In a city obsessed with money, kids are, too. And the choices parents make have powerful effects on the separate, sometimes cruel, world of adolescence.
"I hate money!” the young girl blurted out, her cheeks flushed and quivering. And why not? Money is an issue that plagues New York kids much the way it does the adults raising them. Kids fret over not having enough money, they plot how to wheedle more, they organize social systems around who’s got how much. It’s brutal. Few, however, hate money for the same reason this girl does. Wiping her red-rimmed eyes, she added, “I wish I didn’t have so much!”
"I hate money!” the young girl blurted out, her cheeks flushed and quivering. And why not? Money is an issue that plagues New York kids much the way it does the adults raising them. Kids fret over not having enough money, they plot how to wheedle more, they organize social systems around who’s got how much. It’s brutal. Few, however, hate money for the same reason this girl does. Wiping her red-rimmed eyes, she added, “I wish I didn’t have so much!”
Listening to this, to her “distressed” friend, Caitlin Keating had to bite her glossed lower lip to avoid saying something rude. Can you hear yourself? Do you know how you sound? The other day you said that you and your sister were worth more than the Olsen twins! Caitlin and her friend are 15-year-olds, and they were chatting after Italian class at the Upper West Side private school where both are sophomores—a place where the kids loll about in nanny-ironed uniforms customized with Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton, a sanctum so dominated by money that to overtly acknowledge it is the ultimate taboo. And yet to Caitlin, it often seems like that’s all anyone does: kids hustling, kids obsessing, kids turning downright savage.
Take what had just happened: Throughout class, Caitlin had watched her friend—who came from a prominent billionaire family and was quite likely the most affluent kid in this affluent school—get chastised for being so wealthy by another student whose father worked as a fashion designer and wasn’t exactly living the hard-knock life himself. A charmingly laid-back girl, Caitlin says she has always felt older than her peers, secretly detached, and has a tendency to view her surroundings through a vaguely anthropological lens. She found the treatment of her friend to be unfair and—given that most everyone here had parents forking over 25 grand a year in tuition—ludicrous.
But she was annoyed nonetheless. Because despite her friend’s gilded existence—despite her trust fund, despite her penthouse bedroom with remote-controlled blinds, despite the fact that even her freakin’ cats had their own bathroom—the girl never had any money. Her allowance was a flat $60 a week, a pittance in this world. The girl’s wardrobe was heavily Old Navy. She’d even had a stint in public school. She was, hands down, the poorest rich girl in the city.
“It’s ridiculous,” says Caitlin, a few days after the incident, walking near Lincoln Center. “We go out at night, right? And I’m always paying for her cabs! We go out at lunch, and she’s like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so broke! Can you buy me a Vitamin Water?’ Her mom’s obsessed with not spoiling her, but come on. Mooching off friends is the solution?” She pauses. All around her, parents and their kids drift in and out of stores, walking with identical struts, sporting identical clothes, spending with identical verve—squint and it becomes hard to tell the adults from the children. “And to say you wish you didn’t have so much money! What is that?”
Caitlin lets out a laugh.
“The girl owes me at least a hundred dollars!"
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