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Nina Bandelj, "Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting" (Princeton UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Nina Bondell about her latest Princeton University Press book, the Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting. Nina is Chancellor's professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Overinvested examines how child rearing has become in a sense, a competitive sport where parents invest exhaustive resources, time and energy into raising children who can succeed in the modern economy. People have fewer children than they used to, yet they seem to spend more time and money caring for them. Are all the tutors, therapists and bank breaking extracurriculars really necessary for raising future well adjusted and productive members of society? Overinvested brings together a trove of interviews, data sets and reviews of parenting books to take on many of the prevailing ideas and mores of child rearing today. Nina, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
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A
Thank you so much for having me. Caleb and I look forward to our conversation.
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B
This is such a interesting book for so many reasons. In part because I feel like, you know, books on parenting are so popular. If you go to any bookstore, you're going to find a section books on parenting. And you know, they're all different theories and ideas about how to parent well and at least in my experience, there's a bit of a randomness to it. Certain kids with very over involved, over invested parents, sometimes they, they don't turn out as well as their, their peers who had parents that were never around. And obviously there's a randomness to it, but still it's, it's interesting to sort of identify these things. But undeniably there's been a trend towards more investment in parenting, more emotional investment, more monetary investment, more time investment. And one wonders whether or not this is really the best approach. But before talking about parenting, I was wondering if you just tell us a little about yourself and your background.
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A
Be happy to. And I may start with a confession. I love money. Well, not for the obvious reasons. I'm an economic sociologist who studies money you mentioned. I'm a professor in the sociology department at the University of California, Irvine. For a few decades I've been in that position and have written mostly about social influences on the economy. This is how I got to the project investigating the parenting economy.
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B
And the parenting economy is really fascinating in part because it feels in a way like it is just synonymous with so much of the economy. People's mortgages to a certain extent are often tied up with their children's education they live in certain areas because they want to access certain schools. They go into extreme debt to pay for college, all sorts of things. So obviously parenting highly connected with the economy. We spend so much on our children. It's really remarkable. And for this book, you did an enormous amount of research. You reviewed over 100 different parenting books. You looked at financial data sets and all sorts of other information. You interviewed hundreds of parents. Could you talk a little about your research for the book?
- [03:21]
A
I guess I'm going to make another confession. It took me 10 years to finish this project. That's why it was possible to do such a thorough data analysis across different kinds of data. You mentioned interviews, and I should note that with my graduate students, a research team, five of us interviewed 120 parents. In one of the interviews, two parents came. So readers, if they pick up the book, might notice. I talk about 119 interviews. And what's important here is that we try to reach a very broad range of families. A lot of research on parenting talks to those who are on soccer field sidelines or take their kid to kumon, and they might not necessarily be your everyday parent. So making sure that we covered those who range in social class backgrounds, that are of different racial backgrounds, political affiliations, religious affiliations. So it's a really. Not that it is representative because it's very hard to claim that with a qualitative study, but at least it covers a broad range. I would say now this is an experience of parents we could glean from interviews. But as an economic sociologist, I'm also also interested in how individual experience fits into the broader societal context. So to investigate that, we also needed to analyze broader longitudinal data sets. So there is some numbers. There are some numbers in the book as well, mostly to put into context what has changed. Very valuable data sets like the Survey of Consumer Finances panel, Study of Income Dynamics, those that tell us about household financial practices. Then the third part of the analysis were the parenting books. You started mentioning how much we have about parenting out there. My own bookshelf, so filled with parenting books, but because they were data for me, I was analyzing the content of what we've been publishing, what kind of advice we are giving to parents to understand, understand how society has changed and cultural change in particular, of what are those shoulds and musts that parents are hearing about. So I would say that across these different data sources, directly from parents, from quantitative data and financial analyses, as well as content analysis of text and cultural artifacts, I was trying to get a big picture. So perhaps I needed several years to finish this.
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B
Your book begins with the excellent line, once upon a time in America, children labored for the family. Today, however, most American parents labor for their children. What was parenting like in the past?
