How kin help with parental investments

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 suggest that similar attention to how parents garner the considerable resources needed to accomplish invested parenting is critical. My response to Bandelj's concept of invested parenting draws on my study of affluent parents in the U.S. who experienced unemployment. They made great efforts to minimize disruption to their children's lives, and this was accomplished through the help of kin. In this process, parents' viewed expenditure on children's education as sacrosanct. They were often able to maintain these expenses through the duration of unemployment because of financial intervention from kin. Bandelj's focus on conceptualizing children as parental investments comes within the context of a broader sociological discussion on how parents seek to shield their children from the economic and financial tumults that have become endemic to economic life in the 21st century. Privileged families are acutely attuned to the uncertain and unequal winner-takes-all economy, and experience an intense “fear of falling” (Lamont, 2019). Parental anxieties are vested in their children's futures. Affluent parents particularly experience a heightened sense of insecurity (Cooper, 2014) and anxiety (Tevington, 2018) pertaining to their children's potential downward mobility. Tevington (2018) argues that deploying emotions such as anxiety propels privileged youth to proactively anticipate and strive to counter uncertainties. Cooper (2014) finds that affluent parents respond to insecurity by engaging in a “security project” of “upscaling,” in which mothers stay at home in order to more closely monitor children's educational, extra-curricular, and social developments. Cooper argues that upscaling is primarily an emotional strategy, and a response to the risk climate that the affluent encounter. She writes that upscaling “allows the affluent to feel they are maintaining and reproducing their class privilege in a volatile world” (Cooper, 2014, p. 212). Given increasing economic inequality in the U.S (Chetty et al., 2016; Davis & Kim, 2015), scholars are concerned with the forms that social and economic privilege takes. Affluent parents, those in the professional middle classes for instance, play a key part in preserving privileges for their children.1 Parents transmit important material advantages to their children, often through expenditure on education, enrichment activities, and consumer goods and experiences. Privileged parents invest in educational opportunities for pre-college and college education (Lunn & Kornrich, 2018), including sending children to selective and expensive private schools (Khan, 2011). Parents risk indebtedness as they pursue goals expected to foster children's upward class mobility, including college education (Zaloom, 2019). Affluent parents spend a considerable amount of money on children's enrichment activities (Levey Friedman, 2013). These parents tend to view enrichment activities as essential for developing well-rounded children who will be valued by educational and occupational institutions in the future (Lareau, 2011; Levey Friedman, 2013). Expenditure on children, or as Bandelj prefers, parental investments in children, have increased substantially in the U.S. since the mid-1970s and appear to be a “sacred expense” (Zelizer, 1985) for privileged families. The swell in parental expenditure, especially by privileged parents, has coincided with rising U.S. income inequality. Intensive parenting values and styles are dominant in economies with high levels of economic inequality and may help maintain privileged families' advantages (Doepke & Zilibotti, 2019; Lareau, 2011). Parents in countries with high inequality, like the U.S., favor intensive parenting as a way to prevent their children from becoming a “have not” in a context where the costs of being on the lower economic rungs are far higher—and far more visible—than in more economically equal societies. Indeed, parental investment in children is sensitive to the economic context in seemingly paradoxical ways. During the Great Recession, high-income families in the U.S. became even more likely to spend more on children's education than they had in prior years, while low- and middle-income families did not significantly change their spending on children's education (Lunn & Kornrich, 2018). Why these families would spend more in a context of economic uncertainty remains unclear, and can likely be better explained by the meanings these parents attribute to such expenditures. Affluent parents also strive to transmit non-material resources to their children. These have typically been conceptualized as dispositions, preferences, and behaviors—or cultural capital—which can help their children effectively navigate institutions such as education and work (Calarco, 2018; Johnson et al., 2019; Lareau, 2011). Parents thus play an important role in teaching children how to embody privilege to their advantage.2 In her classic work, Lareau (2011) shows how middle class parents prioritize an intensive approach of “concerted cultivation,” through which they negotiate with teachers on their children's behalf, and seek to inculcate in their children the ability to successfully navigate institutions to maximize children's own preferences. Building on this work, Calarco (2018) explains how privileged parents coach children to interact with authority figures such as teachers, again to optimize their own educational experiences and outcomes. In recent years, nurturing “exploratory” cultural tastes and preferences, including eating a range of foods, traveling widely, and possessing knowledge of a wide assortment of cultural products, goods, and experiences has also become an important aspect of parenting (Fielding-Singh, 2017; Khan, 2011; Weinberger, Zavisca, and Silva, 2017). Such cultural knowledge, valued by parents in itself, has also been linked to occupational success in elite workplaces (Rivera, 2015). Essentially, what research on parenting suggests is that for advantaged parents, parenting is an extensive financial and time investment. Cultivating such preferences requires money. Recent research indicates that support for intensive parenting appears to transcend class lines, but the ability to comply with it remains restricted to affluent families (Ishizuka, 2019). As the above review of the literature shows, parenting is expensive. And as Bandelj argues, a cultural ideal of invested parenting may arguably make it more expensive still. Parenting choices, especially around expenditure on children, are imbued with vital meanings. Bandelj points to how increasingly, and perhaps across race and socio-economic categories, this meaning resides in parental identities as invested parents, and in assiduously preparing their children to become the human capital investment child. But do parents engage in this expensive process of raising a human capital investment child as nuclear units? The focus on parenting implicitly conceptualizes parental investments in children and the human capital investment child as taking place in a very nuclear family context consisting of two (probably married and heterosexual) parents with children. This conceptualization of a family, and the project of parental investments and raising a human capital investment child is, however, partial (Hansen, 2005). Privileged parents in particular belong to a social class in which they often have access to layers of economic resources, including access to financial help from kin. Kin can sometimes function as a privatized form of insurance (Pfeffer & Hällsten, 2012), especially for the affluent. Parents provide financial support to their children across the life-course, especially at pivotal moments such as purchasing a home (Spilerman & Wolff, 2012). This is particularly so in recent years with the development of a new life-stage—emerging adulthood—during which middle-class parents seek to help adult children well into their 20s and early 30s (Arnett and Tanner, 2005). In the U.K., young adults who purchase homes in London, an expensive and increasingly out-of-reach financial goal, do so with help from “the Bank of Mum and Dad” (Moor & Friedman, 2021). Young adults, aged 18–30, who have parents in the top quarter of families receive on average $95,000 from their parents while those with parents in the bottom quarter receive on average $31,000 (Schoeni & Ross, 2005). Financial support from high-income parents to their adult children extends beyond support for basic needs and may be aimed at shoring up advantage (Swartz, 2009). In the U.S., Whites are more likely than other groups to have privileged kin networks that can provide money, advice, and support in times of need (Cornwell & Cornwell, 2008). Disparities in initial wealth are compounded through the life-course (Friedman & Laurison, 2019; Orr, 2003; Rivera, 2015; Yeung & Conley, 2008), with severe consequences for the racialization of wealth (Killewald & Bryan, 2018). Although much research assumes that parental expenses on children's education and enrichment activities are confined to the nuclear family, emerging research shows that wealth is transferred from grandparents to grandchildren (Pfeffer & Killewald, 2018), with the frequency and amounts of monetary gifts being highest in families in the higher socio-economic levels (Schafer & Vargas, 2016). Wealth may be transmitted intergenerationally in the form of inheritances, but importantly also inter vivos gifts that transfer significant monetary help to adult children (Benton & Keister, 2017; Keister, 2003). But prior research, and Bandelj's focus on children as parental investments, has tended to view parenting practices as operating within a nuclear family, insufficiently regarding the role of kin (especially grandparents) in facilitating parental projects of raising a human capital investment child. My study on how U.S. families in the professional middle class parent during unemployment attuned me to the important role of kin, especially grandparents, in parenting projects.3 In my broader study, I was concerned with how relatively affluent, heterosexual U.S. families deal with a spouse's unemployment (Rao, 2020). For families of this social class, parenting is an expansive and expensive project and I was additionally interested in how they made decisions about what child-related goods, experiences and activities they would spend on and which they would cut back on given their altered financial state due to unemployment. As I explain elsewhere (Rao, 2022), families with an unemployed father practiced what I term relational preservation and families with an unemployed mother practiced what I term relational downscaling. Relational preservation means that parents in families with an unemployed father were tremendously concerned that their children would worry about the father's unemployment. To minimize this anticipated worry they decided to minimize any changes in child-related expenditure. Relational downscaling means that in families with an unemployed mother, parents were far less preoccupied with managing their children's worries and took a more matter-of-fact approach that some changes in child-related expenditures were necessary given maternal unemployment. One area that both types of families were reluctant to touch though, aligning with Bandelj's concept of the human capital investment child, were child-related educational expenses. As I point out in the article and expand upon in this response, throughout this process, kin, and especially grandparents, played an important role in enabling both strategies. In relational preservation, kin met the shortfall between child-related expenditure and family incomes given paternal unemployment. In relational downscaling, kin transferred financial help that enabled mothers to stay at home. Financial help from kin consolidated gendered ideals for how these families experiencing unemployment ought to organize their lives. What I explored less in the prior piece were the details of how financial help from grandparents was often quite important to parental projects of raising the human capital investment child. Here, I delve into these details. I would buy our groceries on my parent’s Visa. I’m very close with them. My parents insisted that we use their Visa every time [we go out for dinner]. So we’d go out like once every two weeks. Have sushi dinners with the kids, spend like $100 and it was on my parents. So their presence and their support afforded us this material lifestyle. Between the Levys and Rayan's parents, these exchanges are normalized because both sides view them as a transfer of wealth that would have occurred anyway, but which has simply been expedited. Rayan for example, explains that while the Levys are frugal, especially while Monica is unemployed, they have a sense of assurance about their financial well-being because of his parents. He says, “Again, I'm not reckless with money at all, I don't spend anything. I don't go out. Very rarely go out with my friends.” Anytime Monica brings up money concerns, Rayan responds “‘Well, that's fine. We'll make it. It'll be okay. We'll be fine.’…I'm like, ‘Just take it easy. We're going to be fine.’” Rayan often tells Monica the following, “I find myself telling her things like, ‘Look, my parents have property. We're both only kids. My parents have property. Your parents have property. We own property.” He adds, “I go to the point where I'm telling her: these are the retirement money my parents have.’ That comes to us at some point. I know it sounds awful, but they're all going to die at some point. Don't worry about these things.” As Rayan explains, in his mind, his parents in particular are there as a financial resource for his family should they need it. They function, in that sense, as a form of privatized insurance which can be accessed when times get tough. And until times do get very tough, knowing that this resource is there provides a sense of emotional safety for Rayan. Their own parents were important in allowing parents experiencing unemployment to infuse a sense of joy in their children's lives. Kiara Eklund, who worked in the non-profit sector until she lost her has two young the of Kiara says, is so she out with the of me having to purchase new my will buy Indeed, grandparents often made for their and sometimes like a a of expensive while their children were I that grandparents often experiences to their grandchildren while parents were his unemployed, explains how they were able to going on while she has been He how and his have been with their money, go out to we like that I we any or like As though, have to cut some like This is because as says, been very of cut back on We take a of family that The take these with parents, in part so that his parents more time with the as a facilitating these in order to family adds, being with them and they take us on these great So we were in this and his in who to when out of And we would do it. than the that we for so These gifts allow grandchildren to have experiences even as their parents experience unemployment. the important role that financial support during parental unemployment is in shoring up educational investments in children. 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