I recently attended an event to welcome new parents to a private school in Manhattan. The options presented to the wealthy parents were jaw-dropping: kayaking and skiing for field trips; yoga among dozens of electives; the school gives each kid a new iPad. Parents asked one question after another about the offerings, sounding more as though they were evaluating a luxury vacation than preparing themselves to support their kids to exert themselves in a challenging environment. It was when one student presenter began to enthuse about the availability of the teachers – "You can email them anytime, you can call them anytime, they will always meet with you and help you: they are always there for you!" – that I became really uneasy.

Was that, I wondered, what teachers should be for students?

This school is not at all unusual in Manhattan's elite private school environment. If anything, it is restrained. A trend in Manhattan's wealthy private schools, as in major cities across the United States, reproduces this set of delights and more, as each competes to offer affluent parents, who can afford the $40,000 annually that such schools cost, the most fabulous experience for the child. Part of this trend is the excision of any part of the school experience for kids that is, in any way, unpleasant, taxing, scary or boring. I believe that these kids are being put at serious risk by this trend to smooth away any of life's rough spots, once kids are within private school doors; and that US competitiveness and innovation even are being put at risk by it.

Educators complain that wealthy US parents are increasingly demanding in seeking a massively vibrant, pleasurable and supportive school experience for their kids – one that will get them into Harvard, certainly, but with no negative experiences along the way. Many educators in these schools complain that parents' – and, increasingly, students' – attitude to educators is that they are consuming a costly luxury product, and that the teachers work for them; rather than serving as authority figures to the kids, educators at such schools complain that wealthy US parents increasingly expect "service" and "deliverables" from teachers, so won't brook a poor grade or evaluation, or a difficult experience for their child. This attitude then carries over into colleges that serve wealthy populations. And it does not stop there: the consumerist ethos has trickled down, destructively, into the public school system, too.

"How many times has a kid said to me,'You work for me; I am your employer,'" sighed one such administrator to me, recently. This unbalancing of the power relationship in the parents' direction has forced private school principals and teachers to cater to parents by increasingly offering an obstacle-free school experience – since that is what parents demand.

This trend has accelerated as US public education has been cut to the bone – losing $258m in federal grant money in 2011-12 – and as the middle class has shrunk in the US, leaving a two-tier system. As public schools struggle to offer textbooks and supplies, the plenty and fabulousness of the private-school experience only intensifies, and these two groups of students increasingly inhabit totally different worlds. In one, there is challenge and difficulty; in the other, kids are expected to try for good grades, but even this, as in every other aspect of their experience, has been padded over with fun and "support". I was astounded once as I watched a kindergarten class get ready for a field trip, and the school insisted that it needed as many parent volunteers as there were five-year-olds ("Because every child needs a hand to hold").

Do they? Do they really?

I remembered field trips from my own public-school education in which kids were kept in line by being yelled at by teachers if they wandered away – something that never happens in private-school setting any more. I wondered, in consternation: won't bad things happen to those kids if they are raised to expect, metaphorically, that there will always be "a hand to hold" in every situation? Life doesn't work that way.

Many commentators have noted that overindulging wealthy kids is bad for their character; but few have noted the new goal of "no obstacles" in private education. It is not just that wealthy US kids have a range of costly extras to choose from in school; but these schools are being forced to weed out any experience the kids might perceive as negative. Bullying is wrong; but private schools are so attentive – I would say, overattentive – to kids' group dynamics, that administrators sweep in and underemployed, wealthy, stay-at-home parents often meet, to nip in the bud any social combativeness, perceived exclusion, or random aggression. The hierarchical, aggressive physical horseplay at recess, which some educators note is a normal part of boys' and young mens' development, is, in other schools, forbidden.

Another trend is for there to be no final grades: if you don't like the grade you got, in these $40k-plus schools, you resubmit a revised version of your essay for reconsideration. In life, though, how many times will your boss (or your spouse) let you have a no-foul "do-over" for bad judgement or lousy execution?

Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness. In my bad public education, we kids learned a lot from the few great teachers; but we learned, also, important life lessons from the irascible or irrational teachers' teaching; we learned from social conflicts in the schoolyard, from frustration with recalcitrant graders, from the race riots that erupted every fall, and even from the boredom of enforced assembly and other not-fun but serious expectations.

This push from wealthy parents probably derives from many sources. These parents work long hours, and the school is the biggest source of emotional feedback the kids get. Paid caregivers, too, are understandably reluctant to set boundaries that might risk them their jobs. Paradoxically, though, these parents' desire to buy a no-bad-things-happening-ever experience for their kids, will incapacitate them in the long run.

Children raised this way are often very nice; but they are notably passive and indecisive. Many parents in this demographic can attest to how hard it is to get such a child off the couch, or to initiate an activity that is not presented to him or her intact. Many college administrators describe the vacillation and need to text parents constantly, that such children, now young adults, display. I was personally shocked to see several hundred University of Arizona students, children of wealth, rampaging, noisy and drunken, through the corridors of a Mexican hotel at 2am. When I asked the fraternity and sorority leaders to take some kind of action, I was told – nicely and sincerely – by each student "leader" I contacted, "So sorry, there is nothing I can do; I am just one person." This passivity and powerlessness fit the pattern: if everything is handed to you, you won't develop the skills and muscles required to initiate, find inner resources, or experience mastery.

This no-bad-thing educational agenda is new: US elites used to expect hardships as well as educational excellence for their kids. The novels Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace attest to the fact that the American elite, until recently, understood that character-building, challenging experiences in high school were part of training "masters of the universe".

The trouble is that these parents are ill-equipping their kids for global competition. These cosseted US kids will graduate to compete not only with other hothouse-flower American children of wealth; they will be competing, rather, against a foreign student population in the US that has grown 32% in a decade, that contributes $20bn to the US economy and sends almost 750,000 students to US colleges every year. Then, these US kids will try to compete in a global economy with the same population: children of the emerging middle classes of China and India, South Korea, Pakistan and Malaysia and Brazil – young people intellectually toughened by educational years overseen by demanding teachers, a tradition of educational authority undiluted by consumerism, rigorous standards, and the hardships of economic stringency.

These kids are hungry, and smart, and understand adversity; and it is hard to imagine that such different products of different world can possibly compete in the same arena. With two such different educational experiences, the rest of the world is about to eat American kids' lunch.

Nothing could be more ironic: American "masters of the universe", out of familial love and the power to write checks to avoid any negative experience for their kids, are destining their children to subsidiary roles; and less privileged kids in the rest of the world, by having to experience and deal with hardship, come into the fray, now, far better equipped and more truly educated than the offspring of the 1%.