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A
I think it's really important that we remember that parenting has not always been so hard and exhausting at the same time. I do want to pause and acknowledge how much work parents put into their children and how in many ways, unsustainable that has become. I bet we're going to return to some of these questions, but I just want to acknowledge all this hard work. It's not only data to me. It's really lives and experiences of fellow parents. Well, I guess it's a podcast of confessions. I should also tell you I'm a mom myself and so have been experiencing this in my own life. But to return to this historical context, we need to remember. I would like to remember a brilliant book that Professor Viviana Zelizer, who is a sociologist at Princeton University, wrote and published in 1985. That book was called Pricing the Priceless Child, and it tracked how children's social value has changed from an economically useful child, a child that would contribute on the farm, certainly in the household, sometimes even in factories, and how we've transformed that economically useful child into an emotionally priceless child. So that was an analysis kind of in the early 20th century, tracking how we started to believe that children's lives are sacred, that they should not be in the workforce. And with child labor laws, we've institutionalized and helped the cultural shift toward pricelessness, emotional pricelessness, in particular, of children. I mention when this book was published, because things have changed since then. It's not only that kids are emotionally priceless, but my argument is that we're entered into a new phase, a new step that parents are making, and that is to think of our children as investment projects. From economically useful to emotionally priceless to treating kids as investments.
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B
Yeah, I feel like the economy today, it feels like the gap between the winners and losers is growing so much that if you don't start your kid off at age 4 or 5 reading or doing math or doing all, you know, getting into the advanced class classes and at age 6 or 7, that they are not going to make it in a sense that they are going to be behind their peers. So there's so much pressure to get kids to the place that parents feel need to be. You use this term emotional economy, and I'm wondering if you could explain it a little bit how it relates to parenting and just to basically jump off of what you're saying, how are children treated like little investment projects?
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A
The subtitle of the book actually is the Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting. So this idea of emotional economy appears very centrally in the book. And as a sociologist, I would say this is part of my conceptual tool to try to understand the social change. It's really to think about emotions and economy together. And oftentimes they're put on two opposing sides. We think that the intimate family life is very different from money. That could corrupt, that could bring something bad. But economic sociologists and some of us studying the social meaning of money have done lots of research to point how the intimate and the economic or the emotional and money go very much hand in hand. And oftentimes how we use money is really to affirm our quite precious and intimate relations. And this is what I found in researching parenting and what Parents do for Children. It was a really great empirical research site, if I'm putting my professor hat on for a second, to understand the social meaning of money and the concept of relational work. And that is how we match different relationships to different economic transactions as well as different forms of money. And that always in our interactions, no matter how abstract the economy seems, we are engaging in this relational work. So what parents did, and that's, I think, really important because you mentioned, Caleb, about the competition and inequality and winners and losers, that it's true that we live in a very unequal world and that those concerns of what will happen to one's children are quite primary. But you know what is even more fundamental? It's love for kids. So while we try to think about the future, we live in the present. And the decisions that we make with money are sometimes not as predetermined, deliberated, I should say, even not about the big decisions, because they involve this relationship. They involve what we want to do for our kids, but also how we want to be good parents. So I would say the emotional economy is also that. That certainly economic forces drive what people do, but the emotional reality is very present. And that we see how our society more broadly has become focused around emotions, not only in the home. And so when I describe the emotional economy of parenting, I say that more broadly, it's a society. We both become more economized and emotionalized. We've let economics and emotions run wild and sort of enter even into the sphere of the home.
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B
Many of these shifts that you look at this, this new approach to parenting, a lot of these ideas first began sort of fermenting, but also popularizing in the late 50s and the early 1960s. Could you talk a little about some of the thinking about parenting that shifted in this, this period of time, how parents were thinking a little bit differently about their children? Their children are no longer just help for the farm. So if you need more workers, have more children, now you have fewer children, and you think about them in a very different way. They're your babies.
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A
That's right. I will, however, also note that intellectual thinking around children has changed. And very curiously, economists began to be really interested in what we now call parental investment. So note the language of economics put into the home treating children as investment. Also due to the fact that we've sort of started to explain these processes from the scientific perspective as investment. And I would call out here work of economist Gary Becker, who won a Nobel Prize for Economics in 1992, and his work was primarily lauded as it relates to human capital. He also wrote a book called the Treatise of Family. And there he connected how, in fact, already parents are raising human capital. This is my paraphrasing that fits with the message of the book. But what parents would do and all the energy would be to augment the skills and talents, so called human capital, of little children so that in this economic logic, having more human capital, one could have more returns as an adult in the labor market. And so it became quite natural in some ways to start thinking about human capital using the concept human capital. While even economists themselves would say that not too long ago, thinking that humans are capital was not quite what one would want.
