Rich Upper East Side mom Tracey Jackson, the screenwriter of “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” blamed herself for raising a teenage monster who charged $1,000 a month on food and discarded $12,000 of designer clothes on her bedroom floor. So Jackson took her daughter, Taylor Templeton, on a three-week trip to the slums of India and filmed a documentary called “Lucky Ducks” on how she tried to set her straight. Here, she tells their story.
Everything changed for me the day I found thou sands of dollars worth of clothing on my 15-year-old daughter’s bedroom floor.
I don’t have a problem buying my children nice things, but when you walk in and find every single item strewn about, you lose your mind. I went around her room with a calculator, adding up how much every piece of clothing cost. The total came to $12,018.
“That’s as much as some people make in a year,” I told Taylor. And it was my fault for buying them for her.
I live on the Upper East Side with my husband and two daughters, Taylor, now 18, and Lucy, 10. It has been a constant struggle to raise them in an environment where everyone around them has unlimited use of their parents’ credit cards and seemingly no rules. Of course, I’m also the one who wrote the screenplay for “Confessions of a Shopaholic.”
The hazards of raising a Manhattan teen start with money. There are privileged, and often unhappy, kids in every major city where there is a concentration of wealth, but that takes on monstrous proportions here in New York.
I first knew there was going to be trouble ahead at Taylor’s 13th birthday party.
I gave her a party at the Soho House. Automatically, I should be shot for that. But because I’m in the film business, I had access to an advance copy of “13 Going on 30” starring Jennifer Garner, so I organized a private screening of the movie for Taylor and her friends.
These kids were at the Soho House, at a private screening, and they were behaving like monsters.
The boys didn’t like the gifts — I got them hats with the “Matrix” logo on them from Sony. They were throwing shoes at the screen. So I shut off the film.
“You are the most spoiled, unappreciative, self-involved group of people I’ve ever encountered in my life,” I told them. “You’re all ungrateful, and indulged within an inch of your lives, and it makes me sick. If I hear another peep out of anyone, I will send you all home.”
They were quiet after that. They were terrified, because no one ever spoke to them like that. I had to pay an extra $200 at the end of the night because they did so much damage to the screening room.
So many of her friends have so much money, and the kids have no restrictions on what they can spend.
We have an account at the diner, Three Guys, on Madison Avenue, around the corner from where we lived, but Taylor wasn’t allowed to charge anything. Still, she would constantly do it — at the end of the month, I would open a bill for $1,000, from Taylor buying her friends breakfast and lunch. I told everyone who worked there that she wasn’t allowed to charge anything, but she’d find the one guy who didn’t know the rule and convince him. And the next month, there would be a repeat performance.
Or I’d find a $500 bill from iTunes because she would program my credit card into her iTunes account. She found a way to break her phone so she could get a new one. One month she sent 7,000 texts.
One day I was in Barneys looking at Dolce & Gabbana dresses for a big party I had coming up, and one of her teenage friends was there, just buying dresses, like she was Jerry Hall or something.
It’s hard, because when they see all their friends doing it, the entitle-itis comes in, and they think, “Why not me?”
But it’s no one’s fault but mine. We parents allow it.
In New York, you start placing pressure on a kid at nursery-school age. Manhattan parents are deeply competitive to get their kids into the right one, because it’s been embedded into their brains that that leads to the right prep school, the right college, the right job on Wall Street, the right connections. Their trajectory is planned from the time they’re 6 weeks old.
Everyone walks around telling everybody, “My kid goes to Episcopal. My kid goes to Brick Church.” And I think it makes kids a nervous wreck.
There are 16 private schools in a 1.5-mile radius in our Upper East Side neighborhood. Taylor went to the Hewitt School, an all-girls private school where tuition is $35,000 a year. It began as Miss Hewitt’s Classes in 1920, and has educated the daughters of the Astors, Vanderbilts and Pulitzers.
Out of all of her friends, she had the earliest curfew — midnight. By the time she was a senior she could come home at two, but her friends were allowed to go out ’til all hours of the night.
I can’t tell you how many 16- or 17-year-old boys go down to clubs, buy $3,000 tables with $1,000 bottles of booze, and then, of course, because they’ve spent money, the clubs let their friends come in. So then you have 16-year-old girls at clubs. When I was growing up, kids went to Studio 54 at an early age, but we somehow got in with the grown-ups.
