than focusing on unequal systems of distribution. My goal is to
avoid this kind of individualist critique in favor of illuminating larger cultural
processes of legitimation that are, in the main, taken for granted in the US.

Sherman
Strategies of Constraint: Disciplining the Self
Parents tried to circumscribe kids’ entitlement by setting limits on their

consumption and their behavior, and by making demands of them. First, they
tried to teach kids to take other people into account. Paul, an executive earning
about $500,000, told me, ‘‘I think one thing [his wife] and I are, very, very,
very—it’s very important for us, that our kids are, at a minimum, respectful to
people. They’re nice. That’s number one.’’ Nadine, who had family wealth, said,
I try and think a lot about this stuff, and I don’t want my kids to be entitled
or snobby or spoiled in any way. I come down pretty hard on them about –
I mean, the main thing is, like, you’re going to be, like, a good fucking
person, you know? Like, you’re going to say please and thank you, and
you’re going to be, like, kind towards other people. And you’re going to be
responsible for yourself, and make good choices.
Second, nearly all my interviewees (like the affluent parents Pugh, 2009 studied)
also portrayed themselves as setting limits on children’s consumption. Olivia,
whose children will inherit tens of millions of dollars through her husband’s
family, did not want them to become spoiled. Asked how she would prevent that,
she said, ‘‘I mean, I think the biggest thing is, they just don’t get everything that
they want.’’ Teresa, a stay-at-home mom with an annual household income of over
$1 million, said, ‘‘We’ll take a taxi to [her son’s] school, frankly, sometimes when
we’re running late. But then he started asking for one every day. That’s sort of,
like, entitlement, so then we were like, ‘Hmm, I don’t think we’ll do it anymore.’ ’’
Not surprisingly, parents used consumption to enforce appropriate behavior.
Zoe had been a corporate lawyer but was now a stay-at-home mom; her husband
worked in finance. She described herself as setting strict limits. She said, ‘‘I don’t
buy them random things for no reason. We definitely wait for birthdays. Or, even
an ice cream. Like, she has to earn it. Yesterday, we promised her an ice cream,
but then she behaved horribly. And I said, ‘Then I’m sorry, ice cream is for girls
that behave. And that’s not you today. Maybe tomorrow.’ ’’ As Zoe’s comment
indicates, consumption not only depends on appropriate behavior, but is also
framed as a ‘‘treat,’’ an idea to which I will return.
These concerns also came together in limits on how much of other people’s
labor children had the right to consume. Olivia said, referring to both politeness
and labor, ‘‘The manners thing, I think is really important. And entitlement.
Like, you shouldn’t feel entitled to leave your stuff at the table, or not clean up
after yourself. And you know, the worst thing is when you say [of the family’s
assistant], ‘Look, Nancy’s gonna [do it].’ No, no, no. I will make it so that
Nancy doesn’t come. You know, you will take care of this.’’ Danielle, a stay-at-
home mom with family wealth, told me, of her two young children, ‘‘I mean,

they live in an incredibly entitled environment. So yeah. Squash it down, every

time I see any, I go squash.’’ She laughed. I asked, ‘‘When do you see it? How do
you do that?’’ She responded, ‘‘They say ‘Get me a–.’ I say, ‘You have legs. Your
legs ain’t broke, you get that. You put that away. You pick it up.’ ’’
This emphasis on self-sufficiency also meant requiring labor of children in the
form of chores. Lucy, the wife of a business entrepreneur worth over $50
million, was concerned about her small children’s entitlement. Asking me if I
had read a recent New Yorker article that described a 6-year-old child in the
Peruvian Amazon who cleaned, fished, and cooked,10 she said, ‘‘That article
changed my life. I’m not kidding you. I was like, ‘My six-year-old doesn’t know
how to do anything.’ So the next day, I was like, ‘You are doing your own
laundry. Here’s the liquid detergent. Have at it.’ ’’ She laughed. ‘‘And now he
does. He does his own laundry.’’ She and her husband also took away all her
son’s activities when he turned six, replacing his previous entitlements with a
system of points he had to earn for making effort in areas where ‘‘he feels he
needs to improve’’ (e.g., in school).
Frances is a stay-at-home mom and a Republican, whose husband’s hedge
fund job has generated assets in the tens of millions. She was raised ‘‘well-off’’
and attended elite high school and college, but her family’s current lifestyle is far
beyond what she grew up with. Frances linked her children’s allowance to their
chores, as her own father had. She said,
Yes, my kids definitely have an allowance. And it’s tied to their chores.
Which is something that I carry over from my own childhood, which I
really value. It’s a huge pain in the ass for me. But I fine them, when they
don’t do their chores. …. Everything has a value. It’s like, if you don’t turn
off your lights, if you don’t make your bed, if your clothes aren’t in the
hamper, those are fines. If you don’t set the table, if you don’t clear the
table, if you don’t put your sports bag away, those are all fines…. And
every time I describe to friends what I do, they think I’m a nut job. That
I’m crazy to spend the time I’m spending. But that’s how I grew up, and it
is a huge pain, but I’m hoping that it pays off, and that they appreciate –
that they get something from it later in life (laughs). I don’t know.
Like Lucy with the points scheme, Frances has created a system that creates
work for her, but which she hopes will ‘‘pay off’’ for her children, although she
cannot exactly articulate how.
As this example indicates, respondents who grew up either without money or
with less money than they have now often referred to their own upbringings in
talking about their children. This pattern held true even for respondents who
did not grow up poor or even middle class, but rather (like Frances) moved from
10
Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘‘Spoiled Rotten: Why do Kids Rule the Roost?’’, New Yorker, 2 July 2012.

