The “Emotional Economy” of Parenting: A Conversation with Nina Bandelj

Being reviewed: Advertisement In the latest installment of our partnership with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Caitlin Zaloom, author of Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, talks with scholar and author Nina Bandelj about her new book Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting. Caitlin Zaloom (CZ): Was there a moment when you knew that you had to write this book? Nina Bandelj (NB): That moment was when I realized that parenting is a window to understand broader cultural transformations and shifts in society. As an economic sociologist I was used to following the money and I saw that parents were going into more and more debt to raise children. To me that was quite surprising at first. Then I started to see how following the money leads us to where love goes, and how financial demands and emotional demands of parenting are tightly connected. Parenting is no longer just intensive, as the sociologist Sharon Hays named it in the 1990s. Parenting has become “invested,” involving various financial instruments as well as various forms of emotional investment. It isn’t just children focused but in many ways about parents being invested into being good parents. I was trying to understand how we turned children into investment projects and parenthood into this central preoccupation of adults with children. CZ: You have been wrapped up in invested parenting yourself and it is exhausting. Has there ever been a moment where you broke? NB: Absolutely. I have a son and when he was about thirteen, I remember a day when I’d just had it. It was all too much, inside and outside the home. I screamed from the top of my lungs that I’m taking a parenting vacation. I told my son that I would not be doing anything: no cooking, no cleaning, no checking in on homework or extracurriculars. It turns out he made himself macaroni and cheese for dinner that night and offered me some, and he did his homework alright. The shock of the experience played a role, sure, but the fact is that he could do it. He could, in some ways, live as our roommate for a couple of days before the parenting burdens came crashing back down. Honestly, I couldn’t stay out of it for long, because a lot of it I realized was about me as a parent. It was about me worrying about all the things that I thought I needed to do for him. That was the weight, the guilt, that was so hard to bear. But in reality, to what extent do parents have such control over how their children turn out to be? Outside, that is, of the very basics of our socioeconomic background and a caring, loving relationship. Psychologists say that giving children more independence, more responsibility, more opportunities to make mistakes is a good idea. Interestingly, only about ten parents out of 120 my research team and I interviewed mentioned that one of their main roles as a parent was to raise children so they become well-functioning adults. Most parents focused on wanting to support their children emotionally, be there for them, help them be happy, realize their potential, and pursue their passions. That’s all important, sure, but we often do it in an overinvolved and overinvested manner because it’s so linked to what it means to be a good parent these days. I have to keep repeating to myself: My child is not an investment project, and parenting is not supposed to be exhausting labor. CZ: Was it a relief to write Overinvested? NB: Frankly, I avoided writing the book for a long time because it felt too close to home. But then I realized that so many other families were grappling with similar issues. We live in a parenting reality that is shaped by social forces. What I’ve been going through is not just a reflection of my personality. Sure, I’m obsessive, and I want things planned and organized. But this is not about a type A mom. It’s about how we brought the hustle from the outside world and from our workplaces into our home. We need to be productive at home. Our children are investment projects to manage, which leaves us exhausted, emotionally and financially. But parental burnout is not any one’s individual fault; it’s a social problem. In fact, the US Surgeon General in 2024 called it a public health crisis. These are systemic issues that raise sociological questions: How do norms and institutions need to change for this intimate experience of exhausted parenting to change? CZ: Throughout the book you connect two styles of thinking—an economic style and an emotional style. Can you explain how these structure experiences of parenting? NB: The economic style is very much linked to the proliferation of economic reasoning in our lives. Elizabeth Popp Berman wrote a book, Thinking Like an Economist, that demonstrates how economic reasoning, cost-benefit analysis, investment-return calculations, moved into US public policymaking since the 1960s. I show how those same ideas have shaped what we do in the home by economizing everyday family life. CZ: Can you say a little more how parenting has become economized? NB: Start by considering that we call parenting a job—nobody even blinks when we refer to it that way. The exhaustion that parents suffer, we call parental burnout, a notion developed to describe people’s experience in the workplace. In broader public discourse, this notion of parental investment has become taken for granted. That parents need to invest in their children, especially in their human capital to get returns on that investment. But it’s important to distinguish between economic theory that advances the idea of building children’s human capital, which is associated with that investment and return logic, and what parents themselves describe about their relationships with their children which we heard in the interviews. The human capital theory emphasizes that the capabilities and skills we possess as humans increase our productivity. It’s an individual-level perspective on how to increase productivity for economic growth. Following this perspective, parents can “capitalize” their children, so to speak, by starting earlier and earlier in their lives to augment children’s human capital, especially through all manner of education activities. This is economic theory. But parents themselves do not talk about human capital. They don’t use words like investment, return, or productivity. That language was not explicit the way it is in public discourse. Instead, parents were focused on the emotional way of looking at parenting, which is why the rising influence of the economic style has to be seen together with the emotional style, or how people increasingly use emotions as a compass of life