External colloquium - November 15 - Anne Gauthier (NIDI)

November 15, 2012, 13:00-14:15, room B136, Boumangebouw

Anne H. Gauthier (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute): Intensive Mothering and Parental Investment into Children: The Experience of Middle-Income Mothers in Canada and the USA

Various recent studies have shown increasing parental investment into children during the past decades. Today’s parents are not only spending more money on their children, but they are also devoting more time to them. The motivations behind this increase in parental investment is however not well understood in the literature. In particular, while economists have suggested that parents invest more in their children in order to produce better ‘quality’ children, sociologists instead point to the emergence of a new parenting ideology focused entirely on their children (intensive parenting). In this paper, I draw from qualitative data from the FIM (Families in the Middle) project in order to shed light on the ideologies and reasoning that motivate parents to invest more in their children. I also explore the various ways in which parents invest in their children as well as the tradeoffs that this investment entails for parents themselves and for the families’ standard-of-living.

Anne H. Gauthier is senior researcher at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) and full professor of sociology at the University of Calgary. Her research interests include comparative children well-being, parental investment into children, and family policy. The paper presented today is done in collaboration with Dr. Shelley Pacholok, University of British Columbia at Okanagan.