UC Irvine

The American parenting economy is built around the notion that raising children is a matter of private parental investment. This essay outlines briefly the features of what is best characterized as, not family-friendly, but rather family-hostile policy in the United States, before it proposes two reasons for why the ideal of parental investment holds its grip. The first is the historical political entanglement of neoliberalism with neoconservatism that continues to entrench the focus on traditional family values. The second is the more recent cultural backdrop of building knowledge infrastructure around “the economic way of looking at parents” to repurpose economist Gary Becker's Nobel Laureate lecture title, which has permeated public discourse and reframed “childrearing” as “parental investment.” Therefore, the possibility of policy change is not simply a matter of political struggle. A potent obstacle to family-friendly policy is cultural. Parents and nonparents will not demand, nor will politicians embrace, radical institutional transformation of the American family policy if we do not shift our thinking. We need less economic reasoning and more sociological imagination, recognizing that parenting, no matter how intimate and personal it seems, is inextricably and thoroughly bound up with social structures and culture. And that raising children—all children in the manner they deserve—is not a matter of private investment but a common responsibility.