“Now we don't have that freedom to not work”: Childhood and parenting in insecurity culture

Zoe Wallace was a 13-year-old student when I interviewed her at an experimental school in Silicon Valley where tuition ran about $60,000 USD. The school relied on computers to teach math, coding and grammar while students pursued independent projects using “goal time,” but, as Zoe told me, there was actually not enough of that time for all the tasks she had to complete. “There's, like, 7 hours of goal time and 15 hours' worth of work, so it's hard to, like, squeeze it all [in],” she said. Her sister complained to her sometimes, but “I'm like, ‘Oh, no, this is normal,’” she said. “‘We're all running around like headless chickens. It's normal.’”1 Because now we don’t have that freedom to not work, which is a lot better because it’s very tempting not to work when -- in my first year here at least. Not anymore. In my first year here, it was tempting not to work because I was, like, so little and “oh yes, we have access to computers. Okay, let’s not work!” But now it’s just work. Cut adrift in a sea of privatization (Cooper, 2014), Zoe holds onto her self-governance like a neoliberal life raft. A longtime economic sociologist, Nina Bandelj has aimed her prodigious analytic energies at contemporary parenting in the United States, and the story she tells is of neoliberalism run amok. In her essay, she marshals extensive data—survey results, context analyses of advice books, and interviews with 120 parents—to argue that parenting has changed over the last 40 years, and with it the value of children. She develops the notion of “economic entanglement,” a web of intersected structural, cultural and political forces that ensnare parents and shape their practices. While even relatively recently US parenting was about childrearing, now, Bandelj argues, it has become more about the parents, a master identity involving investment both financial and personal. In this commentary, I use her generative essay as a jumping off point, to spur new questions—about kids, gender, spending and the post-neoliberal future—that can help us explore the phenomenon she has identified and its implications. There is much that is appealing with Bandelj's essay, and with her approach. Bandelj rejects the “rational bounded actors” that she notes lie at the heart of economic sociology's more conventional theoretical apparatus of “embeddedness,” and she tries to center a different vision of social life with the notion of entanglement: of people as “practical negotiators” whose actions reflect not just intention or improvisation but also the more modest “muddling through.” Furthermore, she takes the influential “earmarking” concept, which captures how people try to match or signal different kinds of relationships with different kinds of money, and brings to it an explicit treatment of inequality. Finally, her treatment of the interview data, in particular, is well attuned to the claims it can support: while we might complain that the parents she quotes often appear to be performing their most honorable selves (Pugh, 2013), for example, asserting that all of their spending is for their kids while they themselves would “just rent a room somewhere”; as it turns out, Bandelj's task is to uncover exactly what counts as honorable to these parents. In three areas, however, I invite us to use Bandelj's essay as an inspiration to think further, and I begin with the children themselves. Zelizer's (1985) classic Pricing the Priceless Child documented how changing meanings of children transformed not just parenting but also kids' daily lives, explaining for example, how children lost their rights to the street—to their own spatial autonomy in public space—as they became sacralized. How might “invested parenting” affect kids' lives? Bandelj argues that the cultural forces that entangle parents are the “value of children and the meaning of childrearing,” and that “the priceless child of the new millennium is a human capital investment child.” Parents are apparently pouring financial assets into their children in order to increase their productivity later. Underlying this ideology of childrearing is the notion that what matters most here is children's future, rather than their present day lives. The trope “children are the future” is a common one, and childhood scholars have documented how it serves to marshal adult investment in disciplining and educating children, but also “fail[s] to incorporate specific, real living children, and the needs they might have articulated had anybody been listening to their voices” (Bühler-Niederberger & Sünker, 2009, p. 394). Bandelj convinces me that for much of the population under study—contemporary American parents with children under 25—this ideology holds sway. As Zoe, the student, might attest, however, these trends have implications for today's child as well. For example, when Bandelj documents that families are “increasingly devoting a larger share of their overall financial assets to assets co-owned with children or under children's names,” she concludes that this demonstrates that investment in children is increasingly important. Yet when we put children at the center, we can see that this spending has other potentially significant implications: first among these, it appears to say something important about children's visibility. Money betokens a certain kind of social citizenship, as a comparison to women's financial behavior makes clear. Under the system of coverture, married women were once subsumed under the legal person of their husbands (Basch, 1986), which meant they were often (but not always) financially invisible, unable in many locales to own property