and a source of moral authority. CZ: Are the economic style and emotional style opposed? Or are they both at work at the same time? NB: The economic and emotional style are not opposed, as we may commonly think, pitting emotions and economy on two opposite sides, imagining economic decision-making as objective, on the one hand, and the emotions defining the world of intimacy, uncontaminated by the economic, on the other hand. In actuality, the economic style and the emotional style work really well together. That’s what I’m trying to capture with the idea of the “emotional economy” of parenting. CZ: In one fascinating part of the book, you talk about paying for extracurriculars and expenses around college. How do you understand parents’ economic work for children even though they express valuing the children as love and commitment? NB: This is a paradox that a community of researchers in cultural economic sociology have been thinking about for a long time. Viviana Zelizer, a sociologist at Princeton, coined the notion of “relational work” to signal that economic transactions are governed not just by supply and demand or the rational calculation of costs and benefits, but by the social relationships involved. Acts of monetary payment, such as whom you decide to tip or who deserves a paycheck or what monies some people are entitled to, these are all related to the social relationships that people have with each other. You would tip a server in a restaurant, but a husband would not tip his wife at the end of the day. People are pretty good at figuring out that certain kinds of payments go better with certain kinds of social relationships. The effort that goes into differentiating payments, using payments to affirm relationships, and sometimes changing relationships to match with the monies—that’s relational work: the effort of matching economic transactions with social relationships and monetary payments. CZ: How do parents engage in relational work? NB: Parents use different kinds of monies to say something about their relationship with their children. Take for instance 529 accounts, which are federal tax-advantaged savings vehicles for a child’s college or education expenses, established in the late 1990s. There was a parent I call Irene in the book, a middle-class freelance journalist with two children, whose parents had set up 529 accounts for the grandchildren as a gift. They thought there was something really important they were doing for their future. But Irene felt burdened by having to contribute each month to these accounts because her financial situation wouldn’t allow it, and she was negotiating her relationship to her children and to the fact that the grandparents had gifted those accounts. Those 529s were certainly about more than just money. Actually, there was a great commercial I came across that conveys this message so well. The ad shows an image of a father with a tiny baby resting on his chest. And the message says: “Love has a number … it’s 529.” This signals poignantly that from the very moment a child is born, there is a moral pressure on parents to show love by putting these monies aside into 529s. When I analyzed quantitative datasets about household finances for the book, it became clear that the ability to contribute is pretty much limited to the top 10 percent or so on the income spectrum. The pressure, however, to show love with money, is on everyone. CZ: This is so important. Sociologists have long talked about parenting along class lines—that there’s a difference in how working-class, and middle- and upper-class adults parent. In Unequal Childhoods, Annette Lareau showed that middle-class parents engage in “concerted cultivation,” scheduling children’s time and enrolling them in activities, while encouraging them to discuss their concerns with adults collaboratively. Working-class parents preferred a “natural growth” approach that allowed much more spontaneity in children’s development. Each reproduced their parents’ relationship to work and institutions. In other words, class-based parenting reproduced inequality. You found something different. NB: Yes, I found that the pressure of invested parenting cuts across class lines. What Annette Lareau captured was mostly how concerted cultivation was about cultural capital, or valuable tastes and knowledge on how to behave in institutions, something theorized by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and this was passed down to children from well-to-do families, so they could keep ahead. But what I found was that invested parenting norms, including being hands-on and scheduling activities, were consistent across what would otherwise be considered class lines and also racial lines. That was surprising to me, given this well-established social class difference between concerted cultivation and natural growth parenting styles. In the research for Overinvested, I was really careful to design a study that covered a range of class backgrounds as well as different racial backgrounds, religious persuasions, and political views—although class background is the one I talk about most in the book. It was significant to find that there is a lot that parents have in common across these divides, and that these pressures to financially and emotionally invest into children, including enrolling them into activities, are now widespread. Of course, how we are able to meet these pressures is unequal. Today, when so much of parenting is about money and financially intensive activities, a demand that parents meet such a high standard can be heartbreaking. Parents from lower and lower-middle classes told us that if there’s anything more they wished they could do for their children, it was to have more resources so they could afford to put them in more activities, have them travel, and just do more for them financially. And many took on debt to meet expectations. But you see, when some families can invest into 529 accounts and others take on debt, inequality doesn’t just reproduce. It grows. Parenting in that sense becomes an engine of growing disparities between families. CZ: What do you think accounts for the difference between your finding and Lareau’s finding? Her first edition came out in 2003 and she was writing about the 1990s. Does the historical moment account for some of the difference? NB: Yes, in part. I mentioned how we have seen both the economic style and the emotional style intensify, producing what I call the modern emotional economy of parenting. But what’s also real is that the costs associated with education and childcare have grown substantially, and this is the child expenditure category where increases over time are the greatest. Imagine that