My friend Alice’s daughter recently celebrated turning 5 with a party at home in Clinton Hill with a few of her closest friends. Not too long after, she was invited to a classmate’s 6th-birthday party that had a decidedly different flavor. The hostess’s entire brownstone had been transformed into a lavish Barbie Dreamhouse, bedecked with a pink balloon arch at the entryway leading to a life-size Barbie box in which the guests could be professionally photographed. In the living room, a singer performed songs from the Barbie movie. (“The first one was the Billie Eilish song, which made my daughter cry when she watched the movie because it’s really sad,” said Alice — who, like everyone else in this story, requested anonymity.) At a makeup station upstairs, another pro stood at the ready to do makeovers. Several nannies employed by the host family managed the kids.
On the way home, Alice’s daughter stated the obvious: “Her party was better than mine.”
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Chloë Sevigny
Alice didn’t know how to respond; the Barbie party’s superiority was undeniable. After a beat, she eked out a response about her daughter’s own celebration and how fun it was. “I don’t know if it was effective or not, but she hasn’t brought it up since, so maybe it’s okay,” she told me, the doubt still present in her voice. Alice didn’t say it, but the source of her problem lingered in the air: She can’t afford lavish birthday parties, and some of the kids in her daughter’s social circle can. It’s largely an urban-parenting conundrum, but a stressor nonetheless. I relate to it deeply.
Nine years ago, deciding to raise children in New York hardly felt like a choice for my husband and me. Our in-person jobs and deep networks of friends and colleagues were all inextricably rooted here, and I’d never imagined living anywhere else. I also never fantasized about raising kids in an anodyne suburb like the one I grew up in; I wanted my kids to feel the energy of the city all around them. But lately, the wealth gap between us — a pair of novelists turned academic and journalist, respectively — and most of the other parents escorting kids to our local public school seems to have grown more stark. I’m not imagining the absence of similarly resourced families here: Since April 2020, the under-5 population has fallen by 17 percent in New York City and 14 percent in Los Angeles County. A recent report from the Fiscal Policy Institute found families with young children are twice as likely to move out of New York City as those without them. Parents cite the need for more affordable housing as their primary motivation.
My husband and I will never, barring some kind of lottery-win-like windfall, have the money to own a second home or even a first one in New York. We are not poor by any stretch of the imagination, but we are stuck where we are — paying expensive rent that is still less than the cost of a mortgage on the inevitably smaller apartment we don’t have the down payment for anyway. (Apartments go for $914 per square foot in the neighborhood where our kids go to school.) Though I knew all this to a degree when I was in my 20s and early 30s, I also thought less about class disparities then, probably because they weren’t always in my face. Back then, it seemed like everyone I knew in New York rented the same medium-shitty apartments, decorated them with street finds, and brought over a bottle of wine from the store’s $8 table. Looking back, I wonder if some of our friends had generational wealth they hadn’t yet had cause to flaunt or even if they were pretending to be poor, experimenting with a bohemian lifestyle in Greenpoint before settling down properly in Park Slope.
Once we had kids, though, it became clear that there was nothing bohemian about having a baby. We started to move in a world of other kid-havers whose money tells were legible and everywhere. It seemed that people who could afford to stay in New York with children had planned how to do so comfortably, rather than improvisationally as we had. Soon after giving birth, I could estimate a family’s net worth just from the brand of their stroller or baby carrier. Now that my kids are 6 and 9, the clues are found not only in Barbie birthday parties but also in camps, cars, and social-media posts. On my Instagram feed, I see who’s spending school breaks in the Seychelles or at their bungalow upstate. And of course, there’s the great divide of owning versus renting. I hate to admit it, but I’m hit with a wave of depression whenever my family is invited to a playdate or party in a beautiful brownstone or for a weekend upstate at someone’s second home. When we are guests for dinner and the kids go play upstairs while the adults have a nice meal in the dining room, it feels like someone — not our hospitable friends but God or the universe — is rubbing our noses in it. On some level, we have failed. Worse, we are failing our kids. Their childhood, whether they realize it or not, is just not as awesome as these other kids’ childhoods.
Like Alice, I’m often left tongue-tied when my children ask for things and experiences we can’t afford or to have a babysitter instead of being dropped at a heavily subsidized day care when they’re off from school. I’ve told them we have money for everything we need but not for everything we want. I’ve said the vague “maybe next year” when asked about overseas travel. But I can’t bring myself to tell them the complete truth: that we have less money than almost everyone else around here, that I’m raising them in a place where some people are obscenely wealthy — arguably, deplorably so. How do other parents deal with explaining the mind-bending fact of living in a place where inequality is so visible to kids? Surely, the children can’t help but notice the travel sports teams, the lakeside sleepaway camps, the peers at school who never get picked up by their parents because they still have a full-time nanny? (They probably don’t perceive that last one, but we sure do.)
