"The findings stated that 90per cent of Manhattan children are spoiled while 67per cent of children living in Brooklyn are as well."

It's official: children in New York are the most spoiled in America. Must be, because it says so in the Daily Mail. Measured by how much parents spend on their kids.

Which is, as I'm sure I've said here before, an oddly persistent definition of "spoiled," and one that rings utterly false when I think back to how things went among my peers when I was a young child, or to that which I've witnessed since. A child who's spoiled is one who's indulged and raised to be entitled. This means that the kid gets what he wants. Which will sometimes mean expensive stuff (video game consoles? Nike sneakers? am I dating myself?), but is essentially about control. Permission to do this or that, to have ice cream for breakfast, to talk back, to use curse words, stay out late, etc.

Meanwhile, parents who spend spend spend on their kids are often spending on things the kid is indifferent to (private school, if that's been the default since age 5 and the kid doesn't know otherwise; international vacations because those are the vacations the parents take, not because the kid necessarily prefers this to going camping) or ones the kid actively protests (expensive children's clothes are, or were when I was a kid, super dorky, not because it was cool to wear inexpensive clothes, but because the expensive ones always had that my-parents-made-me-wear-this look to them; bringing a lunch made from organic kale is not the status symbol at 11 it is at 41; going to a different tutor for nearly every academic subject, as some of my wealthier classmates would, is not something children themselves are known to demand). Sometimes spending on a kid is discipline, sometimes it indicates a lack thereof.