- [15:48]
B
Right. And it makes so much sense in the context of the race to get children into good colleges. The idea being that if you get your kid into an elite School, then McKinsey and Goldman Sachs are going to be knocking on their door, give them a salary for, you know, a million dollars. And obviously no one's making that immediately, but, you know, then, then the parents, when they're getting ready for retirement, they'll have a nice cushy retirement because their children will then pay for them. All of that time investment, the love, the money paying off for the parents in the long run through the vehicle of their children. I think that obviously people don't necessarily say that, but clearly there's a lot of thought going into that. Oh, of course, you don't want to have to keep on paying for your kids. Eventually you want your kids to be paying for you.
- [16:36]
A
It is so curious, though, Caleb. We talk to parents mostly about what they do for their children and so much that they told us they do, both financially, emotionally, but also how they think about this identity of being a good parent. So that's the investment threefold, right? With money, with emotions, but also with ourselves. But then we asked a question toward the end of the interview, something along the lines of, well, you do so much for your children. What do you expect your children to do for you? And mind you, our respondents were mostly selected because they had at least one child in the middle school. So this is perhaps relevant because they were dealing with lots of extracurricular activities and schedules, but they were not super close to college yet, nor were they changing diapers, probably in most of our cases. So for in that moment, parents. I don't know. Do you want to guess? I guess you read the book. I don't know if. Remember that section of what parents said they were expecting from kids?
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B
Yeah, I, you know, in general, I feel like with that age, and I'm also just thinking too, you know, when I was growing up that, you know, the expectation is that, you know, the kid is not only playing sports, but is a great student, is, you know, is essentially, you know, firing on all cylinders.
- [18:10]
A
In a way, school is work. Absolutely. So of how they thought of their children was that school is a big preoccupation. They were not expecting that children would even get part time jobs. I mean, we're not generalizing across everyone. But it was surprising to me to what extent, even hypothetically, when they thought about children turning 16, 17, 18. Why would that not be a relevant consideration? It's interesting that more broadly we've observed how this age limit in when we think children are ready to go outside in the world has increased. And there was an interesting article in the Atlantic about how the perhaps American babysitter is dead. I think that's part of the title just to be provocative, you know, don't tell America the babysitter's dead. Meaning that children now up to age 14 with parents might expect that they need care, they need supervision in the home. While not too long ago, maybe 12 year olds would go and help out and have the babysitting jobs. And even during the summer, during the summer you would think there's opportunities to have exposure to part time, small job, you know, to even want to earn some money, kids might be interested. Lots of parents said that they prefer to give them money. They were also enrolled in school during summer. They were enrolled in school related activities. And I would say all of that points to how central human capital, human capitalization, not that parents would use these terms, but focus on school, focus on this aspect of extracurricular activities and then tutoring, then preparation for college was part of parents lives. I will note here that it's not the case that financially all of the expenses related to children have increased. Mostly what's increased is how much parents devote to this category of childcare and education. That's changed ninefold over the course of, you know, 50 years. And this is really again evidence to point what we are focusing on when we think about children these days. We're focusing on their human capital, right?
- [20:55]
B
You know, one can, you know, buy their children a couple books for, you know, 50, $60 or get them a library card or you can go and spend hundreds of dollars a week on, on tutoring for, for some of the, you know, what you might consider, you know, highly invested or you know, to use the more pointed judgmental term over invested. What are, what are some of the inputs, some of the expenses that you see they, they think of as really important and, and primary for them.
