With the current spate of arrests and incidents of youth violence in the southeast Valley — particularly Gilbert — spiking, the negative effects of wealth on children are being discussed anew.
The issue has become more insistent following the beating death of 16-year-old Preston Lord at a Queen Creek house party in October.
While Gilbert is no Scarsdale or Brentwood, it does have one of the highest median household incomes in the Valley — $105,733 according to the U.S. Census Tract in 2021 versus $97,409 in Scottsdale.
The word “affluenza” exploded into the national discussion in June 2023, when a then 16-year-old from Texas received 10 years of probation after pleading guilty to killing four when he plowed his truck into a group of people while heavily intoxicated. His lawyer said the teen had “affluenza” and couldn’t tell right from wrong.
Affluenza is not a real psychological condition or a viable legal defense, but it has become popular shorthand for saying the kids of wealthy parents are not alright.
And that theory has been around for more than 30 years.
The late Suniya Luthar, a former psychology professor at Arizona State University, was surprised by what she found when she used wealthy kids as a control group in her studies on the effects of poverty on children’s mental health.
“My first study on upper-middle-class youth was conducted essentially to look for a comparison group for inner city kids, and while doing this comparison we found, much to my surprise, that the so-called ‘privileged’ or ‘rich’ kids were doing much more poorly — again, mostly on substance use, but also on depression and anxiety,” Luthar said on a 2014 podcast for the American Psychological Association. “So, that was way back in the late ’90s and since then we’ve followed that trail and replicated these findings over and over again.”
Luthar found rates of depression, anxiety and substance abuse are about 1.5 to 2.5 times as high in wealthy youth compared with the national average.
“Now we’re talking about random acts of delinquency. We’ve found levels are comparable actually to levels in inner-city settings. The only difference is the inner-city kids are doing things like carrying a gun or getting into a fight and so on, which could potentially be in self-protection, in gangs.” Luthar said in the podcast. “Our upper middle-class kids are doing things like stealing from a friend or stealing from a parent or defacing property — as I said, random acts of delinquency. And these rates are much higher — two to two and a half times high as average rates in America.”
Luthar and other experts have said while it’s tempting to solely blame rich parents for their kids’ bad behavior, there are other issues at play — especially the American cultural norm of gauging success by money and winning at all costs.
Barry Schwartz, a visiting business professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and emeritus professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, once collaborated on a research paper with Luthar. His research focuses on the near “unlimited” choices the rich have.
“I wrote a book some years ago called the ‘Paradox of Choice’ and it’s about the problems that arise when people have too many options. My focus was on shopping but it’s not just shopping. It’s too many options with respect to almost any aspect of life and of course if you are affluent there’s essentially no budget constraint, so the entire world is available to you,” Schwartz said. “I think kids are really lost.”
Schwartz also blames what he calls the “coarsening” of society for rich kids going from self-destructive to destructive behavior.
“Rich kids could be rebelling by using drugs and alcohol. Why is it that instead of that they’re beating other people up,” Schwartz said. “That kind of approach to resolving conflicts has been completely normalized in the last decade and it wasn’t 20 years ago. (Kids) were mostly interested in being self-destructive not destructive of other people. The culture has gotten so coarse that they look around and see how adults behave and read what adults are saying and it makes their antisocial behavior seem almost normal.
Schwartz said he believes the COVID pandemic has also taken a psychological toll on teens. Social media has been pinpointed as one of the contributing factors to modern adolescents’ detachment from community and the long lockdown that cut students off from their peers, teachers and everyday routines only deepened that divide.
“I think COVID really exacerbated the problem by leaving kids so isolated from one another and from social norms and I think it’s going to be a while before we take a make a full accounting of the effects of COVID on young people. I know it had effects on everybody but not going to school, not being part of the structure of the school day just took a problem that was already there and magnified it and we’re paying for it,” Schwartz said. “I think the focus now has mostly been on lost academic development. Everybody is a grade behind, and I don’t want to minimize that but there’s also I think massive loss of psychological development, and nobody knows how long it’s going to take for that to recover.”
All this is not to say that permissive parenting doesn’t play a part in stunting the formation of empathy in any child.
“Total permissive parenting where there’s no consequences for anything and the parents are just kind of protecting their kids from any consequences, I think you would have a tough time finding a psychologist to say that that’s a good idea,” said Christopher J. Ferguson, an associate professor and department chair of psychology at Stetson University in Florida.
He added while parents are not responsible for their child having antisocial personality disorder, they can channel “antisocial inclinations to a societally accepted direction.”
“A really involved parent can kind of shape that so that they become a lawyer,” Ferguson said. “If you don’t do anything, in other words if you’re permissive … then there is no deterrence for these kind of natural inclinations toward antisocial behavior.”
Another way parents can help their children grow up into good people is to reflect on their own behavior.
“It’s very easy for us to say, ‘Now, I really want my child to be a good person.’ But take a step back and say if your child did not make the starters in the basketball team, if the child did not get into the advanced reading group, might you even with a slight raised eyebrow, a slight gesture, be conveying I’m disappointed,” Luthar asked in the 2014 podcast. “Just as the inner-city parents must work extra hard to keep their children physically safe and out of trouble with gangs, we in upper-middle-class, white-collar families need to work extra hard to make sure our children do not get swept away in this feeling of ‘I must do more,’ and stay grounded more in decency, kindness and true compassion, concern for humanity.”
We’d like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org. Janet Perez can be reached at jperez@iniusa.org.
Janet Perez
News Editor | Queen Creek &
San Tan Valley
jperez@iniusa.org
Meet Janet
Janet Perez joined Independent Newsmedia as editor of the Queen Creek Independent and Florence Independent in 2020. She started her career in 1989 with the Gannett-owned El Paso Times. In 1992, she moved to Tempe and has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio and television. She left Arizona for three years to work at New Mexico State University and Baylor University before returning to work at Arizona State University. Missing the business, she went back to journalism in 2017.
Community: A long-time pet owner, she supports animal welfare causes.
Education: University of Texas at El Paso with a BA in journalism and a minor in political science.
Random Fact: She had a head full of random facts.
Hobbies: Reading, watching documentaries, cooking and playing with her dogs.
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