Liz Moyer

Liz Moyer, Forbes Staff

10/24/2007 @ 11:59AM

How The Rich Raise Their Kids

You know the dream: Get the kids into the right preschool so they can get into the right grade school, which will guarantee them a spot in the right high school, so they can shoot for a spot in the Ivy League.

Educational achievement will then open doors for the kids and lead to their prosperity and happiness.

Such is the aspiration of the middle class. Say it all pays off. Once those dreams are achieved and enormous wealth results, educational achievement and other normal middle-class parental aspirations for their children, like family and marriage, fall by the wayside.

In Pictures: How The Rich Raise Their Kids

So says a survey of the mega rich by Connecticut firm Prince & Associates ( Barely more than half of those surveyed who have net worths over $10 million said educational achievement was an expectation they had for their kids, and just 33% said they expected their kids to one day get married. Forty-six percent said they expected grandchildren.

Compare that to the “working affluent” (those with between $1 million and $10 million net worth), for which 84% cited educational achievement for their kids, 74% cited marriage, and 71% cited grandchildren as expectations.

Russ Alan Prince, who runs the firm that tracks the habits of the rich, says the super rich simply don’t view education as the be-all-end-all, mostly because their wealth and connections can already open doors for their kids that the less wealthy have to struggle to pry open.

“Being erudite doesn’t necessarily make you smarter or richer,” says Prince. “Also, school brand means less. It doesn’t matter.”

Happiness is also not a universally agreed upon expectation for the mega rich’s kids, the way one would imagine it to be. Just 85% of those with $10 million or more cited it, compared to 99% of those with less money.

It seems kids with lots of money can be challenging as far as parenting is concerned. “The parents want the kids to grow up and have a lifestyle like theirs, but sometimes the kids aren’t as motivated,” Prince says, conjuring the stereotype of the preppy ne’er-do-well. “When kids have access to a lot of money, parents tend to like them less.”

Nearly two-thirds of the 296 affluent parents who responded to Prince’s survey send their kids to public school, and Prince says many of those families moved into top public school districts to do so. The survey is nationwide, but respondents tend to be clustered on the coasts and in major urban centers, where taxpayer- financed public schools in wealthy communities can compete with the top private schools.

Even the mega rich (those with more than $10 million) send more kids to public school than private, though the numbers are far more even, 55% vs. 44%. There are 49 million public school students in the United States vs. 5 million private school kids.

Naturally, the rich tend to supplement these educations with expensive enrichment activities, like music, riding and dance lessons. Also, the super rich take on average one more vacation a year than lesser mortals, giving kids an additional opportunity to experience new cultures.

Values are more frequently left up to others to instill, according to the Prince & Associates data. While virtually 100% of parents with less than $10 million of assets said teaching values was their job, just 88% of those with more than $10 million responded in kind.

Instead, the super rich leave a good chunk of the values teaching up to family and friends, school, and yes, hired consultants.

In Pictures: How The Rich Raise Their Kids

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