- [21:25]
A
It's a great question and I mentioned this increase, the ninefold increase in childcare and education. And I would primarily also note that cost of child care and college in particular has gone up very noticeably over the course of the decades that I'm studying in, in this book. And while extracurriculars are really prominent, there are parents who find low cost alternatives. So I would say in that respect it's really important first to note it's not just one, it's become many different activities. But parents are not necessarily just curating children's resumes for college, which is a story we hear from the media and a story that certainly describes a segment of our population, but not everyone. So I think that's an important mythbuster in terms of how super expensive all extracurricular activities are. At the same time, we do have this industrial complex of youth sports and club soccer and fencing and horseback riding and sort of the, the extravagant kinds of activities that surely are super expensive. And media loves to write about those. But in terms of expenses, it's not extracurricular activities. It is tutoring, however. So in 2009, the survey of Consumer Expenditures placed a new category in its questionnaire to solely focus on tutoring. What would that tell us? It says something about what expenditures look like, how they're changing. Not only did the category of extracurricular activities capture enough, but they added a separate category of tutoring. But what's important there is that when we did analyses and comparison over time, but also comparison across family income, the top third in income were spending so much more than others. So really those expenses have grown, but a certain segment of the population is partaking in those activities and also paying much more for them. So I think this is really important in terms of finances. Let me just mention a couple more. One is debt for college. We know there's college debt crisis in our country. We worry about students finishing with so much debt and sort of being looking at the future, not not knowing how they could deal with this. We pay less attention in the media about how parents of these children have become overburdened with debt. And so after 2010, the balances that parents have in college debt for their children have surpassed the balances that children themselves have. That's because there's a cap, right? Federal student loans. But parents are doing various things. They take on plus loans, which are the parental loans for undergraduate students by federal government. We'll see how that evolves. It's a very changing landscape currently. But then also one could take second mortgage or a private loan. And I mention these things also because the financial industry has been supporting these efforts in investing into children by parents very much so this is the new reality. Not only you save, put it aside, but we have all these financial instruments that parents can take advantage of.
- [25:34]
B
It makes me wonder about the stress that it puts on parents, you know, how it impacts their happiness. You talk about there being a happiness gap between parents and their, you know, their friends who don't have children. Could you talk a little about how this debt can sort of hang on parents? How does that impact parents?
- [25:57]
A
Honestly, oftentimes it was very heartbreaking, the financial sacrifices that we heard about parents make. And at the same time, also for more privileged parents, the worry. So it just seems like it's super hard. Even when you do have resources, you feel like you should be doing even more or what is the best way to support children. So I think that's where this exhausting reality comes into. It's emotionally exhausting because we talked a lot about money, maybe because I said I love talking about it, but the emotional part of the emotional economy is equally important. And so while parents really wanted to support their children and went to financial sacrifices, oftentimes they would say they forego other expenses and put children first. They also really cared about the emotional well being being of their children. And this is also where stress came in. Thinking about that nearly constantly for some. There was one mom, I call her Janet in the book, who said, you know, there's a little part of me in my brain constantly in the back of, back of My head. I'm responsible for these kids and I love them. And I can't even articulate it. And it's with me all the time. And I think it's not a surprise that this came from a mom. But both financial and emotional burdens are very clear. I should say that, in fact, this is probably related to US Surgeon General in summer of 2024, issuing an advisory related to the well being, lack of well being, and parental burnout and called it a public health crisis.
- [28:02]
B
My mom likes to say, or has said to me in the past, that you're only as happy as your saddest child. And I think that that speaks a lot to the fact that parents, like you said, they carry the burden of their children with them. And it does have a really significant impact. And you talk about this, you know, this different forms of emotional labor that parents are expected to perform or maybe in the past, you know, under the, you know, the more of the tough love formula, they wouldn't really be carrying these same burdens. And you also talk in particular about how mothers really do carry this burden. They're really expected to be the ones to, to help their children when they're dealing with emotional struggles. Could you talk a little more about this emotional labor and in particular how it impacts mothers?
- [28:50]
A
I will be happy to say a few words, but first I wanted to highlight how different potentially this is from the past. So there's a question that Pew Research center that does lots of research in the polls of the American population on different topics. They asked a question of how would you compare how you were parented to how you are parenting? This came out in 2023. And so parents did not call out, well, I'm disciplining my children differently, or my values are different, or religion was more important. It's less. What they emphasized is that the relationship to the child that they want to cultivate is primary for them that they didn't think was so central. I mean, parents love them, sure, but, you know, to put so much energy. And this is the idea, right, of the emotional labor. We even call it labor because that's how intensive it is into the relationship to the child. I will link it to my comment about emotionalization of society. And one of the threads of the book and kind of the second part of this emotional economy idea is that think about it. If we are concerned about emotions more broadly, if emotions are in someone's compass for our lives, how we think of ourselves and others, it's not only that we want to support our children but we're more and more preoccupied with the children's well being emotionally. And we read about how this is not all great and the anxious generation and how we have a mental health crisis even for the young population. So of course this feeds into our preoccupation. But, but what especially moms are also going through is that they feel it themselves. They take it upon themselves to be a good mom in a very emotional way. And so these phrases we've seen circulated, mom guilt, you know, parent shaming, are all about the emotional state of parenthood, not only parenting and children related. So when you put all these things together, you can understand how you know when so many moms are working and we've been at this for a long time, why is it still so impossible, as I call it in one of my chapters, the impossible mom's impossible job, to feel like we're doing enough? The standards are so much higher and our sense of how we're meeting them is lower and lower. So that gap, I would say, has increased also because parenting with social media and influencer culture and just how we process information is within reach on our phones. Any messages, even positive ones, right, where your friends share what great things their children are doing, you feel like, oh, should I be doing more for mine? So it's constant pressure in some ways that is shaping our subjectivities and especially mom's lives.
