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Love, Money and Parenting

When did child-rearing become so fraught? An economist looks to his own field for answers.

Parenting was hardly the high-intensity, high-stakes activity that it is today when Matthias Doepke was growing up in Germany.

“My parents expected us to show up for meals, go to school and be home before dark,” he recalls. “But other than that, we had a lot of freedom.”

The Weinberg College economics professor expected that he would raise his children in the same easy-going way. But despite Doepke’s best intentions, that’s not how it has worked out. “The reality is that I am now a much more intensive parent who spends a lot of time on parenting, just like most other American parents today,” he said.

Why is parenting so different between cultures, and so much more fraught than it was just a few decades ago? Doepke and his co-author, Fabrizio Zilibotti of Yale University, explore those questions in their new book Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids (Princeton University Press).

Economics, the authors say, has transformed the hands-off parenting of the ’60s and ’70s into a frantic, overscheduled activity. Parents in countries with rising economic inequality, such as the United States, push harder to ensure their children have a path to security and success.

Meanwhile, parents in nations with lower levels of inequality, like Japan, Germany and the Scandinavian countries, don’t feel the need to push their children with the same degree of intensity.

“If everyone is more or less the same, in a way, there’s more room to relax and let the kids just enjoy themselves and be less frantic about the parenting,” Doepke says.

Doepke and Zilibotti say most parents are doing the right thing, given the economic circumstances their families face. Of greater concern is the persistence of economic inequality, which has created a “parenting gap” between richer and poorer families. As wealthier parents race to secure their children’s futures, those from disadvantaged backgrounds face the disturbing prospect of fewer opportunities and diminished social mobility.

Measures such as free daycare, equal funding for schools, and investments in vocational programs would help reverse the drivers of inequality and create greater opportunities for all students, Doepke and Zilibotti say.

“Change the economic incentives,” they write, “and the helicopter-parent phenomenon will fade away.”

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