Rich People and their Social & Moral Misdemeanors

How parenting goes wrong with a lot of money at hand

Photo courtesy- Unsplash

Recently I was back to India for a two-week trip and got the luxury of browsing through a newspaper(my little one was happily busy with his grand dad all the time) and noticed the headline- “One killed, 3 injured after being hit by a car driven by Class 12 student of DPS”. Why was a 12th class student allowed to be behind the wheel? Why was he speeding the car at all?

Reportedly, the said teenager was driving his friend’s father’s car without a license and while he said that he and his two friends were going to school, they were in track pants and the incident happened in wee hours, way before any school opens. He also said he was epileptic and wasn’t allowed to drive by his parents. This was not the first such accident though and wouldn’t be the last of course.

Such reckless driving accidents by teenagers have been becoming news previously as well. Last year another 17- year- old 12th class student ran over his Mercedes on a 32 -year- old man, the footage can be watched here. It was illegal, reckless and brutal.

Teenagers are almost always adventurous and high on adrenaline but that should not be an excuse to hand them those car keys. Most often in such accidents involved are the kids of rich parents who have luxurious cars parked in their villas, enticing these teenagers of power, supremacy, and carelessness.

With money should come responsibility, compassion for those who are less fortunate, but what rather comes is indifference, flamboyance, and lawlessness.

Do these kids feel safe behind the wheel at 100km/h knowing that their rich dads will ensure no harm comes to them, regardless of whatever might happen to others because of them? Do their parents fail to instill in them a sense of social responsibility and perils of illegal behavior? Do these rich parents take pride in their minor kid driving their luxurious cars?

We need behavior correction, both in the parents and their kids. If you happen to be a rich parent with loads of money stashed under the mattress in your house and if you claim to have connections with the seniors in police and law who would be ready to bail you out nonetheless, please take a print out of what I write below and paste it everywhere, importantly on your cars-

1. Your money, your car, and your kids are your damn business. If none of it can be used for the betterment of all, it definitely shouldn’t be causing any harm to anyone .
2. Put a full stop on your tendency to show off- at least in front of your kids. Taking pride in possessions is injurious to health.
3. Teach your kids that debauchery is bad. Being rich and senseless doesn’t help either. Everybody can’t be Salman khan, for that matter, he is still ‘being human’.
4. Teach them the importance of hard work. Show them how money is earned respectfully and legally. If not, surrender yourself to police and file your tax returns.
5. Teach them to respect — from your laborer to your driver to the maid in your house. This will eventually serve you good as well.
6. Learn to take responsibility for your kids and their behavior. What you sow is what you reap.
7. Learn how to put your money to good use without unnecessarily splurging it. Buy fewer cars, this will save some parking space and some pollution. You might live longer.
8. Learn to share- both by giving tips and sharing profits.
9. Phones and cars can be updated every year, kids can not.

I understand that being a parent and that too rich, can be difficult. I also understand that being a kid of a rich parent can also be difficult, the pull of money and push of childhood is a tough rope to walk. So here are some pointers if you are one of those kids —

1. Observe but learn to apply your own brains. Being original is always better than being a copy. It is never mandatory to copy your parents and their ill-manners.
2. Childhood is for fun and learning. Real cars are fatal, not fun.
3. Showing off doesn’t help. Learn to do things, not own.
4. Respect is a two-way street. Give and you shall receive.
5. Go green. Ride a bicycle. Racing a car and killing someone is a buzzkill.
6. Lives are important. Be it yours or someone else.
7. Money can make you more fortunate, but not supreme, definitely not above law.
8. Law exists for a reason. Don’t create that reason though.
9. Live, love, laugh. Learn to share and care.
10. Causing harm to others is causing harm to yourself. It all works in cause and effect.
11. Living beings have dignity, things don’t. Respect people, not things.
12. Don’t hurry to be an adult. An adult spends his whole life missing his childhood.

The list is longer for kids than for parents. It is easier to mend kids, than grown-ups. We anyways tend to have more expectations from the future.

Psychologist Paul Piff has conducted studies co-relating money and lack of compassion in rich people. In an interesting experiment, they monitored drivers behavior on California roads based on the car they were driving. As expected, the tendency to break the law increased with the expansiveness of the car.

“What we’ve been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down,” Piff said in his Ted talk on Does Money make you mean?

So it is a human tendency to feel superior as we go on to own more money than others. I always thought that money should bring harmony and contentment for us, while compassion and kindness for others. Ironically it does the opposite. The more rich people get, the more they get cocooned in their own shell of desires, power, and ego. Money isn’t the unifying factor it should be, it divides us far and wide. It will be so until we learn to use it as more of a social commodity than personal. Of course what we earn is what is ours, but when it gets beyond consumable limits, it will be better to put it to a greater good than letting it sit and rot our moral being.

As I write this, the parent in me is whispering ‘judging and blaming parents haan, how convenient’! Yes I know how hard parents try to teach their kids everything right and I also know that mistakes still happen. It is possible for your kiddo to sneak out with the car while you are sleeping or on vacation, and it is for such defining moments that it is essential for parents to teach their kids values which do not vaporize with the mere absence of parents. Values that stay with them regardless of where they are and with whom they are. That’s why it is said — Practice what you preach. Because ultimately, our kids are our reflection. If they fail, we fail too.