- [32:31]
B
There's a whole industry of parenting, whether it's, you know, many of the books that you, that you study in this book, whether it's the tutoring services, the really expensive extracurricular trips, you know, globe trotting trips around the world, whether it's, you know, just paying for college, period. I think it's, it's, it's easy to think for parents that every additional dollar they have should be spent in some way, shape or form on rearing their children. Could you talk a little bit about some of the consequences, some of the harms that you think come about from this maybe false belief, this false sense that unless we're investing every additional dollar into our children, then we are somehow failing that them.
- [33:17]
A
It's really interesting. In our conversations with parents, we did ask them to imagine a scenario of putting money away for children or putting money away for their own retirement. And the majority of parents said it would be children. And some of them even talked us through kind of. Well, it doesn't seem like it should be so much, but I just can't help it. I guess my default will be to go with parenting and what I need for my children, even though it would be prudent to also think about myself. And so we do see that parents balances for retirement compared to non parents are much lower. And the idea that kind of fits in the future I won't need much. Some of the parents also talked about how they don't expect much for the from their children in the old age. So that was surprising in some ways, right? One would think if this is investment, what is the return? A lot of parents said I'm not expecting anything. Moreover, I don't want to be a burden to my children. And even in another way, if they would like me to help out with their own children, I'm there because I know how exhausting this can be. So grandparents, right, Helping out in this intensive parenting circle, in some ways, vicious circle you mentioned there are some costs. And let's think about the fact that parents are burnt out as the US Surgeon General called out, not just any individual one, but so widespread that I think in that study, 40, 40% of parents said that most days they're so stressed they cannot function. So that is a lot. And children do not deserve such exhausted parents. But then we look at children and I mentioned that we're concerned with their well being. And heartbreakingly, this well intentioned effort to be very focused, also known as helicopter parenting, snow plowing parenting, jackhammer parenting, tiger mom parenting, has these downsides. So psychological research, not necessarily my own, shows that so much intense focus is not good to build children's life skills and independence moving forward. But as a sociologist, I also point to some important downsides for us as a society. I mentioned before how only certain segments of our population with resources can engage in very intensive financial extracurricular activities. But I also said about something about debt on the other side. So just imagine how parenting today is not only about raising children, but because it's so financially focused. Those who have resources, in fact can sometimes even benefit from instruments that we have like 529 savings plans. They are tax advantaged financial instruments. So you know, wise parents could put money somewhere else and in fact use this parental economy for their benefit. On the other side we have debt and parents going into debt and undermining intergenerational transfer of wealth. So there is a very famous study about parenting from Annette Laraux, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who talked about this notion of concerted cultivation and that is that well to do parents pay a lot of attention in scheduling their kids time, putting them in extracurricular activities and also transferring their knowledge of how to behave in institutions so they can pass on this advantage. It's called cultural capital. To kind of reproduce inequality through passing down cultural capital. But now, because it's so financially intensive, it's not only about reproduction of inequality, it's about growing inequality. And parenting has become this instrument. In some ways, we'll be very happy. Very sociologically imaginative reader for Kirkus reviews of my book said it is an instrument of socioeconomic control. In some ways, I would say there's a political economy of parenting behind the individual experience of it.
- [38:24]
B
Right. And, and so, so much of it, so much of the goal of parenting seems to be to get children into and through college. This idea that, that, that college is the ticket to, to this life that parents want to see for their children whether or not it pays off for them. And, you know, I remember when I was applying to college and, and I grew up in California, and I was looking at the, the UC schools like the one that you teach at and being shocked by how expensive public school in California was and how difficult and challenging it was to get any kind of financial aid in California. And then talking to friends, parents who had gone to UC schools and hearing them tell stories about how they had essentially paid for their college through summer jobs that they had done that year and just how, how cheap it was. So I was wondering if you just talk a little bit about college admissions and just the astronomical expense, you know, just expensive price ticket, you know, the sense that even if, you know that it'll pay off in the end, you know, I don't know how much the most expensive schools are, but, you know, paying 300 to $400,000 over the course of four years, it's essentially, you know, it's the cost of a home in many places. If you could just talk a little about the. How much. This has just affected everything.