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an upper-middle-class background into an astronomically wealthy one. But

some had learned about money by having less of it and therefore facing material
limits; now, wanting their children to learn these same lessons meant imposing
artificial ones. Miriam, an investment banker with a household income of over
$1.2 million, insisted that her two daughters share a room, a decision she
attributed explicitly to her own upbringing and her discomfort with her own
privileged financial position, as well as to her desire for her daughters to have
‘‘normal values.’’
I just wanted them to share a room. I always shared a room growing up,
and I have weird feelings in general about—like, I didn’t grow up with any
money, and I didn’t set out to make money, but I do make a lot of money.
And it’s a weird thing. And I’m like, what does it mean for my girls to
grow up with money? What does it mean for them and their values, and
how do I instill normal values in them? So I was like, they need to share a
room…. I think I just feel like [sharing a room] will show them that they’re
not the only person in the world. That, you know, they can’t have
everything they want. Maybe they feel like they should have their own
room ‘cause their friends have their own room. Well, too bad.
Miriam also criticized parents who said they ‘‘had to’’ give their kids separate
rooms because they would fight otherwise. ‘‘I’m like, you don’t have to do
anything. You know? We didn’t have the option when I was growing up, and so
we fought and we had to share a room.’’
Like Miriam, other respondents drew boundaries against parents who seemed
to indulge kids. Betsy, a management consultant turned stay-at-home mom,
with an annual household income of about $1 million, described a friend of her
son’s whose parents bought him a lot of stuff. She said they were ‘‘lovely
people,’’ but ‘‘that’s their way of showing affection to their children. That’s not
my way.’’ Jasper, an entrepreneur worth about $4 million, told a story about
trying to push his young son to participate in a preschool play when he wanted
to back out at the last minute. Jasper made fun of the other parents, who seemed
to think he was a bad father for encouraging the child to honor the commitment
he had made. Zoe deprecated ‘‘mothers cooking three different meals,
depending on what kids want.’’ She said she, in contrast, would send her
daughter to bed hungry ‘‘if she doesn’t want what I cooked for dinner…. I’ve put
her to sleep many times without eating dinner. I’m not afraid to do that.’’
Yet despite their commitment to limits in general, these parents were torn
about what specific limits were appropriate, especially when these constraints
stood in tension with other desires the parents had for the children, such as the
child’s happiness, comfort, or sense of belonging (Pugh, 2009) as well as their
enrichment. Frances had had no problem refusing to buy her teenage daughter a
$400 ski jacket, which seemed too extreme. But she struggled to set limits when

they seemed to affect her daughter’s social life. She told me, of her daughter’s
obsession with brand names:
I definitely entered that [phase] with her, where – you know, if it doesn’t
say Ugg on the boot, it’s not actually a boot. [She laughs.] If it doesn’t say
Hunter, it’s not really a rain boot. And that drives me crazy. ‘Cause my
parents never bought me any brand name anything. I’m weak, on that
score, though. Because she’s a good girl. She’s a nice girl. She works hard.
And I cave. Because it’s easier to buy the Hunter boots than it is to say, just
on principle, ‘‘You’re gonna be the one girl in [her school] who wears the
rubber boots from K-Mart, because that’s how I grew up.’’ And I’m sure
I’m doing her a disservice by letting her have all the brand names. But
again, it’s one of those things where you pick your battles…. I tried very
briefly, when she was in fifth grade or so, to buy the non-brand-name stuff.
And then she didn’t have a lot of friends, and she got all these pimples, and
I just [felt] like, ‘‘You know what? Okay. You can have the Ugg boots, as
long as you appreciate that you got them for your birthday!’’
Frances is trying to establish a sense of constraint that echoes the limits she grew
up with, but she does not want to make her daughter suffer in her social milieu
by not fitting in (Pugh 2009). She resigns herself to buying the boots, as long as
her daughter is ‘‘aware’’ that they are special, a birthday treat. This kind of
consumption, she hopes, will not be taken for granted. It is also notable that she
describes her daughter as a ‘‘good girl,’’ ‘‘a nice girl,’’ who ‘‘works hard.’’
Because her daughter does not act behaviorally ‘‘entitled,’’ she becomes
materially entitled to the boots.
In this conversation, both because I remembered my own anxiety about not
having the ‘‘right’’ clothes at that age and because I wanted to be sympathetic, I
said I could see her daughter’s point of view. Realizing that we were the same
age, Frances and I ended up reminiscing about what it was like to be teenagers
and be denied the brand name items that were fashionable (for us, Tretorn
sneakers, all the rage in the mid-1980s). In a follow-up telephone conversation a
few days after the interview, Frances mentioned without prompting that that
part of our conversation had ‘‘crossed my mind a dozen times.’’ Saying, ‘‘This is
so messed up,’’ she admitted feeling that since a ‘‘well-educated, hardworking’’
person (i.e., me) had sympathized with her daughter’s position, she felt better
about buying the expensive clothing rather than getting it at Target. I had not
expected that my opinion would loom so large in Frances’s mind; her comment
signaled to me that she was genuinely worried about the situation and looking
for legitimation – from a particular kind of source. Since I was coming from the
opposite of the position her daughter was in – that is, I had been denied these
items – she could have read me as evidence that if she wanted her daughter to
become ‘‘well-educated and hardworking,’’ she would likewise refuse them. She

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had even said that maybe she herself was a better person for not having been
given these goods. But instead somehow she was able to read my sympathy for
her daughter as the green light to stop worrying about these purchases, because
it validated her daughter’s psychological need.
Kevin articulated another kind of struggle over children’s psychological needs,
beyond fitting in with peers. His parents had been in the professional middle
class, but his partner’s family had significant inherited wealth, and their different
ways of thinking about consumption illuminated the tension between constraint
and expansion. Kevin resisted the idea of giving his young son everything he
wanted. He told me, ‘‘I want him to know limits.’’ He felt that having to make do
with less ‘‘kind of invites creativity. It gives you a gratitude, or, like, appreciation,
or pleasure, in a way that, like, a constant desire for newness, for me at least,
doesn’t.’’ But his partner, Kevin said, ‘‘wants our child to feel okay expressing his
wants and needs. Not to be greedy. But to be, like, alive that way, in the world.’’
Again, psychological health (a legitimate need) can mean not setting limits.
Protecting kids from thinking about or worrying about money (itself another
form of privilege) was also a priority among these parents, and demonstrated
another dimension of concern for kids’ psychological well-being. Several told me
they did not want to talk about money with young children. Donovan, an
inheritor and earner of wealth over $10 million, said of money that he had tried
to give his kids ‘‘the gift of allowing them to ignore it.’’ But again, this approach
sometimes conflicted with the notion of setting limits. Karen and her husband
were professionals with a household income of $300,000. Karen had been
‘‘raised with a money problem’’ and struggled to decide how to restrict her
daughter’s spending after school at Starbucks. She said, ‘‘I mean, I definitely
don’t want her to feel worried about money. But I also want her to feel like
there’s some real limits to what she can spend.’’ The dilemma for her, as for other
parents, was how to impose the ‘‘limits’’ without also imposing the ‘‘worry.’’
Pugh (2009) has described similar practices and feelings of ambivalence
among the upper-income parents she studied, who used ‘‘symbolic deprivation’’
and ‘‘rules and allowances’’ to manage their children’s consumption and their
own anxieties about that consumption. Pugh primarily theorizes the tension
between indulging children’s desires and constraining them as having to do with
parents’ fear of raising kids without self-control (2009, p. 119) and anxiety
about materialism as morally unworthy. My complementary interpretation
extends this view into the realm of managing affluence more generally by
avoiding ‘‘entitlement’’ through constraint.
Strategies of Exposure: Locating the Self
Parents I interviewed also used strategies of exposure as a way of mitigating

