Why Parenting Now Feels Like an Investment Strategy
In an age of hustle culture and hyperoptimization, parenting has become a source of pressure. The consequences aren’t great.
It was the picture of the eagle that stopped me in my tracks.
My son, who produced only a series of random lines for his kindergarten “self-portrait,” had begun churning out dozens of drawings of the things he was obsessed with: trains, bridges, skyscrapers and animals.
The pictures were intricate. One airplane was drawn like a Zentangle puzzle, with hidden images within the picture. Lately, he had started to integrate depth and perspective with a surprising level of sophistication. But it was the unprompted experiment with animal portraiture that gave me pause. The eagle was delicately shaded in, with wispy feathers, and a glint in his eye. My son had only just turned 6.
My feelings of pride were mixed up with a gnawing sense of obligation. If my child was exhibiting preternatural talent, what was my responsibility? To supply him with nice pencils and a pat on the back — my strategy thus far? Or to introduce him to exhibitions, send him to art classes and begin to think more seriously about how to develop that talent?
These questions raised my blood pressure and felt intensely revealing about 21st century parenting. Parents — especially mothers — are under an inordinate amount of pressure to invest time, money and energy in their children. Many of us hear a persistent voice in our heads, asking, “Am I doing enough?” But enough for what exactly? The question set me out to understand how parenting has changed and why my son’s talent felt like both a gift and a test.
How Parenting Has Changed
When you’re in the thick of it, it can be easy to forget that parenting doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s an interplay with broader social, economic and political forces that have gone through seismic shifts over the last 100 years.
Toward the end of the 19th century, as child labor laws were passed, welfare protections expanded in industrialized nations, and more children came to be educated, the value of children in a family shifted away from their immediate economic contribution. Instead of their lives being measured by their ability to support their family, kids gradually became sources of emotional meaning, and prized for their future potential, according to sociologist Viviana Zelizer, who documented the shift in her 1985 book, Pricing the Priceless Child.
More recently, though, another form of economic logic has crept into parenting, according to a new book by economic sociologist Nina Bandelj, Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting (Princeton University Press). Bandelj, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, argues that we are now in a new phase of parental investment — one in which offspring are increasingly viewed through the lens of human capital. Children are being treated as future economic assets whose worth lies in the skills, education and credentials they will accumulate, Bandelj writes. These changes are reflected — and reinforced — by significant increases in government and parental spending on education, childcare and enrichment activities, particularly in developed countries.
This shift has been monumental — a result of forces that have nudged parents to see themselves as primary agents in preparing their children for the future and to see parenting (a verb that only entered the vernacular in the late 1950s) as a core part of their identity.
“A century ago, children labored for families. Today, parents labor for [their] children. Not just financially — we toil at parenting,” Bandelj tells me. “It has become an exhausting job to realize children’s potential, and support their emotional well-being.”
Bandelj’s book tracks a number of factors driving the shift, from advances in understanding brain development in early childhood to the rise of consumerism and individualization, to the impact of social media on parents worldwide.
She argues that “economization” (the increased use of financial reasoning in our lives) and “emotionalization” (the growing centrality of emotions to our identities) have converged to equate being a good parent with ever-increasing investment of time, money and energy. Companies have capitalized on these transformations, deluging caregivers with opportunities to craft their children in a variety of (usually quite expensive) ways. Parents with means are pouring billions of dollars into tutoring, coaching and extracurricular activities as a way to enhance their children’s résumés.
Parents are often left to make these decisions on their own, and they are on the hook for financing investments in their kids. “This idea that we are all individually responsible for all aspects of our lives — that has integrated into family culture and the way that we think about our familial roles,” says Sunnee Billingsley, a professor of sociology at Stockholm University who has studied intensive parenting. “When you couple that with rising inequalities and lower chances for upward mobility,” she says, “that really ramps up these feelings of concern and worry.”
This context helps to reframe “intensive parenting” less as neurosis and more as a somewhat rational response to shifts in society.
‘Pernicious Consequences’
“Child rearing on steroids,” as Bandelj calls it in her book, can have far-reaching consequences. To start with, it’s an approach that creates “high anxiety for many parents,” says economist Emily Oster, founder and chief executive officer of ParentData, a research-driven platform for caregivers. “We want our kids to have all the opportunities that they can, and we do not want to feel that something we’ve done prevented them from achieving their dreams.”
This pressure is unevenly distributed within the family. Mothers are often much more likely to be responsible for bearing the load of this approach, such as scheduling, monitoring, researching and worrying about how to be a “good parent.”
“The drumbeat of social media together with the billion-dollar parenting industry has ramped up the expectation that mothers not only will raise children, but will also make children the very center of their universe,” Bandelj writes. Mothers face costs to their own opportunities as a result, from cognitive overload to career slowdowns. (My husband is supportive of our son’s talents but is happy for them to unfold naturally rather than being drawn out.)
Social media is just one place where mothering is challenging. From doctors’ offices to school drop-off, mothers face the “subtle judgment or observation of everything you do and say,” says Yana Kuchirko, an associate professor of psychology at Brooklyn College. It’s no wonder then that one of the complaints that she hears is: “I love being a mother. I hate motherhood.”