- [39:48]
A
Very much so. It's affected so much, and this is such an exorbitant cost. At the same time, parents take for granted, I think in some research, almost more parents than those who believe that Americans have landed on the moon say, my kids have to go to college. It's not true. It's about two thirds. So about 60% of parents really have plans for their individual children. And some yes, some no, but it's a big deal. It's like they have to do it. And sometimes from our interviews, wasn't really the case of, oh, they need to go to an Ivy League school. Again, a little bit of myth busting. And what we hear in the media is Only those schools are very important. What they would say often is just have to have the degree. In some ways, sociologists call this credentialism. Right. We live in a society where that credential is just opens doors and it's just impossible to think what you could do without it. And I think parents in many ways were resigned to this. It's going to be expensive. I mentioned we interviewed those whose children were in middle school and, and so interestingly we asked, how are you preparing? Are you putting money aside? Do you have a 529 account? Any other ways? And many parents did not quite have all these finances figured out. This wasn't something so intentional and in some ways calculated. So they perhaps could realize that there are really serious costs and that they would need to, you know, steer their children perhaps not into their dream schools, but to other alternatives. And there are many right out there. So what was so clear was that parents wanted the children to realize their potential. This is also a message from a book called Indebted by anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom, who talked to middle class families mostly who really wanted to support their children even though they were taking debts, debt, college debt, to realize their potential. And there's this love part, right? To the emotional economy. All, even the 5 29s, the commercials we were analyzing, you know, it's a kid in diapers and express your love. Right. That was the message. Open a 529 account because that means that you really love your child. So I think that is very important to understand. There's also the, the business side to the parenting economy, including colleges. Yeah, Getting brochures. You are a consumer, right. And colleges are competing to make it more and more appealing. Maybe for another discussion, how experiences of professors in, in classrooms have changed in some ways because we bear the burden of how much students do pay and how expensive it is. And on that note, I will just say that there was one mom who talked about an immigrant from El Salvador who really poignantly asked, she said it seems it's so expensive. Are there all just private options for college? In her understanding, as you mentioned from your example, Caleb, a public school should not be that expensive.
- [43:34]
B
Right. And, and so often too. And I think that this is something that, that professors are very aware of. It's so difficult to become a professor at HUN at, you know, the top thousand schools in, in America, that the reality is, is that the educational experience, if you really want to take advantage of it, that you're going to get at at most schools in the country is actually really good. And, you know, I often feel like when I'm talking with people or thinking about it, I remember actually I, when I was in high school, I randomly, for two years, I interned for the college counselors at my high school. So I had a lot. I actually learned a lot about this early on. And what I essentially learned is that you should probably, if money is an issue, you should just go to the school that's going to be most affordable, because the experience you're going to get at the top 10 school versus the top 200 school, it's probably going to be pretty similar, actually.
- [44:26]
A
Let me just sort of interject to say, yes, I agree. And a lot of this pressure on certain families of where kids should go is really an emotional burden and financial burden, and we should rethink how we think about education from that perspective.
- [44:45]
B
Yeah. And you go into the book, you talk a little bit about the, you know, for example, you talk about the Varsity Blues scandal, which was such a big deal, where basically, I mean, you can, you can probably share a little bit more about it because you go into it. But, you know, these celebrity, some celebrities were involved. That's probably why it made such a big splash. But, you know, faking extracurriculars has become a thing where, if you're going, if your kid doesn't necessarily have the best grades or the best test scores, you can help them get over the finish line. So could you tell us a little bit about the Varsity Blues scandal and why it was such a sensational scandal, why it connected so deeply with parents?