Ana lives in a modest two-bedroom apartment on the edge of Park Slope. Recently, some of her rich friends bought a brownstone, and her kids — ages 6 and 12 — went over to check it out. Their takeaway was simple, Ana said: “They were like, ‘Why do they have a pool table?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. Because they like it?’ And they said, “Well, I want a pool table.’” She had to explain that pool tables were out of their budget and that their friends simply had more money than they did, which was okay. I heard from another mom, Samantha, who lives in Chicago and recently experienced something similar when her 4-year-old was invited to a playdate at a friend’s split-level coach house, which boasted not one but two sets of stairs, a detail her daughter found impossible to ignore. “She’s like, ‘Well, how come we don’t have inside stairs? I want to live somewhere bigger,’” Samantha said. She talked to her daughter in 4-year-old terms without mentioning money, saying something like “We live here, they live there, the end.” But it did make her wonder if this was just the start of it: “What will she notice as she gets older?”
In the school years, activities and vacations are often points of kid focus. John, who lives in the Boston area with his wife and their 7- and 9-year-old, feels surrounded by families who have just that crucial bit more than they do. Mostly, it doesn’t bother him — “Angst isn’t quite the right word” to describe his feelings, he said. But lately his kids’ questions have become difficult to answer. “The children will ask, ‘Why are our vacations always to see family?’ We have relatives in the Midwest and on the West Coast, and we can’t go anywhere else because we can’t afford to go anywhere else,” he explained to me. His son, who is 7, has said he “really, really” wants to go to Paris. “I respond, ‘Well, I don’t know if we ever will, but we’ll try,’” John said.
I told John I experienced the same thing with my 6-year-old, who took an after-school French class this year that mostly taught him how to say “bonjour” and sing a few songs. The likelihood that either of our children will make it to Paris before college is extremely small, but neither John nor I feel we can confess that to our respective kids, especially when the questions keep coming. “It’s really a matter of my kids constantly posing questions about the resources and experiences available to them that are taken for granted by other people’s kids,” he told me. We can stand to say “no” only so often.
But if you play your cards right as a parent and are blessed to be “born without the envy gene,” which is the way Laura, who lives in Park Slope with her husband and two children, describes herself, there may be a way around this unpleasantness. Laura’s kids go to private school with financial aid and are surrounded by peers who never have to think about cash flow. But Laura’s eldest has a solid job helping a homebound elderly neighbor, which covers all the after-school trips to Pinkberry and the like. She has also managed to instill an environmentalist ethos in her kids that makes them relish the thrill of the hunt at stoop sales. They reuse paper scraps and magazines for art projects and entertain at home instead of going to restaurants. All their clothes are used, including their shoes. “The thing about living in a wealthy neighborhood is the street keeps giving and we give back to it. We use a puzzle, we make it, and we put it back out,” Laura said. “My friends have been appalled that my kids wear used shoes, but I’m not. I mean, whatever.”
Laura said her kids sometimes feel disappointed that their friends aren’t around on the weekends because they have second homes, but that’s as far as their distress goes. She doesn’t censor talk of money and status around her kids, but she does make sure they know that having a lot of money isn’t the most important thing. “It is still possible today in New York to raise kids who are not super money-and-status conscious. I do think you can focus on who shares your interests and not on who has what and what do you want to have,” Laura said. But it’s up to the parents, and it’s a lot of work: “It is not easy to bite your tongue all the time when other kids around do not share the same values. It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Hearing this, I immediately regretted every time my husband and I had mentioned our desire for more money in front of our boys, which is a lot of times. But perhaps unsurprisingly, neither of my sons seems to have any idea what money is or what it means. My 9-year-old idolizes MrBeast and dreams of giving away millions on YouTube, but his conception of a million is that it’s a lot of cash, not that it’s a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in the Clinton Hill Co-Ops. When my sons ask why they can’t have objects or experiences their friends have, their questions are innocent, not meant to needle us about how we should go back in time and attend law school. It’s hard to remember that in the moment — to recognize that, for the most part, kids are unbothered by what they don’t have and that the angst is mostly ours.
During a recent vacation to a shared Airbnb near my in-laws’ house in Cape Cod, my younger son expressed a wish to cut the trip short and go back to our apartment. But why, I asked, when the house we’d rented had a yard with bunnies, a giant TV, and other house-specific qualities? “It has my bed in it,” he told me quite reasonably. And while it may be Ikea, mine is there too.
Photo: Jackie Siegel with her twins, Jordan and Jacqueline, in front of their private plane in Orlando. This photograph appears in Lauren Greenfield’s 2017 monograph Generation Wealth (Phaidon).
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