Abstract: The talk is based on Bandelj’s new book, which examines how we turned children into financial and emotional investments and child-rearing into laborious work. At the turn of the twentieth century, children went from being economically useful, often working to support families, to being seen by their parents as vulnerable and emotionally priceless. In the new millennium, however, parents have become overinvested in the emotional economy of parenting. Analyzing in-depth interviews with parents, national financial datasets, and decades of child-rearing books reveals how parents today spend, save, and even go into debt for the sake of children. They take on parenting as the hardest but most important job and commit their entire selves to being a good parent. The economization and emotionalization of society work together to drive parental overinvestment, offering a dizzying array of products and platforms to turn children into human capital—from financial instruments to extracurricular programs to therapeutic parenting advice. And yet, the privatization of child-rearing and devotion of parents’ monies, emotions, and souls ultimately hurt the well-being of children, parents, and society, urging us to reimagine children and what it means to raise them.
Nina Bandelj is Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She is an economic sociologist interested in how relational work, emotions, culture and power influence economic processes and has published widely, including in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Nature Human Behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Social Forces and Socio-Economic Review. She is the author of From Communists to Foreign Capitalists (2008) and Economy and State (with Elizabeth Sowers, 2010). Her newest book, Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting, was published in January 2026 with Princeton University Press. Bandelj is President of the Sociological Research Association and Past President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. She was Vice-President of the American Sociological Association, longtime and first woman editor of Socio-Economic Review and the inaugural associate vice provost for faculty development at UC Irvine.