Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting
In her new book, Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting (Princeton University Press), UC Irvine economic sociologist Nina Bandelj examines
a fundamental shift in child-rearing that has seen children transformed into investment
projects and parenting into exhausting work. Drawing on interviews, nationally representative
financial datasets, and an analysis of more than 100 parenting books published since
the early 20th century, she traces the rise of the emotional economy of modern parenting
and its consequences for the well-being of children, parents, and society. The work
- available now for pre-order - received a Publishers Weekly starred review in October ahead of its January 20 release. Below, Bandelj dives into
the forces driving this shift and why it may be time to rethink it.
Q: Your book explores why modern parenting feels so intense, consuming, and emotionally high-stakes. What initially motivated you to investigate this “emotional economy” of parenting, and what core question were you hoping to answer?
Parents today do so much for their children, but we are exhausted! When did raising children become such an all-consuming, never-ending, incredibly expensive, and emotionally absorbing effort? It’s a real puzzle because for much of U.S. history, children contributed to the economic welfare of families, working on farms, in factories, or doing substantial household labor. Only at the turn of the 20th century, children’s social value shifted from “economically useful” to “emotionally priceless,” as sociologist Viviana Zelizer documented in her book Pricing the Priceless Child. But today’s parents are expected to take an additional step: to invest in our priceless children, especially in their education, as if children are assets that will appreciate and yield returns in adulthood.
I wanted to understand how we arrived at a world where we turned children into investment projects and parenting into exhausting work. What does this emotional economy of parenting mean for families’ everyday lives? And what are the consequences of good-hearted parents doing everything for their own children? Is it a good idea? Or does it counter-intuitively, even tragically, hurt not only parents and children but also the common good?
Q: You draw on interviews, financial data, and decades of parenting literature. What did this multi-method approach reveal about how parents spend, save, and emotionally invest in their children - and were there any findings that surprised you?
Growing up in Eastern Europe, I witnessed firsthand the monumental transformations after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which has inspired me ever since to understand the connection between people’s emotions, beliefs and struggles to large-scale social and economic transformation. But how to research these issues rigorously as an economic sociologist is not straightforward. One way to tame the challenge is to combine various data sources and that’s how I approached research for Overinvested. I analyzed quantitative datasets that encompass large, nationally representative samples of American households over the past few decades. I also did content analysis of a sample of more than one hundred parenting books since the beginning of the 20th century and a review of intellectual history of economic and child development ideas and theories. With my graduate student research team, we also conducted in-depth interviews with 120 parents across socio-economic, racial, religious and political backgrounds. Together, these multiple sources of data allow me to examine the broad—macro—political, economic and cultural trends in society alongside parents’ individual—micro—perceptions, emotions, and decisions.
There were a few things that surprised me in this research but let me call out a central paradox. On the one hand, parents are so invested into their children, toiling and investing all our love, loads of money and our whole selves into parenting. Many get into debt for their children, or they are burnt out from exhaustion and their mental health suffers. But still, when they talk about parenting most parents don’t even mention that this burden might not be theirs alone to bear. That children may not be just a stock of parental investment but a common responsibility. Only one from 120 interviewees explicitly mentioned wanting the state to play a larger role in supporting parents. I guess what struck me is not what parents said but more what they didn’t say.
Q: You argue that the economization and emotionalization of parenting can actually harm families. Why is it important to recognize this shift, how did we get here, and what problem do you see your work helping to solve or bring to light?
Here’s a confession: I never set out to write about parenting. As an economic sociologist, I am interested in how social forces influence economic processes. Parenting came my way given that it is such a big and growing part of the economy. And to understand why that is, I sought to identify more general changes in society that fuel this emotional economy of parenting. I found two.
The first is what I call the rising dominance of the Economic Style, or the spread of economic reasoning and influence of financial structures into areas of social life. What I show is that parenting hasn’t escaped these economization and financialization trends. Through the influence of social scientists and policy experts, childhood has come to be understood as a development project, where every learning activity, enrichment opportunity or school choice is understood as a way for parents to optimize investment in children. Notice the words “development”, “optimization”, “investment”, all words generally not associated with family and child-rearing.
The second equally powerful social change is the rise of the Emotional Style, or a therapeutic culture that gives emotions a moral authority and centers our attention to how we feel about ourselves and others, rather than how we think about the world. An explosion of parenting advice — from experts but also from coaches, popular psychology and social media— constantly disciplines a parent with all the must-dos and shoulds. And it also elevates concerns about children’s emotional well-being, and a focus on how we feel as parents. This means that today’s exhausting parenting reality is as much about parent-ing (what you do for your child) as it is about parent-hood (how you feel as a parent).
But no matter how personal any parenting decision seems—do I swaddle my baby, what to do when my toddler throws a tantrum, should my preschooler start Kumon, do we move so the child can attend a better school, do I take out a second mortgage to pay for the kid’s college— stepping back to identify these broader social shifts allows us to see parents’ struggles not as individual shortcomings but as reflections of larger cultural forces. It helps make the familiar strange and urges us to imagine how it could be otherwise.
Q: If parenting has become privatized and overburdened onto individuals, what does this mean for children, families, and society at large? How might your research push us to rethink our cultural or policy approaches to child-rearing?
In the book, I describe this as the tragedy of the parenting commons. When every parent is left to largely their own devices to secure the best possible future for their own child—emotionally, financially, and through relentless effort—the social fabric is tattered. Parents overmanage children in ways that don’t actually help them thrive. Parents themselves become exhausted to the point of burnout. And society grows more economically divided as disparities in parental investment widen, without any changes in family policy.
For instance, parents with more resources can leverage financial tools, such as 529 education savings plans, tax-advantaged mortgages, and financial assets they put aside under children’s names, to amplify advantages. Many others forgo saving for their own retirement or go into debt just trying to keep up. The result is deepening inequality among families with children, a segment of the population that demographers identify as one where inequality is growing the fastest. A reader of Overinvested for Kirkus Reviews calls out this “troubled state of contemporary American parenting” writing that the book reveals how “the privatization of child-rearing has transformed parenting into a toxic instrument of 21st-century socioeconomic control.”
Q: After reading Overinvested, what changes - whether personal, cultural, or structural - do you hope readers will consider? What do you see as the next steps in this conversation or future research?
A: My hope is that readers come away seeing how resisting the pressure to overinvest in their own children can actually help everyone because it helps change, no matter how slowly, this unsustainable modern parenting standard. I know that change is not easy. The emotional economy of parenting is deeply rooted in core social institutions—family, education, economy—and in the sacred belief that children are solely their parents’ responsibility. But given all the negative repercussions, it is high time to rethink this modern parenting standard. As another reviewer of the book wrote, society must “radically reimagine its approach.” I couldn’t agree more.
Real change will need to be radical, from individual practices to structural reforms given the resistant-to-change American family unfriendly policy. But before policies can change, our thinking must change. We need to reimagine children not as investment projects but as a shared societal responsibility. If the book helps open that conversation—about how to channel our bottomless love and our significant financial resources toward a future that supports all children—then the decade I spent on Overinvested is well worth my own investment.
Join us for a special book launch event on Jan. 22 at 1:00 p.m. via Zoom featuring Bandelj in conversation with Viviana Zelizer, Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, moderated by Frederick Wherry, vice dean for faculty development and inclusion in the Office of the Dean of Faculty and the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. Register online: https://uci.zoom.us/meeting/register/EfNIaQ0vRA-nRx_WTvwmoA#/registration