Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In the "Social Life of Money for Children," Nina Bandelj proposes several concepts to reframe how sociologists ought to think about shifting trends in parental expenditure.Bandelj argues that there is a cultural shift in what parenting now means-and what it entails-that is evidenced by changes in how parents spend on, and save for, their children.For Bandelj, parents' expenditures on children are better conceptualized as parental investments.The complementary concept of invested parenting, Bandelj posits, better evokes how spending on one's child is also about how parents' own identities are invested in being specific types of parents who provide particular goods and experiences, to their children, as well as setting their children up for financial wealth.Bandelj thus extends Zelizer's (1985) argument that children evolved from being economically useful to emotionally priceless to suggest that now children are the human capital investment child, such that parents seek to equip their children to allow for increased economic productivity from them upon adulthood.Invested parenting focuses conceptually on parents and what they do financially for their children and the meaning this holds for parents.In my response to Bandelj, I will consider how invested parenting may often be facilitated by kin-primarily grandparents, but also aunts and uncles.Here, I point to how kin play an important role in allowing parents to provide a childhood (and, at times, an adulthood) for their children that is seen as best suited to setting children up for a "successful" life (which in their vision means accessing specific types of education, being prepared for certain occupations, and generally having continued access to a range of opportunity).Sociologists show that someone's income provides an inadequate understanding of how they are placed socio-economically.While wealth can be harder to measure, many argue that it provides a far more holistic understanding of economic resources at someone's disposal (Pfeffer & Killewald, 2018).Wealth, however, is better understood intergenerationally; paying attention to how resources transfer between kin is crucial.When it comes to invested parenting, I
Source: British Journal of Sociology
Author: Aliya Hamid Rao
Institution: London School of Economics and Political Science
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,840
OpenAlex ID: W4407852969