- [45:22]
A
I think it really is an example that many people could observe and be shocked with, but speaks to some of these underlying processes that I talk about in the book. And that is, you know, what do we need to do for our children? Isn't that kind of the ultimate, to commit a crime, to secure a spot in a college for your child? Yes, celebrities were involved. I think actress Felicity Huffman, who was actually charged. And very curiously to me, I read that interview with Felicity Huffman, and, you know, in retrospect, like, why would you do this? The question came from the journalist, and it wasn't about, well, I want to secure the best future for my child. At least in the, in those discussions, what Felicity Huffman came back to is, I felt I wouldn't be the best mom or I wasn't a good enough mom if I didn't do everything for my child. And so, of course, we have to understand there was a supply to these processes. There was a scheme that somebody was luring parents into and in some ways really took advantage not only of the money they had to pay for it, but stroking these anxieties of what does it mean to be a good parent. In some cases, children themselves said, I think I could do well on ACT sat. Perhaps those scores would be excellent and I could do this on my own. So not only did they of course pay for this and were punished because obviously they were breaking the law, but the relationship to their child might have been ruined because it exposes how much mistrust they had in the child's own ability. And I would say this goes back to my third part of this investment. Right. It's not always just about the child these days. It's so much about this idea of being, being a good parent and what we do because of that.
- [47:44]
B
The parent parents can be so much just a support system for their kids. And one wonders sometimes if the parents are too supportive, whether or not they're really setting their children up to succeed. What you say is many people see the goal of parenting is putting their children in a position to be responsible, to take care of themselves. And it does often and feel like some of the ways that, that we parent our kids or we parent, you know, we think about the best ways to set our kids up sometimes doesn't really correspond with letting them fail and figure things out on their own. We can't let our children fail. They have to always win. They have to always succeed. They can't get a B because if they do, they'll be sad and then the parents are sad. So it is this kind of this conundrum in a way where you don't want to help your kid too much because if you help them too much, then they're going to always expect to be helped.
- [48:35]
A
There is a book called Too Much of a Good Thing and it is about that approach to parenting. And there could be Too Much of a Good Thing starts with, you know, a toddler on the playground almost falling and a parent immediately jumping to help them stay up. But the toddler psychologist would say has to fall in that moment to learn that you could deal with that somewhat stressful situation. And you know, both literally in that case and metaphorically, you can pick yourself up. And so yes, I think you really touched a nerve here saying how much we want to protect and how well intentioned all this is. But is it really in the best interest for long term? It was so surprising when we asked parents, so what does parenting mean to you? What are your responsibilities that only 1 in 10 mentioned as the first thing, I would like to raise a future adult to be independent, to be well set up for adult life. It was about the emotional well being and to be there for kids and to support them and to care for them, which is wonderful and of course really important. Nobody said please, please don't read into this, that I'm saying that we shouldn't love our children. I think having it in mind that our children are members of society and future active participants in this world, we should think, what do we really owe our children? Is it this intense financial and emotional and kind of parenting, hamster wheel type of parenting that absolutely is not just a choice of a parent, but constrained by our structures in society, both expectations, but also our policies. So absolutely not easy to say, I'm just going to opt out. But I think if we all start asking this question of what is really in the best interest of our children, all our children, not just our own, and us as parents, we can start changing this unsustainable parenting reality.
- [50:58]
B
One of the trends that you look at that feels so significant is the individualization of parenting. This, this idea that the child will only be parented by their parents essentially. Maybe you know, a little bit of parenting here and there by the grandparents, a little bit by aunts and uncles. But you know, when I spoke with my, my grandmother years ago about what her childhood was like, it seemed very much like there was a community effort that, you know, you might get, your parent might drop you off at your neighbor, at their neighbor's house and, and you know, that parent might feel comfortable in a way in giving instruction to the child. And, and there is something that, that, that feels like it used to exist to a certain extent. You know, the parental commons. And you talk about the tragedy of the parenting commons. It was wonderful if you'd share this idea. Cause I just think it's such a brilliant, brilliant term. I love how you, how you borrow from that idea of the. I think it's Garrett Hardin, if I remember correctly.
