NBN Book of the Day Nina Bandelj, "Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Feb 5, 2026
Nina Bandelj, Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at UC Irvine and author of Overinvested, studies how parenting became an emotional and financial project. She traces the historical shift to treating children as priceless investments. The conversation covers skyrocketing tutoring and education costs, parental debt, burnout and gendered emotional labor, the parenting industry, inequality reproduction, and proposals to share responsibility more broadly.
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A Decade Of Research And 120 Interviews
- Bandelj and a research team spent a decade and interviewed 120 parents to capture diverse parenting experiences. They combined interviews with national financial datasets and content analysis of over 100 parenting books.
Children Became Investment Projects
- Parenting shifted from economically useful to emotionally priceless, then to treating children as investment projects. Nina Bandelj argues this new phase frames children as human capital requiring intensive parental inputs.
Money And Emotions Are Intertwined
- The 'emotional economy' links money and intimate parenting decisions, not separating economics from emotions. Bandelj shows parents use finances to express love and to perform relational work for children.
