OVERINVESTED

A UC Irvine sociology professor examines how children have become the “investment projects” of parents trapped in a cycle of exhaustion and debt.

Parenting in America demands far more of mothers and fathers than simply serving as loving caretakers for their children. According to Bandelj, parenting now means investing “loads of money and our whole selves” into their offspring. Contemporary children are now treated like CEOs who “[dictate] the family’s schedule” and command most of its emotional and financial resources. Drawing from sociological, anthropological, and economic research as well as parenting books, interviews, and her own experience as a parent, Bandelj offers a study that examines what she calls the “three sacred commandments” for parents: invest in, finance, and labor on behalf of offspring. The author shows how the “post-fifties boom in parenting advice,” in tandem with the rise of neoliberal economic policies, has resulted in the privatization of parenting. The financial aspects of parenting that Bandelj discusses reveal the commodification of childcare and the explosion in debt parents have taken on to help their children through college, leaving mothers and fathers under ever-increasing economic pressures. And finally, the “all-in” parenting standard that the author explores shows how child-rearing—especially for mothers—relies on a system that normalizes mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion. Rigorous, accessible, and thought-provoking, Bandelj’s book illuminates the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which the privatization of child-rearing has transformed parenting into a toxic instrument of 21st-century socioeconomic control.

Necessary reading about the troubled state of contemporary American parenting.