or inherit wealth until the mid-19th century. Vestiges of this invisibility continued into the 20th century; American women had to wait until 1974 for the right to apply for a credit card without a man to co-sign the application. Women eventually triumphed over coverture, and their incremental steps toward financial visibility reflected their slow path to legal personhood and social rights. By comparison, we might view children's conspicuousness in investments as a testament to their financial citizenship, and perhaps simultaneously to their legibility as people. Financial visibility appears detached from other forms of power for children, however; scholars have documented children's rising power as consumers (Schor, 2014; Zelizer, 2002), even as they experience decreasing spatial ranges, with parents restricting their capacity to venture alone outside mostly due to fears about safety (Marzi & Reimers, 2018). How does age inequality allow us to parse the multiple dimensions of power (Barnes et al., 2024; Pugh, 2014)? Centering the child invites other questions about Bandelj's story. In contrast to the sacralized child of the 20th century, we might imagine a new kind of childhood based on the parents she depicts. Are these children whose physical autonomy is even more curtailed by extraordinary surveillance (Villanueva et al., 2012)? Are they achievers in academic or athletic endeavors, but less competent with regard to risk (Hillman, 2006; Livingstone, 2013)? Are these kids who might be safer and healthier on a number of dimensions but who are criminalized, “cultivated” or otherwise the subject of unprecedented adult control (Dinsmore & Pugh, 2021)? How are the changes in children's personhood, as evidenced by their increasing financial roles, related to the complexities of children's evolving autonomy? It is worth exploring what kind of invested child the invested parent begets. Throughout her piece, Bandelj largely sticks to gender-neutral language of “parenting.” Reviewing four parenting advice books, for example, she notes that they suggest “we have witnessed a cultural shift toward a focus on parenting, away from childrearing.” (emphasis in the original). But all four of the books are about and aimed at mothers; three of them have the word “mother” in the title, while the fourth is “What to Expect When You're Expecting,” about childbirth. Invested parenting is performed by mothers, fathers, and nonbinary folks; when we make gender visible, it pushes us to ask new questions. Of course, Bandelj's decision to refer to “parenting” here might be due to the fact that financial matters are the one area where fathers are most involved in childrearing (Cooper, 2014; Robertson-Rose, 2020), and where—like mothers—they might also be subject to social censure for failing to measure up. Nevertheless, mothers are still presumed responsible for primary caregiving in the contemporary United States (Musick et al., 2016); they are almost four times as likely to be stay-at-home parents than fathers (Fry, 2023), they are more likely to work part-time due to caregiving responsibilities (Boeckmann, 2015), there are more than five times as many single mothers than single fathers (Livingston, 2018), and women still endure the “motherhood penalty” at work (Correll, Benard and Pail, 2007), believed to be divided in their loyalties between their responsibilities at home and on the job. As even this cursory review of a few telling statistics indicates, parenting is deeply gendered behavior; thus, what happens when we pull back the gender curtain on “invested parenting”? Taking gender into account adds a new perspective to our understanding of how such parenting has evolved. If, as Bandelj maintains, “parenting has become a master status, an aspect of identity that overpowers others,” we are probably not talking about mothering, as scholars have documented how motherhood as a master status long shaped many women's beliefs and practices: for example, how women felt about abortion (Luker, 1984) or managed work-family conflict (Gerson, 1986). Perhaps the issue at stake here is that parental status is becoming a master identity for men, or for some specific populations of women and femme-identified folks (e.g., LGBTQ people for whom legal parenthood has been hard-won, indeed, still the focus of struggle today (NeJaime, 2020; Polikoff, 2009)). Being attuned to gender helps us to usefully refine and specify the claim. Adding gender also helps us to add history in other ways: not just in thinking about when parenting became a newly dominant master identity and for whom, but also in analyzing the interview data, where parents are attesting to a powerful sense of guilt. Bandelj quotes one Latina mother as saying “[And] they can't say that you were not a good parent or that you didn't [give] what [they] needed,” highlighting the woman's sense of social disciplining, of other people's collective monitoring of her mothering. Of course, mothers have been watched and judged for hundreds of years—recall Ehrenreich and English's iconic work For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of Advice to Women (2005/1978). Mothers have long been blamed for perceived social problems—for Black men's underachievement (Hill, 2005); for men's homosexuality in ancient Greece (Slater, 1968/2014; but see Foley, 1975); for a wide variety of psychopathology (Caplan & Hall-McCorquodale, 1985). Knowing this history helps us to see what is at stake here: not just that parents (mothers) are being judged for inadequate parenting (mothering), but rather what counts as adequate parenting at all. Bandelj effectively shows us that what counts as adequate parenting has a new emphasis: this financial