Over the weekend, I had the great pleasure of finishing Rob Henderson’s excellent new book, Troubled: A memoir of foster care, family, and social class, as well as meeting him for an intimate lunch hosted by Anthony and Polina Pompliano.
Through reading his work and sharing a wide-ranging conversation, it’s obvious Rob is an extremely resilient and thoughtful individual, in addition to being a keen observer of culture and education.
Today, I want to share some details from his book that stood out to me.
If you haven’t already, I emphatically recommend picking up his book and subscribing to his newsletter.
Luxury beliefs
Having never met his father and being born to a drug-addicted mother, Rob entered the foster care system at the age of three and bounced around multiple foster families throughout his childhood.
Crime, alcohol, and drugs colored his upbringing, and nonstop dysfunction shaped his worldview.
Eventually, after much chaos and fighting and poor grades, he enlisted in the Air Force at 17. Later, he earned admission into Yale for his undergraduate studies, then Cambridge for his PhD.
“As someone who never really had one, maybe I am the least qualified person to defend the importance of family,” Rob writes in the opening of Troubled. “But as someone with more education than I ever expected to receive, maybe I’m more qualified to say we give education more importance than we should.”
Through his own tumultuous upbringing and his research in psychology and sociology, he coined the term “luxury beliefs,” which he describes as ideas or opinions that confer status on the upper class while harming the less fortunate.
Rob categorizes the upper class as individuals who attend or graduate from an elite university, and who have at least one parent who’s also a college graduate. Compared to parental income, research indicates parental education is a more powerful predictor of a child’s future lifestyle and tastes.
Luxury beliefs, importantly, are espoused by those who are most protected from the consequences of those ideas.
Consider for example Apple executives who publicly praise iPads as a boon for underprivileged education, who also bar their own kids from using them.
Or take the increasingly popular idea in intellectual circles that marriage and monogamy are outdated. While it’s common for elites to decry the tradition, they themselves do not practice or recommend unconventional alternatives to their own children.
Among other data, Rob highlights how the percentage of US children living with both biological parents has changed over the last six decades.
- In 1960, an equal 95% of children in both affluent and working class lived with both biological parents
- By 2005, that dipped to 85% for affluent families and cratered to 30% for working-class families
Rob writes:
Affluent people, particularly in the 1960s, championed sexual freedom. Loose sexual norms caught on for the rest of society. The upper close, though, still had intact families. Generally speaking, they experimented in college and then settled down later. The families of the lower classes fell apart.
Yale students, he added, can easily dismiss marriage as a piece of paper, yet they would hesitate to do the same for a college degree.
Shrugging off the former has no bearing on their own existence, yet any slippage of the latter threatens their social standing.
“I’ve learned,” Rob says, “that educated and affluent people tend to focus on credentials when deciding whether or not to listen to someone.”
The ideal audience for the book
As a journalist and as a holder of undergraduate and graduate degrees from top schools, Troubled spoke to me.
In a sense, I’m perhaps the ideal demographic for the book. I said as much to Rob over lunch — journalists and well-educated individuals should be the ones reading this book.
I remember some of my professors would tell us that we were the future leaders of the world while also reminding us that, framed in a certain way, we are being oppressed — by politicians, by capitalism, by corporations, by history, etc.
To that point, it isn’t uncommon for me to hear other journalists or intellectuals speak from positions of authority — sometimes with condescension — while also practicing the verbal gymnastics to adopt, paradoxically, a position of victimhood. Rob makes similar observations in his writing.
Ultimately, I found his story painful and the lessons important.
I finished the book in 48 hours, and highly recommend it — especially if you are a college graduate. I remind myself often that a tenet of wisdom is not only reading books that make you uncomfortable, but making a good-faith effort to learn from them.
Fair warning, early chapters put tears in my eyes. I’m still processing the themes, and already I’ve found myself trying to pin down the luxury beliefs I carry.
I also raced through this book. I grew up, mostly with a single parent. (I had grandparents also in our household but both died before I was a teen.) I’ve done fine. But I would have done better with a father. And I vividly remember seeing tv shows and movies about single parent households that had nothing to do with my reality. There was much celebration of single parenthood and little understanding of how difficult it was for all involved, and how much was simply not possible for most single parent families that didn’t have considerable resources.
I also remember a conversation with a group of students at an elite university – all of whom were well off and all of whom believed firmly that as ‘the leaders of tomorrow’ they deserved a free ride.
This book is an excellent one – for everyone. It will help everyone see how people not like them not only thinks and feels, but acts.
[…] relationship trends also don’t look promising. Americans are marrying later and people are moving cities more often — two patterns associated with self-reported feelings of […]
This is truly interesting. Luxury beliefs: something I don’t hear people acknowledging much.