Love, Money & Parenting

Parents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. For instance, American and Chinese parents are increasingly authoritative and authoritarian, whereas Scandinavian parents tend to be more permissive. Why?

Love, Money and Parenting investigates how economic forces and growing inequality shape how parents raise their children. From medieval times to the present, and from the US, the UK, Germany, Italy,

Spain, and Sweden to China and Japan, Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti look at how economic incentives and constraints — such as money, knowledge, and time — influence parenting practices and what is considered good parenting in different countries, says a review on the Princeton University Press website. Through personal anecdotes and original research, the authors show that in countries with increasing economic inequality, such as the US, parents push harder to ensure their children have a path to security and success.