I love being a father but not a parent.
Things I associate with my role as a father—teaching my kids things, taking them places to visit, helping them when they’re stuck with schoolwork, playing sports with them—create meaning.
But things I have to do, or I must do, in my role as a parent — contorting my schedule to accommodate their extracurriculars, balancing pick-ups and drop-offs, managing funds to pay for their education — just add to the daily grind.
One role is delightful. The other is, well, just exhausting.
While reading Nina Bandelj’s new book, Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Parenting, I realized that my sentiments aren’t particularly unique. They are broadly reflected in the plight of a modern parent, although rarely expressed openly.
The book goes beyond the sentiments and presents a sobering reality of modern parenting: raising kids, a quintessential human endeavor since time immemorial, has turned into something that feels like an all-consuming job. And parenting into laborious work.
Drawing on interviews with 120 parents, national datasets, and a review of more than 100 parenting advice books, Nina makes a compelling argument that parenting has become an “emotional economy,” and how the socioeconomic scaffolding around it makes stepping out very difficult.
To grasp the emotional economy, we have to see how our thinking about kids has changed. They aren’t just young human beings anymore, but also future human capital. So we invest considerable resources in them, beginning in preschool and all the way through college, so that they can become productive participants in the labor economy.
We aren’t making these choices on our own. There is a parenting industry that offers a wide array of products and services, often marketed as tools that give children an advantage in their future labor prospects.
When parents who want to do everything for their “emotionally priceless” children engage with an industry that emerged to sell them exactly that, the result is what Nina calls “overinvested parenting.”
It might all be worth it if this overinvestment led to better outcomes for children. But the evidence shows that most of it isn’t very consequential. Worse, this type of parenting favors private spending over public investment, worsens social inequality, and exhausts the parents doing the investing.
Last week, I sat down with Nina, who is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, to talk about the book. Our conversation covered how parenting became what it is now, how we might understand the economy around it, and what it might mean to raise a human being instead of human capital.