‘‘entitlement.’’ They wanted their children to be ‘‘aware’’ of and ‘‘appreciate’’

their privileged stance relative to others, and to inculcate a sense of what kind of
consumption was ‘‘normal’’ in the world, as opposed to ‘‘over the top.’’ Ursula,
for example, was a stay-at-home mom in her 40s, married to a corporate
executive paid over $2 million per year. She said, ‘‘I do sometimes worry the
kids feel everybody has a house in the Hamptons [as she did]. That this is
normal. And it’s not. So we try to teach them that. But I don’t know if it’s
getting through.’’ Parents described two primary arenas where this concern
played out: what children and families consumed, and the environments they
spent time in.
Consuming ‘‘normally’’
My respondents saw consumption decisions and the constraints discussed above

as important for how kids would locate themselves in relation to the rest of the
world. They tried to model appropriate consumption for their children, often
using the word ‘‘normal.’’ Olivia said of her children, ‘‘I’m sure if you interviewed
them, they wouldn’t think that they have this really awesome life, and that it’s
luxurious, in the least. … We buy normal things. We do normal things…. We do
the things that we want to do, and we do them comfortably. But we don’t want to
communicate over the top. And I think we hope that they wouldn’t develop over
the top lifestyle habits.’’ Gary, an inheritor of wealth worth over $10 million, was
invited to a wedding abroad which he and his wife ‘‘would have loved to go to.’’
But, because it was just a few weeks after another international family trip, they
did not. Such an expenditure seemed ‘‘over the top’’ and generated ‘‘this feeling
that [if we go], what’s the message we’re imparting to our kids?’’
Frances said her biggest disagreements with her husband were about spending
money. When I asked for an example, she first reiterated how confidential our
conversation was. She then recounted:
Like, he would fly privately all the time. And I want our kids to not get too
used to that. Every once in a while. But, I don’t know. I value that I went
to public school, and I slept in many motels, and I drove long distances in
cars. And the way I grew up is still much more affluent than the way most
– but I feel like I have somewhat of an understanding. I think it’s important
to understand the way everyone else lives. That doesn’t sound right, but –
but – so, I just don’t want our kids to go to college and never have cleaned
a toilet. And never have slept in a motel instead of a hotel. And then to
appreciate that there are some kids that don’t even ever sleep in a motel. I
mean, so I just want our kids to have – you know, a reality check every
once in a while.
Frances wants her kids to ‘‘understand the way everyone else lives’’ even if they
will always live very differently from ‘‘everyone else.’’ She hopes that by

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curtailing the most extreme consumption – flying private – in addition to the

chores they perform, they will be able to gain this understanding and locate
themselves more appropriately. A real estate broker I interviewed similarly
described some very wealthy clients who did not fly first class with their
children, saying they were ‘‘constantly struggling to set an example for their
children that ‘Just because we have, not everybody else has.’ They’re trying not
to turn their kids into assholes.’’
Some parents allowed children to have the experience but encouraged them to
experience it as ‘‘special.’’ Having told me they tried to keep their consumption
‘‘normal,’’ Olivia also said her family flew business class ‘‘a lot.’’ She told her
kids, ‘‘It’s a privilege that you get to do this. And it’s great that we can do this as
a family. But I expect behavior and good manners. And they do. There’s no wild
acting out. And it’s a big treat.’’ Olivia is asking her children to experience this
as both a ‘‘privilege’’ and a ‘‘treat’’ – typically defined by being exceptional –
even though it is something they do often. Furthermore, her comments show
again that this kind of consumption is acceptable as long as it’s occupied
appropriately, in a behavioral sense.
Similarly, Danielle emphasized to her kids that they had experiences many
people could not afford. She said, ‘‘I’ve told them, the kind of [private]
education they’re getting, I’m saying, you know, ‘That’s a valuable thing. Not
everybody gets to do that. Appreciate it. Appreciate it, because it’s kind of a
special thing.’ Or, you know, ‘Not everybody gets to have a fun summer away,
like enjoy that. Like understand that’s a special thing.’ ’’ Paul told me, ‘‘I don’t
think I feel entitled, but our generation as a whole is [relative to previous
generations]. And I try to continuously—even though my kids are spoiled
fucking brats—they are. I mean, they get everything they want. But I try from an
educational perspective to continue to just make sure it’s ingrained in their
minds over and over again, whether they hear it or not, at some point they’ll get
it, about the education of what they have versus what other kids have.’’ To be
aware of the specialness of these experiences and to appreciate them is to avoid
entitlement, though the consumption itself is not curtailed.
These practices and discourses illuminate two meanings of ‘‘normal.’’ The
explicit meaning, which parents invoked to try to help their children situate
themselves in relation to others, is what less advantaged others have. But the
‘‘normal’’ that kids actually experience, in the reality of their daily lives, is the
more advantaged form. Rather than recognize this tension, parents represented
certain goods or experiences that were actually ‘‘normal’’ for their children as a
‘‘treat’’ and hoped the children would experience them as such. This kind of
consumption is not special for their children. But these parents want them to see
that it is special relative to the rest of the world.
My respondents sometimes got tangled up in discourse around this question
of ‘‘normal’’ consumption. For example, Allison gave a somewhat disjointed

