Jeni O’Dowd: Brooklyn Beckham and rich kids like him aren’t ‘brave’, they’re entitled

There is nothing new about rich people behaving badly. What is new is how quickly their bad behaviour is reframed as bravery, healing or self-actualisation.

The biggest example of this is Harry and Meghan. “We want privacy,” they say, while simultaneously signing TV deals, documentaries and writing a tell-all book about the pain of being born into one of the world’s most famous families.

Then there are the Beckhams, a different kind of royalty. One of the world’s greatest footballers is married to a pop star from one of the biggest girl bands on the planet.

Add a wife with impeccable fashion sense, a famously controlled public persona and a husband who somehow remains absurdly handsome, and you get public obsession. Rabid obsession.

Their eldest son, Brooklyn Beckham, is someone who has never worried about rent, never stood at a supermarket checkout calculating what has to go back and never faced the panic of a final notice bill arriving before payday.

He married a billionaire’s daughter who has lived a similarly gilded life, albeit without the same parental mythology. And yet he chooses to publicly distance himself from the very people who gave him everything, particularly his mother, in a way that feels less rebellious than entitled.

The public fixation on this particular rich-person drama has been extraordinary. It is still dominating headlines more than a week after Brooklyn’s Instagram post.

Even the Wall Street Journal, not exactly a gossip sheet, dissected the family rupture with the seriousness usually reserved for markets or geopolitics.

Forget Donald Trump floating the idea of taking over Greenland, the Coalition imploding in real time or the fact our Prime Minister cannot seem to put a foot right. None of it has cut through quite like an extremely wealthy young man icing out his famous parents.

But is this really about Brooklyn Beckham at all? Or is he simply a very public example of a broader cultural shift, one where family loyalty increasingly comes second to personal validation?

We have seen versions of this play out across millennial culture for a while now. Silicon Valley founders who cut off their families after early success. Influencers who announce “no contact” with parents in social media posts. Celebrities who love to talk about estrangement, often without acknowledging the safety net beneath them, that most of us do not have.

The Adelaide Now website last week reported that New York-based therapist and family repair coach Marie Morin says family estrangement is on the rise, describing it as a painful, growing trend in which more adult children are choosing to go no contact with their parents.

“It happens more often than people like to admit,” she says, pointing to a generational shift in emotional expectations.

“Millennials and gen Z have a new language around mental health, boundaries, trauma and toxic dynamics.

“Many were told that if someone disrespects you, even if they are related to you, you have the right to protect yourself.”

Morin says emotional wellbeing now outranks family loyalty, with adult children more likely to ask whether a relationship makes them feel heard, safe and valued. When it does not, silence can seem easier than struggle.

There are no figures in Australia on how many children seek legal emancipation from their parents, largely because formal emancipation is rare and handled quietly by the courts.

But if numbers did exist, they would almost certainly be low. Not because family relationships here are flawless, but because economic reality in Australia has a way of cutting through ideology.

With rents at record highs, home ownership increasingly out of reach and wages struggling to keep pace with the cost of living, most young Aussies are not severing ties with their parents.

Instead, they are moving back into the family home, staying longer and relying on their parents for a holiday or a nice meal out.

Which makes the very public theatrics of ultra-privileged family estrangement feel less generational and more like something that only works when you can afford to walk away.

In the real world, family is not just an emotional bond but also an economic one.

And no amount of therapeutic language changes the fact that independence is far easier to preach when someone else has already paid the bills.