Nina Bandelj

Nina Bandelj, UC Irvine sociology professor and author of Overinvested, examines how modern parenting became emotionally and financially intense. She explores why devotion to children feels inevitable. She discusses policy effects on parental well being, the ratchet of competitive parenting, privatized caregiving, and ways communities can reclaim shared care and let kids be bored and independent.

Nina Bandelj, Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at UC Irvine and author of Overinvested, explores how parenting became an all-consuming emotional and financial project. She traces shifts from working children to intensive investment, the rise of tutoring and extracurricular industries, growing parental debt, unequal spending by income, and the social costs of privatized childrearing.

Nina Bandelj, Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at UC Irvine and author of Overinvested, studies how parenting became emotionally and financially all-consuming. She traces the historical shift to treating children as investments. The conversation covers rising childcare and tutoring costs, parental debt, gendered emotional labor, industry pressures to spend, and proposals to rebalance parenting toward shared responsibility.