Nina Bandelj: We don’t see children as people, but as capital we invest in

Local childrenmental healthTop News Nina Bandelj: We don’t see children as people, but as capital we invest in Mother Spending Time With Her Child Relevant News From Latchi to Tillyria: Paphos’ most authentic side 30 July 2026 Nina Bandelj: We don’t see children as people, but as capital we invest in 30 July 2026 Yellow warning and 40 degree peak today 30 July 2026 Xenia Tourki 30 July 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber Money becomes a language of love. Paying for tutoring, travel or extracurricular activities doesn’t feel like economic calculation — it is experienced as devotion to children. Has parenting become the hardest “job” of modern life? Why is it that, even as parents devote more time, more money and more emotional energy than ever to their children, more and more of them say they feel exhausted, anxious and as though they are never doing enough? Nina Bandelj, a professor at UC Irvine in California and author of the book Overinvesting: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting (Princeton Press), tells Phileleftheros in this interview how radically society’s view of children and parenting has changed. Children are increasingly treated as an “investment project,” while parents feel they must constantly invest time, money and emotional energy in order to be seen as adequate, good parents. “Consequently, we have turned child-rearing into a job that a parent has to be productive at, hustle at, schedule from one minute to the next, just like a job at the workplace,” she says. This shift, Bandelj explains, has consequences on multiple levels. It does not only affect parents, but also widens social inequality, while it may ultimately deprive children themselves of the chance to develop autonomy and resilience. “Often, though, what we, as parents, think is in the child’s best interest can actually limit their independence and learning in the long term,” she argues. Your book “Overinvesting: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting” (Princeton Press) is being described as one of the most thought-provoking books on contemporary parenting. What are the main arguments of it? May I share with you that I am at once delighted but also unnerved that the book resonates strongly. I think it resonates because it tries to explain why parenting is so exhausting today, financially and emotionally, and a lot of parents feel this exhaustion deeply in their lives. But we should ask, should raising children be so very hard? Should it be so depleting that some public officials, like the U.S. Surgeon General, pronounce it as a public health crisis? How did we get here? My answer is that as a society we have radically transformed how we view children. Children are not just young human beings, but we treat them as human capital for parents to invest in and manage. Consequently, we have turned child-rearing into a job that a parent has to be productive at, hustle at, schedule from one minute to the next, just like a job at the workplace. Importantly, parents keep doing all this work quite eagerly because, at the same time, emphasis on emotions has gained a lot of power in our society so parenting is not only the hardest job, as parents would tell me, but also the most rewarding one, a purpose in life, a way to define a sense of self, and, for many adults with children, the most important aspect of their identity. So, I offer a sociological analysis about how economic reasoning and emotional culture combined to transform child-rearing into exhausting labor and children into investment projects, with troubling consequences. So, what you are arguing is that today’s parents no longer simply raise children, they invest in them. In what way does this happen, what exactly does it mean? To say that parents invest into children is meant to capture four things. The first is about money, a variety of monies, actually, in the era of finance: from savings plans to financial investments to credit lines. The second is about emotions but not only to love children but especially to support children’s emotional wellbeing and happiness as a priority. The third is about all the time and effort that goes into scheduling and managing children as if they were projects. And finally, it’s also about how parents invest their own selves, how we are preoccupied with being good parents as the very central part of our identity. Can you give me an example? From this emotional investment perspective, I remember one mom, a teacher with two children who said that she thinks about her children constantly, they are part of her being, that she loves them in a way she can never articulate, and they are her purpose in life. This seems natural to many parents today but is a very specific all-consuming nature of invested parenting. Or there were parents who described having a tightly choreographed schedule of school pickups, extracurricular activities and logistics for several children. They were living by the clock as at a factory assembly line and still worried constantly about whether they were doing enough. Financially, many parents took on excessive debt or sacrificed saving for their own retirement to move to places that worked best for children’s schooling or to pay to send kids to the college of their dreams. And on the other side, parents with more resources would ask their financial advisors to set up financial assets under children’s names and wisely used tax-advantaged education savings accounts, for instance. What factors have transformed parenting into one of the most emotionally demanding, financially expensive, and psychologically consuming aspects of modern life? My research shows that two major societal shifts came together. The first is what I call the dominance of the Economic Style: economic ideas, financial structures, the notion of investing in human capital that have expanded far beyond markets into family life. We increasingly think that investing into children’s skills and experiences must begin earlier and earlier. Make the womb the first classroom! There are a variety of financial instruments and products available to encourage that. And we don’t even blink when we describe child-rearing as a job and suffer parental burnout, a condition that used to describe the experience at the workplace. The second cultural shift is the rise of the Emotional Style. Modern advice-giving therapeutic culture, now accessible anytime we pick up our phones, encourages us to see emotions as a compass in life and, as concerns child-rearing, the ultimate