account of how she wanted her kids to understand the two vacations her family
takes each year:
Somewhere or another, we have to instill in the kids that we’re doing this,
but it’s not extravagant. So, you try to not make it too extravagant. (And
why do you want to instill that in the kids?) Because, you know, I think it’s
just a value system. Like, it’s not – you know, they’ve done nothing to –
you know, deserve to have these, like, two vacations. You know. Although
they work really hard. Not – I wouldn’t say – nobody deserves two
vacations. It’s extravagant. It’s extravagant. It’s not about deserving it. I
don’t deserve it. It’s extravagant. I just want them to know, this isn’t the
norm. You don’t want your kids to think that – take these kinds of things
for granted. You know…. most people don’t live this way. And that this is
not the norm, and that you should feel this is – this is special, and this is a
treat.
Allison invokes multiple, sometimes contradictory ideas, illuminating her

ambivalence about her own privilege as well as that of her children. First, she
suggests that legitimate entitlement rests on hard work; then she indicates that
legitimate entitlement is impossible (‘‘nobody deserves it’’); finally, she alludes to
appreciation as the legitimate mode of experience. She also vacillates as to
whether taking these vacations is ‘‘extravagant.’’ Allison and her husband
addressed this problem practically by flying in first class while the children sat in
coach, as a way of controlling their access to privileges they had not yet
‘‘earned.’’ But the children nonetheless took the two vacations every year.
Environments and social others
Parents were also attentive to the kinds of social others to whom their kids were
exposed, and thought carefully about the environments their children spent time
in. Many worried about their children’s exposure to those with more. Sara, an
inheritor of over $10 million, was considering whether she would move out of
the city with her finance executive husband and young child. In speaking of the
challenges of raising wealthy children, she said:
I mean, that is a huge reason why we’re like, ‘‘Maybe we want to leave
New York.’’ Because we’re still kind of like, even if we could afford the
fancy apartment, we don’t want our kid to be surrounded by everyone else
with fancy apartments. I don’t know. A colleague of [her husband’s] went
on vacation with his family. You know, like, a nice vacation. They went
skiing for a week, stayed somewhere super nice. He asked the son, who
was, like, eight at the time, ‘‘What’d you think?’’ And the son was like, ‘‘It
was great, but next time we fly private like everyone else.’’

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Sara continued, ‘‘He spent like, you know, ten grand on this vacation, with, like,
ski lodge—you know, a ton of money. What do you do? He’s like, how do you
insulate kids, you know? I don’t know what you do.’’
Other respondents echoed the impossibility of ‘‘insulating’’ their kids from
other children from wealthy families. Speaking of her children’s sleep away
summer camp, one respondent said,
I worry… The whole idea to send them is for them to learn independence
and a little bit of social acceptance and, you know, how to fend for
themselves and the whole thing. And my daughter’s going to a place where
there’s no electricity, and we’re sitting here in the air conditioning, and she
has really hot days and really cold days and learns to live with it. Which I
think is all a good thing. But then you have the kids that show up in their
private plane…. It’s just warped.
This mother is trying to engineer a sense of deprivation for her daughter, to

promote her learning independence. But because she has chosen to do this in an
environment of wealthy people, the child is still exposed to people with more.
As I will discuss below, this concern permeated decisions about schooling as
well.
In contrast to this concern about exposure to those with more, parents often
wanted their children to be exposed to those who had less. Using an especially
compelling phrase, Eliana, a progressive inheritor, said she wanted her children
to have ‘‘fluency outside the bubble.’’ By this she meant an exposure to and
understanding of the lives of people with fewer resources. Yet it was not always
clear to me exactly which class others Eliana and my other respondents were
invoking. Some parents wanted to instill a sense of awareness of and obligation
to poor people, using discourses reminiscent of charitable noblesse oblige that
seemed to reinforce distance from these people. Others seemed more interested
in their kids having meaningful contact with people who were ‘‘normal’’ – that
is, not poor, but not as privileged as they were.
Some parents recounted trying to have conversations with their kids about
disadvantaged others, such as impoverished kids in Haiti or in the homeless
shelter around the corner from the kids’ school. A few parents told me they
required their kids to give away one or two birthday gifts. Paul said, of his
children’s camp, ‘‘Always for their birthday we ask them to pick one present and
donate it to kids who are less fortunate, ‘cause they understand not everyone
gets what they get.’’ These limits, of course, are relatively marginal to the
advantages the children are experiencing, but they serve symbolically to remind
children about the existence of those with less.
Other parents created activities for kids that brought them into contact with
these populations. A few required children to do community service. Alice, a
stay-at-home mom whose husband earned over $3 million annually, lamented

that her 12-year-old son had not yet done volunteer work at home. But she
described a family trip to Latin America that had also involved a short stint
volunteering at an orphanage. When I asked her why that mattered, she said, ‘‘I
think it’s a big element of being a good person, you know. Being a good person.
And when you, you know, have all these things, if you don’t, you know,
understand the value of volunteerism, and empathy, and all of those things—I
think it’s a key element.’’
Monica, a real estate broker with a household income of about $400,000,
said she felt a responsibility to those with less. ‘‘We help out. We go to public
schools around the city that are – you know, there’s this thing where you go and
you help them paint it, so it looks better and it doesn’t look like a dungeon. My
kids should know what the other places look like, down in the outer boroughs,
where other kids have to go to school. Be thankful for what they have. Sure. We
do that kind of stuff. Not to prove that we’re better, but just to take part in a
community. And my daughter does community service.’’
Monica’s remarks highlight a tension present throughout these parents’
accounts: that between ‘‘being part of a community’’ and making clear that these
poorer children are completely other (‘‘my kids should know what the other
places look like’’) and are of interest primarily as they help her kids ‘‘be thankful
for what they have.’’ This stance does not challenge the social distance between
their families and the poorer families to whom they’re exposing their kids.
Indeed, these accounts demonstrate that, as Gaztambide-Fernández and Howard
(2013, p. 3) put it, a ‘‘conception of the wealthy as moral and deserving…
requires suffering others (i.e., ‘the people’) as a way to enact ‘good citizenship.’ ’’
Furthermore, there is a class assumption here that their children should have
access to the lives of others even when they would not want those others to have
access to their own lives. This approach to others therefore constitutes what
Reay et al (2007) call an ‘‘act of appropriation’’ (see also Pugh, 2009).
Some parents were concerned about a different kind of exposure: creating
meaningful, ongoing networks for their children that included socioeconomic
diversity of various kinds, not just exposure to the very poor. Danielle said, ‘‘I
think there’s something instructional about growing up in a community that is
economically mixed.’’ A few of those who were upwardly mobile mentioned
class diversity in their own families as one way their children developed
relationships with people who had less. But many had to engineer this kind of
immersion more intentionally. Kate told me, ‘‘Just the other day, [her partner]
and I were thinking we have got to figure out a way, once the kids are a little
older, to really expose them to the way most people live. The way most people
live. And not in a, you know - in a concrete way.’’ Kate’s allusion to a ‘‘concrete
way’’ implies a critique of an artificial or superficial possibility. Scott and Olivia
had chosen a church that was diverse in terms of ethnicity, income, and sexual
orientation as a way to include their kids in a different kind of ‘‘community,’’
because they had ‘‘a fairly homogenous day-to-day experience,’’ as Olivia put it,

