The idea that growing up rich costs you something has an obvious appeal to everyone who did not, and that alone should make us cautious of it. It can be a comforting fable, a way of levelling a playing field that is, in most respects, tilted the other way. So it is worth being precise about what the research does and does not say, because a real version of the claim survives the scrutiny, and it is more specific than sour grapes.
What follows is a reading of that research rather than clinical advice, and it comes with a caveat that should sit at the front rather than the back. None of this romanticises going without. The harms of poverty are severe, well documented, and not in question here. The narrower and more surprising point is that affluence removes certain ordinary experiences, and that a couple of those experiences turn out to matter.
The distress no one goes looking for
The most counterintuitive evidence comes from the psychologist Suniya Luthar, who spent years studying young people from wealthy families and found something that unsettled the usual picture. Affluent adolescents were not, as everyone assumed, uniformly fine. As Teachers College, Columbia summarised her work, children from affluent backgrounds showed more problems than their less wealthy peers with depression, anxiety, and risky behaviours such as substance use. In one of her studies, 46 percent of affluent girls had used an illegal substance in the past year, against 26 percent of lower-income girls, with a similar gap among the boys.
Luthar traced this to two forces that money can quietly amplify. The first is relentless pressure to achieve, in a world where a child’s performance is read as the family’s report card. The second, and more poignant, is isolation from parents, both the literal kind produced by long hours and busy calendars and the emotional kind produced by a household organised around results. Her work suggests that what protects these children is not less money but more closeness, an unhurried, unconditional attention that is easy to crowd out when everyone is busy succeeding.
So the first everyday thing an affluent upbringing can miss is not material. It is the experience of being valued for something other than output, and of a parent’s relaxed presence that asks for nothing back.
The attunement that comes from needing people
The second missing thing is subtler, and it shows up not in wealthy children specifically but in how social class shapes attention. In a set of studies published in Psychological Science in 2010, the psychologists Michael Kraus, Stephane Cote and Dacher Keltner found that people from lower social-class backgrounds were, on average, better at reading other people’s emotions. They scored higher on tests of empathic accuracy, judged a conversation partner’s feelings more precisely, and more accurately identified emotions from photographs of the muscles around the eyes.
The explanation the researchers offered is not that wealthier people are colder by nature. It is that they need other people less. When you can solve most problems with resources, your attention turns inward and forward, toward your own goals. When you depend on the people around you, your attention turns outward, toward reading them accurately, because getting them right matters. Affluence, in this account, gently removes the daily incentive to study other people, and the skill quietly atrophies from lack of use.
The everyday thing missed here is that practice. Not empathy as a virtue, which wealthy and poor people possess in equal measure, but the fine-grained, well-exercised habit of noticing what someone else is feeling, which grows sharp mainly when you cannot afford to misread it.
The frictions money is designed to remove
Around these two well-evidenced points sits a looser cluster of things that money smooths away, and here the research is thinner, so the claims should be softer. Affluence tends to remove small frictions: the experience of wanting something and having to wait, of managing a limited budget, of a plan foiled by cost, of ordinary work done because it must be. It is plausible, and often argued, that some resilience and resourcefulness are built in exactly those frictions, and that a childhood without them can leave a person less practised at tolerating limits.
This is worth holding lightly, because the same frictions, in their harsher forms, are precisely what makes poverty grinding rather than character-building. The point is not that hardship is good. It is that a moderate acquaintance with limits appears to be one of the ordinary experiences wealth can edit out, along with the closeness and the attunement.
Keeping the ledger honest
A few qualifications are essential, because this is a subject that invites overstatement in both directions. The findings are about averages across groups, not verdicts on individuals, and plenty of people raised in wealth are close to their parents, acutely attuned to others, and entirely at ease with limits. The affluence research is largely correlational, drawn mostly from particular communities, and it measures tendencies rather than fate. And wealth’s advantages are enormous and real: better health, safer surroundings, richer education, and a wider set of open doors. No honest account trades those away.
What the evidence leaves standing is a narrower and more useful claim than the fable. Growing up wealthy does not doom anyone, but it does make it easy to skip a few ordinary experiences that turn out to carry weight, chiefly unpressured closeness and the daily practice of reading other people. The consoling detail, buried in Luthar’s own findings, is that the most protective factor she identified was not something money removes but something it can never buy, and which a wealthy family can choose to give as freely as any other. The missing things are missable, in other words, not inevitable, and the difference between the two is mostly a matter of what a family decides to pay attention to.