- [51:59]
A
I do at the very end, third part of the book, discuss these consequences of processes that have contributed to this parenting economy and some food for thought and how we need to change. And I call out the tragedy of the parenting commons to say that if we think about children really as private property of parents, you know, we had this discourse of parental rights and we've privatized child rearing in many ways because of institutional structures of our society, we don't offer even quite basic parental leave, paid parental leave, one of only three Countries, in addition to Papua New guinea and Oman, I think, not to have that in place. And so when we've privatized in some ways we're like, you know, participants who are taking, partaking in a community and everyone's extracting just for their own. Now we will exhaust all of the resources of the community very soon if we do so. So that is the tragedy, right, that this privatization and really well intentioned effort of each individual parent to do the best for their kids is simply not good and sustainable for us as a society, nor for this bright future that we all want to envision or all envision and would like to secure for our own children. So that's kind of the society and individual paradox here that I try to capture. And it's very hard these days because we're so used to thinking individual choice, individual responsibility. And I think parents sometimes feel it can't be it takes a village any longer because that says so much about me not being a good parent potentially. And these conundrums are really hard and it's very hard to even see how we could find some very concrete solutions. But I do plead in some ways at the end of the book with the reader to reimagine how we think about children as a starting point, that when we step away from raising investment stock and thinking about children as a common responsibility, we may be able to change this unsustainable reality. And we also may focus on creating a society for all of us. And this goes beyond just parents. It's everyone here, right, thinking more about what is flourishing for the communities rather than for our own individual homes.
- [55:06]
B
So when we think about parenting, you know, we're in this, oftentimes in this extreme mode where we are helicopter parents, tiger parents. You know, you use so many great, great different terms that, that people have used over the years to describe a type of overinvested parenting. Of course, many of that, you know, comes in response, in reaction to, you know, free range parenting or latchkey parenting, which was, you know, the norm, I think, for, for, for many people. You know, when my dad describes his childhood, I think he would, you know, he would go two months without really seeing his parents. They didn't know what he was doing at all. And, you know, I think it's very different than the way a lot of people that I know are parenting today. I hear, I'll talk with people that I know that are parents. You know, they know where their kids are at all times because they literally have their location. So can you talk a Little bit about the in between, how people might think about, about the in between. Just as a sort of, you know, place to leave us off, you know, let's not over invest, let's not under invest. What's the, what's the golden mean, so to speak?
- [56:12]
A
I'm glad you mentioned this with my words of investment because there's no way I'm arguing that investment in children is not a good thing. It's finding that golden medium in some ways and also emphasizing that our societies, our states have a stake in here, in investing into children and for parents themselves. I think maybe the first step really is very, very simple to ask what do I do that's really in the best interest for the kid and what am I doing? Because I feel like I have to, everyone else is and because I just feel like I need to be a good parent. It's for me, in some ways, I have gone through some of that soul searching myself. There is an anecdote at the end of the book about me, you know, wanting to take a parenting vacation. And I wish I could advise that we do this or that we quit the parenting job. We can't really quit being parents, but we can change the conditions of that job and we really need to think about that. It does a lot of good to step back different times to read one less parenting manual to check out, you know, not the posts on every celebrity culture children, including Kim Kardashian, you know, hiding in the bathroom because even for her kids were too much. So it's everywhere here and that is maybe doing less and will be doing good in the home. But we also need to be doing more to advocate for this common responsibility that we have for our children. Taking care of us as a society and structures as a guard rails right not necessarily in position into individual homes and interfering with parental independent choice that we all want to have over our children. We don't want anyone to tell us what to do. But we do need those guarded rails. I mean, just think about burnt out parents, think about our children not doing all right. Think about these untenable divisions that we have in our society. I just, it's very hard to think how we can continue to follow this path. We need to change it. We need to reimagine children. And it really is an urgent reckoning for us to face that reality and move together to create a more sustainable one.
- [58:57]
B
I think we could talk about this topic for hours and hours. Obviously you spent 10 years studying it and I'm sure you feel that there's probably a million more threads that you could pull on. But I just wanted to thank you so much for such a wonderful discussion about your book. I really feel like your message is important and the research and the data that you provide to back up your arguments is really thorough too. I feel like so often when we talk about parenting, as you point out, it's a very emotional thing for a lot of people and not very, not often very, very data driven when we think about it. We just think if my, if I don't do X for my child, then they're going to, you know, end up homeless, on the streets. You know, we get very, we catastrophize very easily when we think about the consequences of not doing one or doing another thing for our child. So I think that your book is very useful for helping to ground parents, and hopefully future parents like myself, in the reality that we can do too much, and that is a problem unto itself. And also thinking about how we can approach these issues less in an individualized manner, but thinking about how a community can, can contribute to helping to raise all children, not just pitting essentially one kid against another in that ceaseless dash for spots at a selective university. There really is more to parenting than just that. So, Nina, thank you so much for being a guest on the New Books Network. It was really wonderful to get the chance to talk to you about your book.
- [60:34]
A
I so enjoyed it. Caleb, thank you so much for this opportunity. Sam.