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in their private school. African-American parents were often concerned about

their children having ties to other African-Americans, often joining Jack and Jill
(a civic and social organization for African-American families) in order to
expose kids to other Black families (typically equally or less affluent, but not
poor).
Miranda, a consultant turned stay-at-home mom with an annual household
income of about $1 million, had lived in a mixed-income rental building while
her home was being renovated. She encouraged her son to keep in touch with
the friends he had made there, who went to public school. She said:
I just feel like it’s a community that’s grounded. And I feel like I want to
keep our feet in something that’s a little more normal….I like the idea that
[my kids] have this community, where, you know, you have three kids
living in a one-bedroom apartment. There’s a lot of that. You know? You
know, two of my son’s best friends, they live in a one-bedroom apartment
with their parents.
Miranda keeps her son ‘‘normal’’ by virtue of his interaction with people who
have fewer resources. These attempts to construct meaningful community with
middle-class people also highlight the same tension mentioned earlier in the
concept of ‘‘normal’’: between a desire that the child be more normal and the
desire that child know what normal is (and know that he is advantaged relative
to it).
Overall, parents want to use ‘‘exposure’’ to help children locate themselves in
relation to people with less. Who these ‘‘others’’ consist of differs (whether poor
or middle class). But either way, parents hope this exposure will discipline the
affective self into appreciation and awareness. At the same time, exposure
connotes an expansion of the child’s experience in ways that might be valuable
in reproducing advantage later. Lisa thought exposure to diversity for her kids
was important ‘‘because most of the world is diverse. And you gotta be able to
relate to people.’’ Zoe similarly cared about diversity ‘‘because the world’s
becoming increasingly diverse, and I think it’s important for the kids to be
exposed to that.’’ Thus, as Reay et al (2007) have pointed out, exposure to
otherness serves both moral and instrumental purposes. The idea of instilling
particular values in kids goes hand in hand with instilling capacities for dealing
with otherness, which become a form of cultural capital, as Eliana’s notion of
‘‘fluency outside the bubble’’ demonstrates (see also Gillies, 2005; Khan, 2011).
Struggles Over Expansion: School and Work
But the strategies of constraint and exposure I have described also came into
tension with the possible expansion of kids’ opportunities. That is, parents’

desire to raise ‘‘good people’’ who treat others well, consume reasonably, and
locate themselves appropriately in social space conflicts with their desire to give
children opportunities to develop their passions and skills. They are concerned
both with children’s self-fulfillment as people and their social advancement.
These struggles emerged primarily in relation to the schools parents chose, as
well as the possibility that children would work for pay.
School choice
Many parents in my sample were ambivalent about public versus private school.
They liked the idea of the network diversity that kids would get in public school –
the positive exposure to difference. Donovan’s children, for example, had
attended a suburban magnet school. He told me, ‘‘I love the fact that not only have
my kids gone to public school, but they’ve gone to a public school that’s not, in
fact, in an affluent community. So they’ve been exposed to a much broader
spectrum of kids than they would’ve even within our own public school system [in
the suburb where he lived], and certainly compared to private schools.’’ And these
parents worried about the negative exposure to too much ‘‘entitlement’’ in private
school. They feared it might, in Miranda’s words, ‘‘warp their sense of what’s
normal.’’ Some of them also expressed a political commitment to public
education. On the other hand, parents were drawn to the private schools because
of smaller class sizes and more attention, the possibility of a better education
which included the arts, and the perceived link to college admission – that is,
imperatives of expansion. Janice and her corporate executive partner had an
income of $500,000 and some inherited wealth; their young children attended the
neighborhood public school. She articulated this tension when she said of private
schools: ‘‘On the one hand, kids probably get a lot more individualized attention.
On the other hand, there can be, you know, extreme privilege and lack of
consciousness about that. And sense of entitlement.’’
When I interviewed Justin, a finance entrepreneur whose parents had been
social workers, he was trying to decide whether to send his children to private
school. On the one hand, he was concerned that they get into a good college,
and he thought this was more likely if they attended private school. He also
wanted strong sports and arts programs. He felt no political commitment to
public school per se. On the other hand, coming from a middle-class
background, he was afraid of the effects the environment would have on his
kids. He said: ‘‘I want the kids to be normal. I don’t want them to just be
coddled, and be at a country club. … I think they come out [of private school]
being really sheltered. Not really exposed to – I don’t know. Economic
hardship, or you think everyone lives in these huge houses, and just thinking
that’s the world.’’ He explicitly associates the private school with an environ-
ment of ‘‘coddling,’’ contrasting it to the public school environment that he
imagines would produce ‘‘normal’’ kids. His idea of ‘‘thinking that’s the world’’

