Everything goes to my children: the parental investment of middle-income families in Canada and the USA

Parental investment into children has increased substantially in the past decades. Not only do today’s parents devote more time to their children than in the past, but there is evidence that they also spend more money on their children. And while economists have explained this change as a quantity-quality tradeoff, sociologists have explained it as being part of a new parenting ideology aimed at securing the future of their children in the context of an increasingly uncertain economy.

In this paper, we use qualitative and quantitative data collected as part of the Families in the Middle project to examine the parental investment of middle-income parents in Canada and the USA. Our inquiry is two-fold: we first analyze the various ways in which parents invest in their children, the reasons that appear to motivate parents to invest in their children as well as their related constraints. Second, we examine the role of national context by comparing and contrasting the patterns of parental investment of Canadian and American families. Considering the large differences between these two countries in their public investment in children, we ask whether these contextual differences are associated with different levels and styles of private investment into children.