These parents get an “F” in parenting.
The biggest college admissions scandal the U.S. Department of Justice has ever prosecuted named dozens of moms and dads this week — including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin — who allegedly paid bribes to get their kids into elite and Ivy League schools like Yale, Stanford and the University of Southern California.
‘More privilege comes with a sense of entitlement and whatever I can’t get, I’ll try to buy.’
Media coverage has focused on how the parents were apparently trying to help their kids. It’s an example of over-the-top devotion to their children, observers say, but the reason parents break laws for their kids has more to do with themselves than their offspring. And there’s a common thread regardless of the crime: Entitlement.
“These crimes aren’t for the kids, these crimes are for themselves,” Dr. Victor Fornari, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital in New York, told MarketWatch. “Their children’s successes are a reflection of their own pathological narcissism,” he said.
Children also learn by example. When kids see their parents break the law, they’re likely to follow in their footsteps. Kids whose parents commit crimes are more than twice as likely to also break the law or exhibit criminal behavior themselves, according to a 2017 study from the journal of Aggression and Violent Behavior. [1]
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These wealthy parents like to be able to predict the outcome
Wealthy parents, experts say, don’t like uncertainty. Just like markets don’t like uncertainty, such parents like to be able to predict the outcome without any margin for error, even if it costs them tends of thousands of dollars to do it. They want to make sure their children are guaranteed the same lifestyle they enjoyed or, ideally, have a better life. That guarantee can come at a high price.
Wealthy parents who are not used to being told “no” can tend to lose sight of their moral and ethical values when faced with a challenge in achieving a goal, and often act on a lapse of judgment, Fornari explains. That seemed to be the case with the 50 parents accused of paying Newport Beach-based consultant William “Rick” Singer to alter SAT scores and Photoshop students onto stock photos to make them look more athletic so that admissions counselors would consider their applications....
The college fraud case is not the first example of parents accused of committing crimes to help their kids.