Sherman
implies that private school will lead to a failure of self-location (not unlike the
child Sara described, above, who wanted to travel in a private plane ‘‘like
everybody else’’).
In the end, despite their conflicts (see Cucchiara, 2013; Johnson, 2006), most
of these parents still sent their children to private school, especially after
elementary school, choosing expansion of opportunities and individual selfhood
over exposure to a diversity of social others. Despite his ambivalence, Justin
admitted that he and his wife, who was nine months pregnant and needed
urgently to move, were waiting to hear from two private schools about
admission before deciding where they would live. Although Miranda valued her
son’s relationships with less privileged kids, as we have seen, she still chose to
place him in private school (primarily because of smaller class sizes, she said),
thereby preserving his class advantages over those same kids. One African-
American respondent had worked to establish a public school in her neighbor-
hood, but had taken her own children out of it after a year to place them in
private school.
Kevin told me he and his husband both liked the idea of keeping their son in
public school, because they wanted him not to live in an ‘‘elitist’’ ‘‘narrow
world.’’ By this he meant a world in which ‘‘you only know a certain kind of
people. Who are all complaining about their designers and their nannies.’’
However, Kevin told me at the end of our interview that he was thinking about
putting the child in private school, because he seemed unhappy in his public
school classroom. He said, ‘‘I think I’ve allowed to enter my imagination more
than I ever would have before, the possibility of ‘Well, maybe there is a school
that he would be happier at.’ ’’
Like Kevin, many of these parents identified something specific in their
children that seems to require putting them in private school, most often the fear
that they would be bored. Beatrice worried that her high-energy son would be
‘‘crawling the walls’’ in a public school classroom with a high student–teacher
ratio. Eliana thought it was ‘‘selfish’’ that ‘‘my child should have all the
advantages…What’s special about [my] kid?’’ However, although she spent a
year soul-searching about it, she ultimately placed her daughter in a private
school because she was not challenged enough in public. These parents would
not choose private school for its own sake, and in fact often lamented that they
felt they had to do so. It is the brilliance or restlessness or some other personality
trait of the child that forces them to choose private, in the child’s best interests.
Typically, though not exclusively, those most concerned about these issues
had more liberal politics, though they were both inheritors and upwardly
mobile earners. Some parents – mainly those with less liberal politics and/or less
upward mobility – tended to see the advantages of private school as
outweighing those of public so obviously that public would never be an option.
But these parents cared very much about which private school the child
attended. Partly they wanted to make sure the school was a good fit with the

child’s interests and aptitudes, and with the parents’ educational philosophy
(especially progressive versus more traditional). But they also cared about the
diversity and ‘‘culture’’ of the school, nearly always stating a preference for a less
‘‘entitled’’ environment. Grace, whose husband had family wealth, was sure her
kids would go to private school, but she thought that one popular private school
‘‘might seem a little too entitled’’ and worried that it lacked a community service
element. Shannon had rejected one private school she called ‘‘elite’’ and told me
that the community at her daughter’s private school would ‘‘look down on’’
‘‘people who have a sense of entitlement.’’
Respondents also felt that avoiding materialism was paramount in their
choice of private school. Maya, a stay-at-home mom with an annual household
income of at least $2 million, told me: ‘‘Most importantly, we don’t want our
children to grow up in an environment where that’s what their friends think is
important, having Ferragamo shoes and Juicy Couture clothes.’’ Rebecca and
her husband both worked in the creative sector, and Rebecca had some
inherited wealth. She wanted to send her daughter to private school. ‘‘But,’’ she
said, ‘‘it has to be some kind of alternative situation, where I’m not, like,
contending with [my daughter] needing to come home and get a Birkin bag for
her 16th birthday. And that’s really more of an ethical thing for me.’’
Parents of color were more concerned than White parents about racial
diversity in their children’s schools and their lives generally, though they did not
necessarily express conflicts about sending kids to private school. As one
progressive African-American mother from a working-class background said, ‘‘I
could manufacture a conflict about it… but at this moment I don’t feel
conflicted about their education.’’ On the other hand, another African-
American mother lamented the ‘‘bubble’’ her daughter was in her private
school, and the lack of ‘‘true diversity in her life.’’ She said, ‘‘And it’s kind of a
bummer, that the trade-off had to be made, between wanting a certain approach
to academics and learning and curriculum and all that, and feeling so strongly
that, like, they gotta run around. I don’t want gym [only] once or twice a week.
And they need to have art. And they need to have music. Like, it’s fundamental.
But it’s a compromise.’’ This woman also offered the one exception I heard to
the negative usage of the word ‘‘entitlement’’ She used the word in exactly
Lareau’s sense, to describe a feeling she had seen among White students at her
Ivy League college that, for example, they could approach professors with
questions; it was a feeling she hoped her children would have.
Paid and unpaid work
These ideas about cultivation also came into conflict in relation to paid work for
older children. Parents consistently wanted their children to have a work ethic.
Scott worried that his kids would be ‘‘lazy jerks.’’ Lucy feared her children
would lack ‘‘hunger and drive.’’ Parents insisted that older kids had to ‘‘do

Sherman
something’’ in their school breaks rather than ‘‘waste time,’’ in Talia’s words.
This stance was consistent with respondents’ allusions to hard work in general
as a form of legitimation (Sherman, n.d.) as well as with their aforementioned
insistence that their kids do chores around the house.
But parents varied on whether they would require high-school- and college-
age children to work for money. Justin unequivocally took a stance on the side
of working for pay as a necessary kind of experience. He said:
I had all sorts of odd jobs when I was a kid. Everything. Because I didn’t
have any money. If I wanted a toy, or a football or something, I would buy
it. My parents wouldn’t buy it for me. They couldn’t. So, I had every single
job. …I’m gonna tell my kids, ‘‘You have to have a job.’’ You have to have a
shit job, like at a restaurant, or something – you know, where it’s not fun.
Justin believed having a ‘‘shit job’’ would build character, just as he wanted his
kids to play sports in school so they would get ‘‘yelled at’’ and ‘‘humiliated.’’ He
said, ‘‘It doesn’t feel good when you’re hearing it. But if you don’t hear that until
you’re, like, 25, then you’re shattered.’’ Lucy said, of whether her kids would
work, ‘‘Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s pretty critical. That’s pretty core, I would
say, to us.’’ Paul said, ‘‘They better work in high school. I worked in high school.
My wife worked in high school….There’s no doubt in my mind. One thousand
percent.’’ For these parents, paid work is crucial in terms of raising adults who
are both self-sufficient and not-entitled. They will be able to make their way in
the world, but they will also be ‘‘good people.’’
Other respondents were conflicted about whether the constraint that kids
would experience if they had to work was a more important form of cultivation
than the expansion of opportunities and selfhood that might come from other
activities. Nadine and Kate, who lived mainly on Nadine’s family wealth, had a
running debate about precisely this issue, partly due to their different class
backgrounds. Nadine, said:
Do I want my kid to spend the summer, like, researching harbor seals in

