Parents from all social backgrounds nowadays invest both more money and more time in raising their kids than was true a generation ago. The increased parental investments are focused on experiences (especially enriched care for preschoolers) that foster cognitive and socioemotional development. However, college-educated parents have increased their investments of both money and time much more rapidly than less affluent parents—and not just at the dinner table, as we shall shortly see.
These increased investments in child development have come mostly at the expense of other aspects of home life (such as adult personal care, housekeeping, and consumer goods). Parents in all classes have been cutting back elsewhere to focus their resources on their kids, but because affluent, educated families have not only more money but also more time (because they typically split child care between two parents), they have been able to increase their investments much faster than poor parents (usually single moms). As a result, the class gap in investments in kids has become wider and wider.
To better understand what is happening, let’s take a closer look at the ways in which parents from different classes devote money and time to their children.
On average, parents from all socioeconomic strata have increased their spending on child care and education over the past five decades. But that spending, always somewhat unequal, has become steadily more unequal over the decades. (See Figure 3.4.) In fact, after the mid-1980s the very lowest income families began to spend less in absolute terms, mostly (but not entirely) because they had less to spend, while higher-income families continued to spend more, partly (but only partly) because they had more to spend. Between 1983 and 2007, spending per child by families in the top tenth of the income distribution increased by 75 percent in real dollars, compared to a drop of 22 percent in the bottom tenth. By 2007, the average child of parents in the top tenth of the economic hierarchy was the beneficiary of about $6,600 a year in enrichment spending: nine times the amount (about $750) spent annually on a child of parents in the bottom tenth of the income hierarchy.
The increase was concentrated in spending on private education and child care, but a class gap in spending is also visible for music lessons, summer camp, travel, school supplies, books, computers, extracurricular activities, recreation, and leisure. Moreover, even if income is held constant, disparities by parental education also appear to be high and growing. This means that children of affluent and educated parents (like Desmond and Andrew) have been getting a double dip, while children of poorer and less educated parents (like Michelle and Kayla) have been getting a double whammy.60
These differences in parental investment, in turn, are strong predictors of children’s cognitive development.61 In fact, the biggest increases in parental spending are concentrated in the preschool and college years: the two periods of development that we now know are especially important in determining upward mobility. Parents who can afford it are privately investing in these stages, providing their kids with great advantages in life—but as a society we have yet to invest adequately in those years, and instead devote most of our public resources to the K–12 years. (We shall explore class differences in schooling in the next chapter.)