provisioning. When we bring gender into the picture, we are inspired to ask new questions: has “adequate mothering” then expanded to include what fathers may have been on the hook for already? This development would be particularly interesting because we know that fathers' involvement in childcare– despite the media's perennial fascination with the New Father—has not changed significantly in the last 2 decades (after dramatic change in the 2 decades before that) (Altintas & Sullivan, 2017). So with the expansion of financial parenting, are mothers are being held to account for what fathers used to do, but not vice versa? Finally, an openness to gender allows to think more deeply about why such trends have taken root. For example, consider the counter-intuitive finding by Suzanne Bianchi that working mothers of the 1990s reported spending more time with their children than nonworking mothers of the 1960s (Bianchi, 2000). One interpretation of this finding is that the standard of adequate parenting ratcheted up despite the massive entry of women—and mothers—into the paid labor force, so that contemporary working women have had to do more to prove themselves adequate parents. Indeed, there is some research to suggest that the convergence of these trends is not a coincidence, but instead reflects the greater social pressure on working mothers to combat allegations of neglect (Damaske, 2011; Hays, 1996). Is it possible that “invested parenting” is yet another example of this cultural backlash against working mothers, that the new onus on parents to provide financially for their children—including “services and produces related to children's education,” which scholars have found remains mothers' primary responsibility (Cooper, 2014)—is about expanding what mothers have to do to prove their family devotion (Blair-Loy, 2003), in the face of societal anxieties stoked by their expanded roles outside of home and family? “The new social life of money for children reflects the new emphasis on long-term investment, not short-term provision and consumption,” Bandelj writes. In making this pronouncement, Bandelj honors a longstanding distinction economists traditionally make between investment—which we might consider spending for tomorrow—and consumption—which we might consider spending for today. But her extensive data actually suggests the phenomenon of invested parenting may extend into both realms, and thus is even more far-reaching that perhaps even she herself recognizes. To make her argument, Bandelj focuses on parents' reliance on 529 plans, Pell grants, and other artifacts of formal education expenditures, arguing that “mortgage and credit card debt trends signal the growing emphasis on long-term investment into children (their schooling, in particular) as opposed to short-term provisions or consumption supported on credit.” She supports this assertion by pointing to intriguing findings: of essentially no major difference in credit card debt held by families with and without children. She concluded that these families do not differ in their consumer spending, but rather in their investments. Yet the equivalences in credit card debt could in fact be hiding spending differences that matter for investment parenting. For example, we know—and Bandelj recounts for us—that “supplementary education offerings” such as tutoring, test prep, coaching, and other services have “exploded,” along with the youth sports industry. Yet these are expenditures that are not paid for via Pell grants or 529 accounts, but rather through regular consumer vehicles, including credit card debt. If these expenditures have indeed expanded precipitously, and yet credit card debt levels do not differ by children in the household, it suggests that families with children are actually spending more on children, and that they are cutting costs in other realms –indeed, that they might even be reducing spending on the adults in the household to cover these expenditures (Plassmann & Norton, 2004). To be able to reckon with the implications here, we might benefit from enlarging the conceptual net with which to catch parenting expenditures beyond simple economic distinctions between consumption and investment. In my 2009 book on childrearing consumption (Pugh, 2009), for example, “pathway consumption” signified “spending on the opportunities that shape children's trajectories,” including contexts like neighborhoods, schools, camps, lessons, and, to be sure, tutoring. Ultimately, if indeed the equivalences in credit card debt are hiding differences in parenting expenditures, it would suggest that the phenomenon Bandelj has identified is even more acute than she reports here. Finally, Bandelj's inclusion of the implications of inequality as part of the “political” components of entanglement are a real contribution to the relational economic sociology tradition. While the notion of “entanglement” is not a conflict theory about, say, why and how landlords or financiers profit off of others' deprivation, Bandelj documents how economic disparities have adverse effects. The most compelling part of the inequality section is what the low-income families are doing; while we know they have long valued education (Lareau, 2003; Swidler, 1986), what is striking here is how they are going into debt to provide it. The structural backdrop to all of this entanglement, the landscape against which invested parenting takes place, is neoliberalism, or what I have elsewhere called “insecurity culture” (Pugh, 2015), specifically the state's withdrawal from the provisioning for needs that then devolved to families and to individuals, and their marketization. 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