guide to being a good parent. More than a hundred parenting books I analyzed show how children’s happiness and emotional wellbeing become primary objects of attention, while parenthood becomes central to adults’ identities. What’s fascinating is that these two forces, the emotional and the economic, reinforce each other rather than compete. Money becomes a language of love. Paying for tutoring, travel or extracurricular activities doesn’t feel like economic calculation — it is experienced as devotion to children. Add soaring childcare and education costs, a booming parenting product industry and weak public support for families, and you create a system where parents feel they can never quite do enough. What does this shift mean, both for parents and for society? I’m sorry to say but the consequences are not positive. There was a recent study that showed that one in two parents said that they are constantly overwhelmed and stressed. But the consequences go beyond exhausted parents. There are grave implications for our society that are less visible to any individual family. Bottom line is that this privatized parenting — the expectation of investment on parents’ shoulders — leads to increasing divisions in society. As I said, wealthier families can accumulate assets for children or profit from tax-advantaged financial instruments, but many middle- and lower-income families respond to the same cultural pressures by taking on debt and forgoing saving for their own retirement. The expectation to invest is widespread; the capacity to do so is profoundly unequal. Parenting in this sense is an engine of growing inequality. And a heavily divided society cannot lead to a bright future that all parents want for their children. Negative consequences for children Where should parents draw the line? How can they know when they have crossed the boundary between doing what’s best for their children and overinvesting in them? The one million dollar question: how can we do less? We love our children and we want to give them the world. I want to make clear that what I argue is that there is a societal expectation to overinvest by parents because of lack of societal investment in our children. So I certainly don’t want to make parents feel bad. Many institutions have to change to better support families. At the same time, it’s also true that people reinforce social norms and keep this exhausting parenting standard going. So, parents can also be aware of what feels inevitable but may not be really necessary for them to do. As a mom I often ask myself, is something that I’m doing for my child, financially or emotionally, really in the best interest of my child, or is it that I will feel as a bad parent if I don’t constantly supervise my son’s schoolwork or read all WhatsApp parent group messages? Or maybe I’m signing up my kid into more extracurricular activities or private school because I see other parents do it and I want to fit in? If I am doing things that are more for me than truly supporting my child to become a well-functioning adult, those are probably the activities I should do less of. That’s not so easy, though. I have enormous sympathy for parents because I know this is NOT simply an individual choice. We live in a culture where investing so much financially and emotionally has become the moral definition of good parenting. When everyone else appears to be enrolling children in more activities, hiring tutors or putting children into private school, stepping off this derailed parenting train seems impossible. But see, often what we, as parents, think is in the child’s best interest can actually limit their independence and learning in the long term. We have these terms “snowplow” or “lawnmow” parenting which refers to removing all obstacles in the child’s way to protect them. But children also need to stumble over difficulty to understand what it means to pick oneself up and learn from mistakes. They need to do chores not just homework to understand social responsibility. They need to have time that is not constantly filled with educational activity. And we should keep in mind that research shows that aside from a loving relationship and socio-economic stability, parenting decisions are actually much less consequential for how the children turn out than parents think they are. What is the impact of overinvesting for the children themselves? The irony is that overinvesting may undermine some of the very qualities parents hope to nurture. This overinvolved approach leads to children having fewer opportunities for free play, fewer household responsibilities and less independence than previous generations. Those experiences matter because they help children develop resilience, confidence and the ability to solve problems on their own. But today we often schedule even playtime! Researchers have linked limits to free unstructured play and independent activity to rising anxiety and depression in children and teens. More anecdotal evidence shows how transition to university is very hard. Children are reluctant to move away from home. Some parents move to be closer to university-age children, they call them to wake them up in the morning, they do laundry for them, they track their movements on their phones, etc. This likely doesn’t help these children transition to adulthood. Curiously, only about ten out of 120 parents my research team talked to said they think among their roles as a parent is to raise a child to become a well functioning adult. They focused on loving children and supporting them and helping them realize their potential and be happy. That’s important, but in the end, parents can’t really engineer this happiness for children by doing everything for them. Children have to develop their own skills to meet life’s challenges. Parenting as a collective responsibility of society What changes, in schools, workplaces, public policy, or society more broadly, would help parents escape the pressure to overinvest? Broadly, I see real dangers in this invested privatized child-rearing, where children are treated as parents’ private property or stocks of investment to optimize. Children are members of society so any actions that support working parents with paid parental leave and sick leave, that invest more public resources into children by covering costs of childcare and education will lower not only financial burdens related to childrearing but also emotional burdens that, hopefully, will make parenting less draining and raising children seen more as a societal responsibility. 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