The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money

by Ron Lieber

When she’s not at the baseball field, Johnson is a sociology professor at Lehigh University who focuses her research on social class and the perpetuation of wealth and poverty. She believes that many kids have settled into an understanding of social class as something you earn through merit and hard work—and that you don’t deserve to be in the highest socioeconomic classes if you don’t work hard enough. Plenty of parents and teachers are fine with that, since it dovetails nicely with the desire to get children to buckle down in school and is conveniently compatible with the persistent idea that all kids in America have an equal opportunity to make something of themselves. But Johnson doesn’t quite buy the idea of a pure meritocracy, and it can make people nervous when she explains it out loud. “There is often more to the story than just hard work,” she explained during a talk to teachers at the Gordon School in Providence, Rhode Island. “It’s not but. It’s and. There is luck and circumstance and the family you were born to. All sorts of things factor in. That would be extremely radical if parents just started saying that at the dinner table. If we were honest about our own privilege when we have it. And not all of us have it or have had it, though most of us in this room have had it in some form or another.”