Alaska, and, you know, getting her groove off, or do I want her to work in a
greasy spoon? You know? I think they’re tough questions. Yes, you want them
to learn, like, the value of work, and getting paid for it, and all that stuff. And I
don’t want my kids to be entitled. I don’t want them to be, like, silver spoon.
But I also feel like life affords a lot of really exciting opportunities. And if you
have money for any reason, it’s for enriching your life and your kids’ life, and
making things happier. And giving back to the world.
Kate, who had grown up middle class, was more inclined toward the position
that her children should work for pay. Referring to the ‘‘crappy jobs’’ she herself
had held, she said, ‘‘But nevertheless, there was some value to it, there was some

value to recognizing this is what you have to do and you get a paycheck and
that’s the money you have and then you budget it.’’ She was ‘‘ambivalent’’ about
paying for the kids to go to college. She said, ‘‘I’m like, maybe we shouldn’t even
plan that way. Maybe we should factor in that they’re going to need to take
some loans and work because there’s no reason for that. There’s no reason they
can’t. Then again, I worked in the library in college and I remember I spent time
doing that and maybe I could have been doing something else. I could have
been, I don’t know, saving the world, and I don’t know. I could have been doing
something more enriching overall than filing books. You know?’’
Shannon, who came from a wealthy family, had worked when she was in high
school, primarily in retail outlets and food stores. Her response to my question
about whether her kids would work shows very explicitly that paid work is
valuable because it cultivates the self of the child. She said, ‘‘I’m very grateful
that I had all of that kind of experience.… If you haven’t served the people, in
some capacity, whether it be retail or food, I think you’ve missed out. I think
people should go through that experience.’’ I asked, ‘‘Missed out on what?’’ She
responded, ‘‘Just, like, a basic work ethic. You’re not above scrubbing the floor.
Like, nobody is. I think it’s very, very valuable to have an entry-level job. To do
the things that I assume someday you’re going to be expecting other people to
do.’’ For Shannon, working teaches the child that she is not ‘‘above’’ doing
certain kinds of work – even though she will never actually need to do such
work. The lesson is about humility and empathy for people who will ultimately
be class others, so work really functions more as a form of exposure.
Shannon continued, ‘‘So, in answer to your question, I would be a fan of it, if
we could fit it into the schedule, and if they weren’t giving up something
important.’’ While this lesson is desirable, she indicates, it is not critical, as it has
to fit into the schedule and not displace something ‘‘important.’’ More
important than paid work, of course, was likely to be schoolwork. Several
parents of older children said they saw homework as the child’s ‘‘job.’’ This is
not surprising, since as children get older these issues become less hypothetical
and parents become more concerned with conventional forms of advancement,
such as college admission. Indeed, only parents with children under ten said
their kids would work for money, and none of the children in the six households
with high-school-age children actually had jobs. Here again we see that the
parent’s wish to pursue a certain course tends to falter when confronted with the
realities of the privileged lifestyle, as well as the anxieties of advancement and,
to use Kate and Nadine’s concept, ‘‘enrichment.’’
Conclusion
Scholars of parenting and social class have tended to argue that middle and
upper-middle-class parents care mainly about two things: seeking advantages

Sherman
for their children and helping them develop their own individual capacities and
passions. This is what I have called the imperative of expansion – of opportunity
and of selfhood. But the wealthy and affluent parents I interviewed also want to
cultivate children’s moral selves, hoping to raise ‘‘good people’’ who are not
‘‘entitled.’’ They try to create subjects who are not rude or materialistic, who
will be aware of and appreciate their social advantages and understand the value
of hard work. To this end, they employ strategies of constraint (on behavior and
consumption) and exposure (to social others of various kinds). These are
strategies of cultivation that have not previously been theorized, especially in
relation to moral imperatives of affluence.
Presumably, of course, most parents want their kids to be moral actors, and
(at least in the US) ‘‘entitlement’’ is broadly seen as negative and undesirable in
children, or in anyone. Parents across the socioeconomic spectrum also try to
constrain children’s sense of entitlement and think about what people and
influences their kids are exposed to. But these strategies are likely to differ by
class. Affluent and wealthy parents, as Pugh (2009) has shown, are especially
apt to use ‘‘symbolic deprivation’’ in the context of having significant resources.
They must also offer children narratives about the high levels of consumption
they ultimately do enjoy. Practices of intentional exposure to those with less are
presumably more confined to these parents as well. These parenting strategies
are also likely to relate to class reproduction in different ways, as they produce
different kinds of entitlements and dispositions.
In the end, of course, expansion mostly wins. What is taken away from these
children is at the margins, and what is required of them is relatively minimal.
They live in spacious homes, and often spend time in vacation homes. They play
music and sports and travel internationally. Most attend private schools that are
carefully chosen as the best fit for their own individual needs. They receive
significant customized attention, not only from parents but also from tutors,
teachers, doctors, and therapists of many varieties. And parents spend
significantly on the ‘‘pathway consumption’’ (Pugh, 2009) that ensures their
advantaged futures. Parents do what they can to help children situate themselves
in relation to others with less, but only inasmuch as it does not interfere with
their getting the best schooling and other experiences. They may appreciate their
own relative advantages, but those advantages are very rarely curtailed.
But these cultivation strategies still matter, and matter differently from those
of less advantaged parents, because they (presumably) shape how elite children
will inhabit their significant social advantages. First, they help children locate
themselves in social space, giving them ‘‘a sense of their place’’ (Bourdieu, 1990).
In showing children what is ‘‘normal’’ for others, parents implicitly delineate
another kind of ‘‘normal’’ for themselves. Second, they make sure that kids will
occupy that space appropriately, in an affective and behavioral sense, thus
inculcating a habitus of legitimate privilege. Like Lareau’s ‘‘middle-class’’
children, they are likely to feel entitled to the attention of adults, to ask

