Overinvested
The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jan 20, 2026
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- $33.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
What happens when children become investment projects and child-rearing becomes exhausting labor
Parents are exhausted. When did raising children become such all-consuming, never-ending, incredibly expensive, and emotionally absorbing effort? In this eye-opening book, Nina Bandelj explains how we got to this point—how we turned children into financial and emotional investments and child-rearing into laborious work. At the turn of the twentieth century, children went from being economically useful, often working to support families, to being seen by their parents as vulnerable and emotionally priceless. In the new millennium, however, parents have become overinvested in the emotional economy of parenting.
Analyzing in-depth interviews with parents, national financial datasets, and decades of child-rearing books, Bandelj reveals how parents today spend, save, and even go into debt for the sake of children. They take on parenting as the hardest but most important job, and commit their entire selves to being a good parent.
The economization and emotionalization of society work together to drive parental overinvestment, offering a dizzying array of products and platforms to turn children into human capital—from financial instruments to extracurricular programs to therapeutic parenting advice. And yet, Bandelj warns, the privatization of child-rearing and devotion of parents’ monies, emotions, and souls ultimately hurt the well-being of children, parents, and society. Overinvested offers a compelling argument that we should reimagine children and what it means to raise them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This incisive treatise from sociologist Bandelj (Money Talks) explores the all-consuming nature of contemporary parenting. Parents are encouraged to treat their children as investment projects they must extensively finance and labor over, she argues, noting that before the 20th century, children worked to support families, but this shifted with the passage of child labor laws and a post-WWII boom in parenting advice manuals from experts like Dr. Benjamin Spock, who emphasized children's emotional development. This gave rise to "intensive parenting" in the 2000s, in which parents sought to elevate their children's well-being—organizing their lives around extracurriculars and enrolling them in elite schools—but often at the expense of parents' finances, time, and mental health. The "privatization of childrearing," along with a lack of social supports like universal child care, increasingly means that a handful of families flourish while the rest fall through the cracks. Bandelj's research shows, however, that a less obsessive approach to parenting benefits kids as well as parents. To regain balance, she recommends replacing some of children's expensive academic and recreational lessons with unstructured time to promote independence, as well as advocating for social policy changes and shifting some household chores back to kids. Supported by thorough research, Bandelj's account persuasively demonstrates that modern parenting is untenable and society must radically reimagine its approach. It's an urgent reckoning for American parents.