This struggle is even worse for low-income families, as they funnel a greater proportions of their income to paying for childcare and education and are sometimes judged more harshly for their level of parental investments, Kuchirko says. “Class has a lot to do with a family’s ability to either go under the radar in terms of institutions or invest in their kids fully in a way that makes them ‘good parents’ based on the culture.”
In 2015, Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, issued a powerful commencement speech to Yale University students acknowledging their talent and hard work, but then describing how their parents had created an uneven playing field for them to excel. “Although it was once the engine of American social mobility, meritocracy today blocks equality of opportunity,” he said, and has become “a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations.”
He expanded his argument in his 2019 book, The Meritocracy Trap, describing professional classes as being locked in a toxic, high-pressure cycle of competition that was reinforcing initial disadvantages.
Speaking now, Markovits believes the rat race of meritocracy has been incredibly costly for the US, citing high rates of clinical anxiety, depression and substance abuse among wealthy children. While he acknowledges that it is difficult to prove causal links, he says he remains “absolutely convinced that this is a perfectly understandable, almost inevitable reaction to the strains associated with this kind of childhood.”
Limits on Investment
All of this raises a fundamental question: How much are we ultimately helping our children by elevating their interests to exercises in cultivation and advancement? Research has shown that home environments and stable caregiving matter enormously in the first years of life. But beyond that, the evidence becomes less clear.
What has been established through studies is that extracurriculars can have negative effects if they crowd out independent play, socializing with friends or adequate sleep. It’s great if your kid can play Chopin, but if they can’t navigate an argument with a friend, there might be other issues down the road.
Hobbies help children develop self-regulation, discipline, confidence and intrinsic motivation and perhaps, most importantly, provide them with the opportunity to “develop a better sense of belonging,” Oster has written. But like everything in life, moderation is key. Parents have to tread a delicate balance between supporting a child’s participation while not going into overdrive — something that can be particularly tricky when a child exhibits talent or wants to quit an activity before a parent thinks they should.
Ultimately, a child’s success rests on a diverse mix of conditions, some of which — genetics, friends, luck, what happens at school every minute of the day — are not entirely in parent’s control, regardless of how much time and money are invested. “Your child can get better at most activities if they put significant work into them, so in that sense you can influence their experience,” Oster says. “But if the question is how to raise a child who is truly in the upper tail of some activity — that requires both raw talent and cultivation.”
Bandelj encourages parents to see hobbies as ways to foster children’s independence and freedom rather than as credentials — and to let those hobbies go when they become too stressful. She acknowledges that this isn’t easy for everyone, particularly parents from lower-class backgrounds who may be relying on these investments to unlock future success. But it’s not good for children to have exhausted parents either, she says, pointing to an unprecedented warning by the US Surgeon General in 2024 about parental burnout. When activities and the impulse to do them start to impact how the family functions, says Bandelj, “that’s probably a big alarm.”
Letting Children Be
The fact that I was questioning the impact of these pressures on myself and our family (as many other mothers seem to be, based on my social media feed) helped ease my anxiety. “Mothers were struggling with parenting before, but now I think this additional pressure is making it even more challenging for women,” Stockholm University’s Billingsley says. “It’s really important [especially for] mothers, to continue to return to this question of, ‘Am I OK, and am I getting what I need?’”
But where does that leave my son?
Oster says parents are best advised to follow their children’s lead in terms of finding activities that make them feel safe, happy and supported; to find a balance in different activities; and to think of the big picture. “When I’ve surveyed parents about their long-term goals for their kids — looking decades out — they almost always talk about wanting their kids to like them, wanting their kids to come home to hang out with them,” she says. “That’s not inconsistent with wanting them to excel at soccer, but it’s an antidote to thinking that excelling at soccer is the only thing that we are trying to accomplish.”
As a mother herself, Bandelj relies on a mantra: “My child is not an investment project. Raising children should not be exhausting labor.” Her book ends with an appeal to return to the act of parenting as a collective endeavor, in which we try to change the social conditions for all children to succeed, not just our own. “This phrase, it takes a village, I know it’s trite, but it’s true,” she says. “One parent cannot change the system alone. We must shift norms collectively.”
Yale’s Markovits also believes the wider context matters. “Focusing on individual parental choices is a big mistake,” he says. “Structural forces govern both what options people have and how their choices produce outcomes. And the structural forces — different school options for the rich and the rest; and even different family circumstances — are enormously powerful.”
“It is still true that a genuinely exceptional child can get ahead almost no matter where they start,” Markovits adds. “But most of us — almost all of us — are not exceptional; we’re ordinary. And a good society makes it possible for ordinary people to thrive.”
For now, I’m choosing to ascribe to psychologist Alison Gopnik’s advice to be more “gardener than carpenter” and focus on cultivating a joint appreciation for the arts while encouraging my son to work at, and take pride, in his art.
Luckily, his enthusiasm remains undiminished by my anxieties, for now. Throwing caution to the wind — as one does when asking a 6-year-old for their opinion on anything — I asked him how I could best support his talents. He looked at me as if the question was a test. “Can I get some more canvas to paint on?” he said, with a quizzical look on his face, then went back to drawing.
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