We live near a top university in the Midwest. Our friends and neighbors are very well educated with lots of PhDs and profs in our neighborhood. It’s the opposite of tiger parenting here. Parents value education but kids are doing normal things - going to regular summer camp, playing sports, working normal kid jobs. Most represented schools are the Big 10 public flagships even though many parents got their degrees at Ivies.
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I appreciate your thoughts. Let me try to make what I have in mind more plausible to you.
You’re right: I don’t think many Atherton millionaires sit around worrying, “Oh no, if my son doesn’t ace BC Calc, he’ll become an unemployed machinist in the Rust Belt.”
But I would add: I’ve never heard a rich parent, on any coast or in between, say “Doesn’t matter if he bombs in school, he’ll just inherit the $5 million house and set up his surf shop.” I have heard many talk about how “tough” the world is, and how you have to work hard to get where you want to be, etc., to their kids or anybody else who would listen.
Really the fear of one’s kids becoming déclassé, to use a quaint word, is not so exotic as you may think. And it’s quite ancient. So soup kitchen, no. Slipping down the ladder of success, achievement, income—most definitely.
And yes, “contemplating” may be too dignified a word to apply to what rich people do concerning the class system. But they know how it works, in their bones, and they’re not unaware of dangers of slipping down it, and know exactly how it’s changed since they were young.
I certainly know old-fashioned middle-class families, schoolteachers, midwesterners, what have you. The middle class, as classically defined, still exists—but even people inhabiting it know the erosion around the edges quite well.
So yes, it takes a certain personality, added to everybody’s collective consciousness of the widening gap, to go full-on tiger. Many, most just shrug and hope for the best.
Finally, I’m not sure if you’re kidding or not, but I find the idea that rich people would engage in an “outpouring of philanthropy” if the class gap worried them to be pretty funny.
They’d instead do what they’ve always done when worried about inequality (and maybe what they’re doing now?): shore up their families’ class position as best they can with all available resources.
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Ah, I’ve always heard the surf shop rich kids called “trustifarians”.
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According to California State Median Income for FFY 2023 | The LIHEAP Clearinghouse , the median income for a family of 4 in California is about $104k (which results in take-home $84k). Are you saying that living on that amount of money is “poor”?
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No. There’s a wide range in between poor and wealthy. If they’re frugal, they could be comfortable but I would not define $80k a year in California as wealthy.
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That is the difference between “involved parent”, and “Tiger parent” is the demands and the response to failure.
Did you demand that your kid keep up an A average, and restrict their social activities or any non-academic activity in order to achieve that? Did you demand that your kid do AP physics, even though they wanted to study something that didn’t require physics? Did you demand that your kid be “only STEM”. Did you denigrate any artistic achievements or aspirations because they weren’t helpful for a career in STEM?
If you simply did your best to help your kid in their chosen direction, and provided resources that weren’t available at their school, that doesn’t make you a “tiger parent”.
If your kid wanted to study engineering, and wanted to do AP physics because it would help with her studies, or because it would help them keep their options open, then what you did was great.
What makes a Tiger Parent is not what they do, but what they don’t do. They don’t take into consideration their kid’s interests, aspirations, mental health or well-being. They mostly care that their kid will have a prestigious career and will be the best in the high school, and the parent will make sure that the kid spends all their available time in order to achieve
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In the Bay Area and other places, around 40% of that would go to rent. Then health insurance, add in a car payment, food, PG&E which has raised rates to an unconscionable level (my monthly bill literally doubled with the most recent rate hike and there’s another one on the horizon), food which has been subject to significant inflation, clothes, incidentals…Sure, they would not poor in the sense that they are going without meals, but they would definitely being watching their spending and probably not saving much if any.
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However, a $150k/yr family income in CA would also result in about $11,000/yr of state income taxes. So that $113k take home becomes $102k.
Let’s say you rent a 2 BR apartment in the SF Bay Area for, let’s say, about $3200/month. That then leaves you with about $62,000/yr to live on for the rest of your expenses.
My SIL & her immediate family, for example, live in a suburb of San Diego. According to Income Limits AMI Chart, “low income” for a family of 4 is an annual household income of $121,250/yr.
So based on that, my SIL’s family is low income.
In San Francisco, you can have an annual household income of about that same amount and yeah, you’re considered low income by the local city & county government.
I think there are a lot of sub-strings going on at once. I’ve already described my second-hand experience of tiger parenting from being a sounding board to a first-gen MIT graduate over the space of the past ten years, probably since before I even knew there was a term for what he had experienced and how it has affected his life into early middle-age.
The other parallel, not entirely unrelated, discussion is about how one defines Upper Middle Class (UMC). That’s always been a rhetorical minefield, notleast of all because this website invites us to take a look at the lives of families from such a wide range of sheer geography. The high COL metropolitan centers of the East are very different from the Northern Plains which would in turn be very different from Silicon Valley even though they might earn the exact same income.
I’m mostly familiar with a small subset of families who reside on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who make their livings producing content for various media, by teaching and a few as professional musicians. I don’t think any of them make more than 150K after taxes, but it is likely that there are all sorts of trust funds no one is talking about.
A surprising number of them have Ivy and little ivy baccalaureates, many of them were legacy admits themselves and made no bones about trying to extend the good fortune to their own kids in not so recent admissions cycles. I would call them members of the Cultural Elite in the sense that they are willing to forego a lot of the trappings of UMC life - the car, the backyard barbecue, the home theater in the finished basement - so long as they can be close to like-minded artists, writers and performers.
So, where do you live?
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I live in the Silicon Valley in an area with many highly-educated immigrants.
Here is what I did do (my husband to a much lesser extent):
• We told our kids that we don’t care about grades, but they should put their best work (implying that this will be enough to get an A, which was true). We worked with them if they needed help which was rare.
• Encouraged them to pursue their interests but enabled them getting better by signing them up for enrichment activities. Some of these activities did eat up into their unstructured downtime. My daughter is an exceptional creative writer. I sent some of her work to Scholastic where she got regional awards. I also helped her to enter pieces into several other contests some of which she won, was published, etc. I signed her up for piano at age 7 and made her practice until middle school. By HS, she wanted to practice and did not want to drop the piano even when I asked her to. After 7th grade I sent her on a writer summer camp without actively consulting her. She did not like it, so no more academic summer camps.
• I also signed my son for enrichment math in 4th grade. In my defense, the math curriculum here is awful (IMO). He did well, and tested out of 7th and 8th grade math, skipped two grades and finished Calculus BC in 10th grade. Skipping was not strictly necessary.
• I also signed him for AMC camps. He likes problem-solving. However, left on his own devices, he would have preferred not doing all this extra work.
• Signed them for various sports and schlepped them to practices and games. They liked that so not very tigerish of me.
• Helped them package their college applications. Tracked volunteer hours, awards, activities, hours, etc.
• Subtly encouraged them to major in something practical. My daughter did PPE and ended up working as economist. Would have studied creative writing without our input. My son wanted to be a psychologist even though this is not his strength, and he did not like AP Psychology as it was not very rigorous. He though this is a good subject if you are social. However, he thrives in conceptual classes so is now super interested and invested in his stem field.
So, the line between an involved and tiger parent is thin. Neither of my kids had mental-health problems; this would have been a red line. Compared to my parents which were completely hands-off after I was admitted to my selective high school, I am a tiger parent.
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The calculator at Federal Income Tax Calculator (2023-2024) also estimates state income taxes for the state given. So $150,000 has the following costs:
| Tax Type | 2023 Taxes |
|---|---|
| Federal | $17,521 |
| FICA | $11.475 |
| State | $7,018 |
| Local | $0 |
| Total income taxes | $36,014 |
Leaving take-home pay of $113,986.
I think this shows the evolution of what people consider wealthy. In the past, this was closer to what it looked like:
No vacations
Staycation
Vacation via road trip
Vacation via plane (domestic)
Vacation abroad
Being able to take a plane trip or go on a vacation abroad was for the upper class. But now, if one can’t fly business or first class, people aren’t well off?
Same thing with the size of houses. The living area of the average new house has gone up several fold over the years, too, despite the fact that family sizes have gotten smaller (source).
Before WWII, the vast majority of people never went to college. If your family was able to help you go to any college, that was a sign of being from a well off family.
So we want more elaborate vacations, bigger houses, and top colleges and then complain about how we’re not financially well off. What we’re wanting now was what had traditionally only been available to the upper class.
So again, just as tiger parenting is on a continuum, what “upper middle class” people expect is also a continuum.
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When people say that $150k is wealthy because millions of people can live on much less, I point to one staggering figure: $1.12 trillion in credit card debt.
Millions of Americans are not able to live off their paychecks. It’s an illusion. They are actually in the red every month.
Companies are pushing their employees into high deductible health care plans, housing costs (and rent) have soared, utilities, basic necessities etc. The median savings is about $8k. That’s less than one HVAC unit.
That’s why I dont think people making $150k are “wealthy”. They can just avoid going into debt and not be financially ruined because one or two life events and maybe put away a few thousand dollars a month.
I also think this is why some parents are pushing their kids into high paying careers. When college is $30k, $40k, $80k/year, that’s an enormous amount for families, even those making $150k. The ROI is very important for these families.
Or in some situations, the kids may realize that 50 year old mom or dad making $100k does not equal financial freedom so they want to make $70k per year right away when they graduate.
College inflation has outpaced overall inflation by a large number.
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Percentage of persons 25 to 29 years old with selected levels of educational attainment, by race/ethnicity and sex: Selected years, 1920 through 2023 lists the percentage of the age 25-29 population of the US with various levels of education or higher:
| Year | % HS grad | % associates | % bachelor’s | % master’s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1920 | <22.0 | <4.5 | ||
| 1940 | 38.1 | 5.9 | ||
| 1950 | 52.8 | 7.7 | ||
| 1960 | 60.7 | 11.0 | ||
| 1970 | 75.4 | 16.4 | ||
| 1980 | 85.4 | 22.5 | ||
| 1990 | 85.7 | 23.2 | ||
| 2000 | 88.1 | 37.7 | 29.1 | 5.4 |
| 2010 | 88.8 | 41.1 | 31.7 | 6.8 |
| 2020 | 94.8 | 50.0 | 39.2 | 9.4 |
| 2023 | 94.3 | 49.7 | 40.5 | 10.6 |
Once upon a time, being a college graduate stood out from the population, whether it is to employers or otherwise. Now, college graduates are more common, so perhaps it is not surprising that more people want a higher prestige college or more in-demand-by-employers majors to stand out from large numbers of competing college graduates in the job market.
One weird feature of Silicon Valley (and other parts of California) is that since the late 1970s we’ve had a sort of rent-control-but-for-property taxes, ensuring that no matter how much your property valuation may increase on paper, your taxes won’t go up more than 2%/year. This predates Silicon Valley and a lot of the people living in these parts were in fact middle class – teachers, trades, public safety workers, journalists, etc. (upper middle class folks – doctors/lawyers etc. – could actually buy homes in Atherton). It was until very recently possible to hand down your property tax rate to your children when they inherited your properties (including, I believe, income properties like multi-family housing and downtown buildings). It has skewed both people’s perceptions of reality and the actual housing market in a bunch of crazy ways. But this is how you have people who think of themselves as middle class living in homes worth $3-5 million, paying maybe $5-10K/year in property taxes and possibly unable to maintain their homes. This is also why a lot of aging rental properties don’t get redeveloped (or, again, well maintained) – redeveloping would reset the assessable property value + property taxes (and cause a temporary loss in rental income). I once calculated (using census data) the change over time in median home value and median household income in Menlo Park. At one point the average home sale price was 3x the average household income. Now it’s closer to 15x. $150,000 sounds like a lot of money but…here’s a starter home in a majority rental neighborhood with a failing school district.
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Menlo-Park/170-Terminal-Ave-94025/home/1239852
And here’s what you’d spend on that to buy into the district where more than 18% of the kids are meeting grade-level standards.
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Menlo-Park/430-Concord-Dr-94025/home/2029929
A lot of other people around here came here during the boom years – they went to Stanford and stuck around, or came out to work for Meta or Google or Apple. They have means. But they look at how intense the competition is for good paying jobs, and homes, and no wonder it feels like a slippery slope.
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Well, speaking as someone who lives in-between, in part that is because it is very unlikely that “rich” parent in-between has a $5 million house! I mean if you are true upper class wealthy, then maybe. But if you are looking at “merely” upper middle class sort of “rich”, meaning possibly with a net worth above $5 million but not way above, that household is unlikely to have so much of their net worth in their house, it will instead mostly be in financial assets, possibly business equity, possibly 529s!, and so on.
That said, for sure the “trust fund baby” conversation can come up. But I think the fear in my circles is less commonly about downward mobility and more just the belief that a life without any sort of meaningful work might not be a very good life. But if, say, paying for college and maybe grad school and maybe a down payment and such helps a kid choose to be the proverbial grade school teacher instead of having to go to law school to feel comfortable? That’s where it gets interesting as I think a lot of us lawyers would think that is a great outcome, but certainly not all.
And yes, you can get some Bs and do that. Actually law school too, for that matter.
So for “fun”, here is what the same amount can get you in Cleveland:
https://www.redfin.com/OH/Rocky-River/2121-Valley-View-Dr-44116/home/66457277
Rocky River is a traditional top suburb with top schools:
By the way, what Salary.com calls an Attorney V, they say in Cleveland makes $187,481 to $232,642. In Menlo Park, they say $239,028 to $295,332. So, more, but not as much more as the difference in housing prices.
I really think upper middle class parents in different parts of the country talk past each other sometimes because this is such a radically different situation.
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I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re not a tiger mom. You’re a good involved mom.
The line between tiger and involved looks thin, but it’s not.
Involved parents see their kid, and help their kid along paths that the kid enjoys and thrives. Maybe a nudge here, or a “you can do what you choose, but you’ll probably enjoy B more”, or “you need to try this once. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to do it again”. But ultimately, their goal is a kid who is thriving.
A tiger parents just sees what needs to be done with their kid to create the “perfect son/daughter”. Their goal is producing their version of a “perfect progeny”.
Involved parent: “my job as a parent to to prepare my kid for the best life that they can live, tailoring this to the kid”
Helicopter parent: “my job as a parent to eliminate all unpleasantness, pain, obstacles, unhappiness , or strenuous effort from my kid’s life. I am a martyr for my child and the world should know it”
Tiger parent: “my job as a parent is to mold the perfect progeny from my child so that world will know that I am a great parent”
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Sounds pretty Tiger Mom to me but if it works for your family it’s all good.
You stepped in and did things for your kids that I would not and did not do for mine. I did not sign my kids up for camps or activities without consulting them except for swimming lessons when they were little and I view that as a safety issue. They have followed their interests from a young age and we have supported that but we didn’t direct it.
My D22 is majoring in Creative Writing and I think that’s great. I would not try to talk her out of that because I don’t like it or don’t think she can make enough money at it.
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Some versions of parent notions of “perfect progeny” go against higher academic opportunity, such as parents who require their students to commute to college (for parental supervision purposes) even if the student can go to college further away for greater academic opportunities at lower cost due to financial aid or scholarships. This is in addition to such things as choosing the student’s major when the student prefers some other major.
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