The Investment Child: Trends in Financial Activities by Parents for Children

• In Event: 3224 - The Meanings of Money, Property, and Relationships

Abstract

We argue that financialization has contributed to treating children as an investment project. Children have become targets of parental emotional, cultural and financial resources, with parents preoccupied to secure their children’s economic future. Using SCF and NCES data between 1989 to 2016, we document financial activities that broadly indicate the rise of an “investment child,” including attitudes about leaving an inheritance to children, co-ownership of financial assets with children, indebtedness of households with children, and taking on parent loans to support college education for children, which all show increasing trends over time. Our inquiry bridges the common divide between family concerns over children, on the one hand, and the functioning of financial markets, on the other hand. Pointing to how parents earmark different monies, including debt, to invest in children, we expose how features of the new economy - stiff competition, economic insecurity, financialization, and paramount knowledge investment - infiltrate intimate lives of families, all the while the resultant moral and political economy of parenting actually perpetuates financialization.

Authors

• Nina Bandelj, University of California-Irvine

• Angelina Grigoryeva, Harvard University