But still, there is no question that I am stricter than her friends’ parents. A lot of them just didn’t care — their kids could go out, come home when they wanted, spend what they wanted.
Not long after I found her clothes on the floor, I looked at Taylor and thought, “I can’t live like this, and she can’t live like this, and we as a family can’t live like this.”
She was 15, and all of her friends were scattering to St. Barth’s and the Bahamas for Spring Break. At that time of year, my husband and I would usually take the whole family away on a trip, but I decided that, for three weeks, Taylor was going to the slum schools of India, teaching English, living in slum-like conditions herself.
We were at home when I handed Taylor a packet of pamphlets about the teaching program in Mumbai. “You’re going to have to make lesson plans, learn all the kids’ names and buy art supplies before you leave,” I told her.
At first Taylor seemed surprised, but that quickly turned to frustration. “You stuck me here in private school and we live on Madison Avenue,” she said indignantly. “What do you expect me to be?” she said. And she was right. But I wanted to undo some of that.
I’ve spent a lot of time in India because I do films there. (I wrote the screenplay for “The Guru.”) For many years I’ve supported a school in Mumbai called One International, which educates the poorest kids. The slums of Mumbai are pretty much as bad as it gets.
I decided to make a documentary out of it. I wanted to see if this experiment was going to wake her up and alert her to a different way of being in the world — more empathetic, less angry.
On the way to India, Taylor was mostly quiet. Later she told me she’d been in shock, and she didn’t really believe it was real until we got off the plane.
When we landed, it finally sank in. I took her to the house she would share with four other women, all in their 20s, who taught at the school in exchange for room and board — and she broke down in tears. I hugged her and said, “I know you’re scared, but you’re going to look back on this when you’re an old lady, or maybe even in your 20s, and you’re going to say, ‘I did this really crazy, amazing thing when I was only 15 — I went to India and I lived with people I didn’t know, and I taught in the slums, and I grew up more in those three weeks than I did in my whole life.’ ”
The first night, sitting in my nearby hotel, I felt like I wanted to run over, pick her up, and get her an iced coffee. I didn’t want to interfere with her experience, but I had trouble minding my own business.
At Taylor’s school, lunch was bowls of gruel, scooped out by hand. Back at her compound, the toilet was a hole in the floor and the shower consisted of buckets of water in the same room. I tagged along with her on a day trip to another city, where a new school had just opened. Taylor was subsisting on coffee and gum and could barely get through her first class teaching the kids English.
“I can’t sleep at all. I can’t shower. I feel stinky,” she complained to me.
“These kids have nothing,” I replied. “So don’t think about yourself — think about how you can make their lives better.”
And yet, within a few days, Taylor really embraced teaching her classes and fell in love with the kids aged 6 to 13. For one, she noticed they were different from her friends back home — they never seemed to fight and even though they didn’t have designer clothes or cellphones, they were appreciative just because they were getting an education. I noticed that Taylor gradually grew comfortable with the children — she laughed and hugged them and seemed to lose any trace of teenage self-consciousness. For the first time in her teenage years, I saw my daughter looking completely natural and happy.
On the way back to New York, I felt she had seen what I wanted her to see.
Back home, Taylor slipped back into her bad ways — pot-smoking, clubbing, undereating — and I discovered that I couldn’t rewire her in just three weeks.
One night, Taylor and I were lying in bed chatting and I told her I was disappointed that she hadn’t changed.
“I did learn a lot of lessons. They’re something I keep in mind every day,” she replied. “But it’s not like you can expect magical change.”
Over the next couple of years, instead of wanting to be cool, she wanted to be creative.
“I want to hang out with people who have something to offer,” she said. “My new crowd of friends would never start talking bad about someone the minute they left the room like my old friends would.”
I had never felt so proud.
Now Taylor’s a college freshman in film school. The documentary about our journey, called “Lucky Ducks,” is probably her biggest accomplishment so far. I let her be a part of the process, helping me pick the music and look over hours of footage in the editing room.
In making the film, my daughter and I got the chance to see ourselves — Taylor saw herself acting like a spoiled brat, and that’s ultimately what helped her change in the long run. As she says at the end of the film, “I still have the same things I had before, but now I genuinely appreciate them, and I’ve become my own person. Before, I got all those things, but I never felt I deserved them.”
Growing up rich and privileged is a gift — and a burden. I hope other wealthy parents like me can raise children to understand they’re lucky, not entitled. Kids need to earn their place in the world.
— as told to Sheila McClear