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Comment by sleepyandlazy | Hacker News Reader

With the increasing in income inequality, I don’t think a story like this will have a happy ending in the future. Those kids who will access to financial support, such as a paid for college education and time to focus on studies rather than chores will have an edge over those who don’t. Sure, many of those kids will be spoiled and not learn the value of hard work and flame out, but enough of them will be able to utilize that advantage that people in this situation will not be able to compete for the limited number of middle class jobs available.

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The reality is these parents gave their kids exactly what the poorer kids never get; access to knowledge and to people who've achieved.

College tuition can be covered while you're in school if you're taught how (and if you're not carrying your parents burdens). Entire careers open up for those who know what to study and optimize for (how many kids want to grow up to be in finance or a consultant, unless it's what their parents do?).

Sure, it probably helps to have well developed discipline and a healthy approach to various aspects of life (if that's even what these kids ended up with), but the real value comes from the generational knowledge of how to work through the system to get to the top. After you do it once, it's 10x easier to guide someone else through it, even without giving them explicit help in the form of money or influence.

I'd think that kids crushed by responsibility and strict discipline from an early age would be more likely than normal kids to ultimately flame out or have a breakdown. Everyone has to find their own meaning in life and make peace with it. Kids that are railed along by uber-strict parents can have a really hard time when that constant driving pressure is removed.

And I agree that it's probably not very useful to have to do loads of chores as a kid and do menial labor (the only kind available as a teenager) to get through college. The kids who had the parental support to have time to read books and tinker with computers and electronics and such, and focus on school, will ultimately be better off I think. If this guy is so well-off that he's having 12 kids and buying cars for them and flying them all over the world, I'm sure he can afford to have a cleaning service come in once a week. His "tough love" approach just makes him seem like kind of an asshole. I'd be very curious to hear what his kids think about it. I've known a couple of people who had a similar upbringing and there's a lot of left-over resentment there.

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