parents devoted only about 2% of all spending per child to childcare and education in the 1960s. The rest went to housing the children, their food, clothing, transportation, healthcare, and miscellaneous other expenses. Fast forward to 2015, and the share for childcare and education expenditures grew eightfold to 16%, according to data by the US Department of Agriculture, which issues reports on the costs of raising a child. It’s childcare and education costs that really make childrearing so expensive these days, much less the other expense categories. What’s more, when we break this down by income groups and child age groups, one of the startling findings is how much families in the top third of income devote to childcare and education for their 15- to 17-year-old children. At that age level, this is mostly costs of higher education preparation, including tutoring, SAT or ACT prep, and other college prep services. If the top third in income spent 9% of all expenses for children on education of their late teens in 1995, this figure increased to 27% in 2015. For families in the lower third of income, we’re talking a change between 5% to 6% over this time frame for their 15- to 17-year-olds, negligible change by comparison. So yes, there has been a large historical shift in the intensity and the financial demands of parenting, but there has also been a spectacular growth of the parenting industry that offers all manner of services and capitalizes on parental anxieties, in particular extracurriculars and tutoring that upper-income families expend a lot of money on. CZ: Invested parenting carries within it the presumption that parents themselves should, in a moral sense, be shouldering the costs of raising children as an expression of their love. Where does the public support for parenting come in? NB: In the book I talk about the privatization of child-rearing as a cornerstone of invested parenting. It’s not only about policy, or lack of safety net support for parents in the US, but also about the way parents perceive their own individual responsibility. Needing to invest has become so tightly linked with being a good parent that the parents we talked to were quite silent about the idea that the state, for instance, might shoulder more of the growing costs. That silence was one of the surprising findings. That said, we do now have initiatives including universal childcare programs in several states, and I think parents welcome them. We will have to see how extensive those programs become, but we need to recognize that lowering financial costs has more than economic benefits for families. Programs like those ease the emotional burdens parents feel about what they must do for their children. CZ: Absolutely. In another fascinating moment in Overinvested you look back at Gary Becker’s idea that parents can cultivate human capital in their children. The economic aspect of his human capital theory has been most fully integrated into public policies—the 529 accounts we discussed are a great example of how parents can raise their children’s future incomes through investment in education. But you talk about another part of Becker’s thinking about human capital. NB: Yes. In Becker’s definition of human capital, it’s not only that investment yields monetary income. Becker sees gains in monetary but also in non-monetary returns—what he calls psychic income. Economists have not dwelled much on psychic income, partly because it’s difficult to measure. But the idea that parents would want to attend to their children’s emotional well-being or think about what brings emotional rewards to children, can be captured under this notion of psychic income. I thought it was important to highlight it, not only because it connects so well to the idea of emotional economy, but also because it is there in Becker’s definition, even if it has not received much attention. CZ: Where do you see yourself aligned with Gary Becker, and where do you see yourself departing? NB: I am an observer of how intellectual ideas travel and enter into everyday life, or how they come to be performed by families in ways that give those ideas a reality of their own. While parents don’t use the language of human capital, the fact that they place such emphasis on school as a goal and treat education as something their children absolutely must have—that they think of going to school as the child’s job—all of this tells me how thoroughly we have integrated this idea of the importance of human capital investment into people’s lives. Now, what we also need to consider is the ways education is practiced. Human capital focus has directed the ways education is measured and implemented in standardized testing and standardized curricula. It is present in how teachers are evaluated. This is all part of the economization of education, another way that this economic style is brought to light. When we say education, we need to pause. Are our children human capital or human beings? Focusing on schooling and upskilling is very specific and there are other possible goals of education. The dominance of this idea that school is for increasing individuals’ economic mobility by investing into human capital, is just one way of thinking about it. Another is that we are raising citizens, a new generation of members of society. CZ: It is difficult to disentangle the economic theory from our way of life. NB: Indeed. Also, finance is so central to everyone’s lives. We talked about 529s, and the data I analyzed also showed that since 2000 parents are increasingly putting aside other financial assets in their children’s names. And that they are taking on various kinds of debt, including mortgage, home equity loans, private education loans, federal PLUS loans, and more. In the era of finance, parents use a multiplicity of monies. This said, parental “investment” is not only financial. As mentioned, parents are also very invested in their children’s emotional well-being and very invested into the identity of being parents. CZ: That seems to connect to a distinction between spending, which sounds like an immediate transaction—you have money, you exchange it for something in the moment—and investment, which implies a longer timeframe and a more ambiguous payoff. NB: Exactly—a longer-term understanding of what parents need to do for children today, which has literally gotten extended. When do you stop being responsible for your children? That window has widened considerably over the past decades. In that way, invested parenting is also implicated with the delayed transition to adulthood. One parent put it memorably: It used to be that when you got your kids to college, you could breathe a sigh of relief. Not so anymore.