questions and so on, which will serve them well in later life. But they will
(parents hope) also feel certain obligations to make themselves worthy of their
privilege – to work, to avoid materialism, and to recognize their good fortune.
Parents’ stories of and struggles over limiting children’s entitlement also matter
because they indicate real ambivalence about occupying a place of privilege in one
of the most unequal cities and unequal moments in US history. They see privilege
itself as potentially morally corrupting for their kids, because it might turn them
into entitled monsters. And, as I argue elsewhere (Sherman, n.d.), they also
struggle to see themselves as morally worthy, which involves these same
imperatives: to work hard, to consume reasonably, be aware of their social
advantages, and to give back, whether to charity or in other ways. These struggles
give the lie to the prevalent idea that wealthy people are primarily preoccupied
with excluding others, and its corollary assumption that those at the top are
always comfortable there.
Indeed, the struggles I have described also respond to and illumi-
nate widespread moral repertoires, at least in the US. I’ve argued that parents
want to challenge behavioral and affective ‘‘entitlement,’’ but not material en-
titlement. In fact, ironically, acting (behaviorally) as if they don’t deserve more
is the signal that they do deserve more (materially). Therefore, by emphasizing
egalitarian, appreciative dispositions, parents legitimate unequal distributions.
These understandings of legitimate entitlement are broadly shared. The deserv-
ing rich are separated from the undeserving on the basis of the behaviors I have
discussed: being nice, working hard, consuming reasonably, ‘‘giving back.’’ We
see these distinctions in popular culture, for example, in which ‘‘bad’’ rich
people are selfish, rude, and lazy, while ‘‘good’’ rich people are down-to-earth
and nice to waiters and others who work for them. Indeed, these evaluations are
the mirror image of those of poor people, for whom individual behavior has
long been a measure of deservingness of material entitlements, typically from
the state. The ultimate function of these distinctions is to legitimate inequality
and forestall a distributional critique, by suggesting that some people (those
who behave appropriately) are genuinely entitled, while others are not.
How common might these moral and emotional struggles over privilege be
among wealthy people? As I have said, this concern was prevalent across my
sample, which as I have suggested was not monolithic. However, some parents
were more explicitly conflicted about children’s privilege than others, although
they did not fall neatly into different camps.11 As I have described, parents who
had grown up with less than they had now (even if they had started out middle-
or upper-middle-class) were often especially articulate about, and troubled by,
the difference between how they had been raised and how their children were
being raised. These people were almost by definition earners rather than
11
Of course there is a difference between feeling these conflicts and being willing to talk about them,
and it is difficult to adjudicate how these propensities may be patterned. See Sherman (n.d.).

Sherman
inheritors, though a few had married into inherited wealth. At the same time,
parents who had grown up wealthy, if they were politically progressive, also
tended to talk more about their fears for their children. Parents in both these
categories typically had more diverse social networks than earners who were not
upwardly mobile or inheritors without liberal politics. Parents of color were
especially aware of racial/ethnic and economic diversity in schools, and
concerned with cultivating their children’s racial identity, but as I have noted
they were not necessarily especially conflicted about their own children’s
privilege. These differences provide possible avenues for future research.
Furthermore, to explore variation in terms of how wealthy people think and
feel about their parenting and their privilege more generally, we should attend
also to possible national differences. My respondents’ beliefs in hard work,
reasonable consumption, awareness, and giving back are anchored in American
ideals and ideologies of meritocracy, self-discipline, and philanthropy. Their
conflicts are likely influenced by the powerful moral symbolism of the American
‘‘middle class’’ and of American egalitarianism (Sherman, n.d.). Affluent parents
in other countries, with different cultural repertoires and histories, economic
arrangements, and welfare regimes, are likely to describe other affects and
anxieties of parenting and privilege (Lamont, 1992, 2000). Even within the US,
these feelings and practices are likely to differ regionally, since people are
embedded in different kinds of communities in Dallas or Miami or Winnetka
than they are in New York. Regardless of how we explore these possible
differences, research on parenting among elites and on elites generally should
take seriously these desires for moral worth and legitimacy in an unequal world,
rather than limit itself to instrumental motives of preserving advantage and
policing symbolic boundaries. We should focus on the systems that structure
individual parenting and lifestyle choices, the cultural norms that legitimate or
question them, and the struggles over moral worth in which they play a part.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Jeff Alexander and four anonymous reviewers for their com-
ments, which much improved the paper. I am also grateful for feedback from
Guillermina Altomonte, Carolina Bank Muñoz, Leslie Bell, Melissa Fisher,
Teresa Gowan, Rachel Heiman, Cindi Katz, Penny Lewis, Laura Liu, Stephanie
Luce, Julia Ott, Jussara Raxlen, and Miriam Ticktin, and for data provided by
Lisa Keister.
About the Author
Rachel Sherman teaches Sociology at the New School and conducts research on
social class, culture, service work, consumption, and inequality, using qualita-

tive methods. Her first book, Class Acts (University of California Press, 2007),
is an ethnographic study of inequality in two luxury hotels. Her current book,
Uneasy Street, from which this article is drawn, is under contract with Princeton
University Press.
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Sherman (2016) - Conflicted Cultivation: Parenting, Privilege, and Moral Worth in Wealthy New York Families

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Sherman (2016) - Conflicted Cultivation: Parenting, Privilege, and Moral Worth in Wealthy New York Families

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Original Article

Conflicted cultivation: Parenting,

In recent years, scholars of the US and UK have devoted significant attention

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

behaviorally and affectively, not materially. Behaving appropriately means

Parenting, Entitlement, and Moral Worth

In recent years, a number of scholars have explored childrearing strategies,

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

families relative to ‘‘working-class’’ ones, and have typically defined class in

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Khan’s definition of entitlement contrasts importantly (and perhaps confus-

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Methods and Sample

Recent debates about interviewing have centered on the utility of interview

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Worthy Selves and Conflicted Cultivation

In the larger project, I found that my respondents were concerned with

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

In what follows, I look first at strategies of constraint – limits on behavior and

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Strategies of Constraint: Disciplining the Self

Parents tried to circumscribe kids’ entitlement by setting limits on their

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

they live in an incredibly entitled environment. So yeah. Squash it down, every

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

an upper-middle-class background into an astronomically wealthy one. But

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Strategies of Exposure: Locating the Self

Parents I interviewed also used strategies of exposure as a way of mitigating

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

My respondents saw consumption decisions and the constraints discussed above

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

curtailing the most extreme consumption – flying private – in addition to the

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Allison invokes multiple, sometimes contradictory ideas, illuminating her

Environments and social others

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

This mother is trying to engineer a sense of deprivation for her daughter, to

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

in their private school. African-American parents were often concerned about

Struggles Over Expansion: School and Work

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Paid and unpaid work

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Do I want my kid to spend the summer, like, researching harbor seals in

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

About the Author

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Ho, K. (2009) Liquidated. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology