Alloparenting the investment child: A reply to responses

In Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think, economist Bryan Caplan (2011) sees the preoccupation of many parents today with doing everything they can for their children as simply an irrational response. He reasons: “Adoption and twin research provides strong evidence that parents barely affect their children's prospects. If parents gave themselves a big break—or redoubled their efforts—kids would turn out about the same” (2011: 4). We can debate Caplan's claims. What is less open to discussion is that multiple factors shape children during the process of socialization. This goes for writing scholarly articles, too. It's a collective enterprise. At the risk of overusing the childrearing metaphor we could say that multiple perspectives and engagement with them help little essays grow up to become better articles. I have had wonderful help in alloparenting1 my British Journal of Sociology Annual Lecture to its greater potential from a stellar group of colleagues, Alya Guseva, Allison Pugh, Aliya Rao and Frederick Wherry, who have each contributed their unique perspectives and talents, and all have pushed me to think further and better. They raised many questions, only some of which I have the space to address here, with hopes that the dialog on these topics continues at other opportunities and in other venues. To recap, I argue in my BJS article that we have witnessed a marked shift from “childrearing expenditures” to “parenting investments” that align with new visions of what it means to be a child and what it means to be a parent. Extending Nigel Dodd's inquiry into the social life of money to family economy, I proposed that the social life of money for children has become oriented to human capital development of children and invested parenting identities. Using the theoretical lens of economic entanglement, or how the entanglement of structural, political and cultural forces scaffolds the economy, I discussed the role of financialization, parenting books and services industry, and an aloof state offloading provision for children onto individual parents. Leading entangled economic lives, parents engage in relational work (Bandelj, 2020; Zelizer, 2012) in which they match the loving child-parent bond with monies for children. But, as I documented using data on decades-long financial trends, these monies (expenditures, investments as well as debts) are not only those that parents deem culturally appropriate (what they should do) but also those that they can actually afford (what they can do). This means that the new social life of money for children contributes to a new political economy of parenting that, ultimately, increases economic and racial/ethnic divisions in society. In his generative response, Frederick Wherry brings to the fore the importance of rituals in money matters. Offering an example of a high school graduation, Wherry incisively points out that, in truth, there is no real connection between the ritual of donning the robes and having a graduation party to actually earning a degree. Yet, there is collective pressure to participate in the ritual. Family members and neighbors might even “step in to help ensure that child experiences this meaningful rite of passage.” As such, Wherry brings to light the imperative to understand what families actually do rather than what economics experts preach they should. While human capitalization has emerged in expert debates and policy agendas as the new social value of children (Bandelj & Spiegel, 2023), I find in interviews with parents that they don't talk about “optimization” or “return on investment.” Rather they express devotion to their children, and they go about their parenting as they do about other aspects of their social lives, following emotions, habits and, yes, rituals and rites of passage. Advancing my economic entanglement framework, Wherry offers a way to see how economic actors are not only entangled but “emplotted,” placed in a plot, or a story line, of “the relational and racialized dramas shaping [various monies'] salience.” While I make a point in my theorizing of economic entanglement that parents engage in relational work in which they match the sacred child-parent bond with not only culturally appropriate but actually affordable monies for children, Wherry's incisive comments and apt dramaturgy metaphors elucidate that such language may carry overtones of too-smooth-of-a-facility to pick and choose from the toolkit and calculate what is affordable. Indeed, “salient” may be a better word here as some types of monies may be relied upon either due to structural resource constraints (e.g., one has more or less funds to set aside in 529 savings plans) but also because people cull from inhabited “repertoires that inform financial decision-making” (Rucks-Ahidiana, 2022, p. 388), that differ by race, class and history. It is indeed crucial, as Wherry insists, to lay bare how “histories of racialization shape how students invest in themselves and how their loved ones also contribute to those investments.” Future research would also advance our understanding of relational work if it focused on how and why some forms of media of exchange are strictly off limits and why particular types of participants are included or excluded. Allison Pugh rightfully points out that when we talk about childrearing, we should avoid ignoring the children themselves. Pugh actually begins her excellent essay quoting 13-year-old Zoe who attends a private school and has apparently bought into the fact that school is an engine of her human capitalization, welcoming readily more structure to her schedule that the school had recently imposed. As Zoe professes, she likes that now she doesn't “have that freedom to not work.” Very maturely, Zoe acknowledges the temptation to not be completely devoted to schoolwork, especially in her first year of school when she was “so little.” But now, “not anymore,” Zoe says, “now it's just work.” This is a rare glimpse into a life of a teenager with an overworked schedule and a keen awareness at that young age of how investing into oneself through education is top priority. The question is, how common is this narrative among American teenagers who don't attend pricey private schools in Silicon Valley—where we know the pressures can run extremely high, to a point of destruction as Mueller and Abrutyn (2024) document in their new book on the social origins of teenage suicide? Nearly all participants believed that parents carry a moral obligation to be unconditionally and absolutely [including financially] responsible for children because they made a choice to have kids. Adult children did not ask to be born, however, so by default, they are not responsible for their parents. Instead, they are conditionally and partially responsible for their parents: if they have “good” parents, then they must be “good” children and want to be responsible for their parents' physical and emotional well-being, and at least maintain a relationship with one another. Related to children themselves, Alya Guseva2 observantly points out that my discussion revolves around healthy children, to which I concede and add that I see the struggles of parenting children with disabilities as even more aggravated. A review on this topic finds that parents of children with disabilities, “continue to experience negative reactions such as stress and anomie, especially early in their children's lives, and socially imposed barriers such as unhelpful professionals and a lack of needed services continue to create problems” (Green et al., 2016, p. 261). This suggests that financial pressures on parents with children with disabilities—not only related directly to parenting but also to managing all these challenges—are likely quite acute (Lindo et al., 2016). A project that investigates the social life of money in families with children with disabilities is a much-needed endeavor, as is one of families where parents themselves have disabilities, which undoubtedly impacts the financial, emotional and time commitments they can devote toward their children. Guseva also addresses significant financial struggles of some parents to even have children through various assisted reproductive technologies, which can require thousands of dollars to be paid out of pocket, given limited health care insurance provisions for this. This is not only a matter of health care policy but another signal of how the state views (having) children; they are a parent's responsibility. Journalist Jessica Grose (2014) writing for Slate magazine offers a phrase to capture this sentiment: “If you can't afford a dog, don't get a dog. If you can't afford a kid, don't get a kid.” It sounds cruel, but such reactions are not uncommon in today's America. Having children is considered to be an individual choice. Ergo, the costs associated with having—and trying to have—children are a parent's responsibility. But perhaps in their financial investments parents are assisted by kin. In her thoughtful response, Aliya Rao makes a valuable point about how crucial kin, especially grandparents, can be in the project of invested parenting. She discusses her research on how professional upper middle class families negotiate unemployment of one of the parents, providing additional insights to what she reported were major gender differences in her award-winning 2022 American Sociological Review article (Rao, 2022). Rao suggests that “kin can sometimes function as a privatized form of insurance” but she is also careful to add that this is most likely in the case of the affluent. In our interviews with parents we did ask about relatives' support. To a general question: “Do any of your relatives, like grandparents, aunts/uncles do anything for your kids?” about two-thirds answered in the affirmative. However, among the upper and upper-middle class parents more than three quarters said that relatives help. When we followed up with a question about the kind of support relatives give, about half of those who talked about relatives' involvement mentioned financial support, such as grandparents or aunts and uncles giving children money, paying for their activities, setting aside money for children's college, including setting up 529 savings accounts, or planning to pass on inheritance to their grandchildren. Here, too, it becomes clear that the ability to help out financially was not as easily accessible to relatives of lower, lower-middle and middle class parents. Less than a third of those parents said that relatives did something financially for their children. In contrast, relatives of more than a half of upper middle and upper class parents were involved financially. Lower middle class were more likely to provide in kind support, especially if they lived close by. As a Latino father who works as a code enforcement officer said of his parents' involvement: “Abuelitos help when I have work or they do pickups if I'm not available or accessible so they help me with that end of it.” My siblings and I are super, super, super close. They are very, very involved in the different things that the kids do. They show up to sporting games, dance recitals… The grandparents, for the most part, are super involved. Everybody shows up to everything… they love it because it's an opportunity to watch the kids grow and do different things… They obviously give them money for birthdays, or the girls get money if they watch their little cousin. My sister will pay them for that. But no, there's no investments [for my children from relatives] or anything like that… I think right now we're all working towards advancing ourselves financially to be able to do more for each other and things of that nature. As this quote reveals, the quality of relationships, recipient need as well as financial ability of kin will play a role in how kin support is extended for children. Existing research on grandmothers involvement also suggests that women relatives may be more likely to provide it than male ones (Harrington Meyer, 2014). In addition, group characteristics may matter, too, and various racial-ethnic groups may have more or less resource rich networks. As Steven Schmidt (2024) finds in his new study of low-income renters in Los Angeles, low-income whites still have more resource rich ties than their Latino counterparts and they can draw upon those ties to their advantage, be it to secure housing referrals or financial support. Similarly, kin financial support in raising children, despite common good intentions, may work differently across not only socio-economic but racial-ethnic groups. Allison Pugh raises an important point that mothers have always had to be invested in their identities as mothers. So, have up or mothers in some yes, have up et al., et al., and we could find who were to for interviews about parenting. 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