A Review of Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti's Love, Money and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids

Lena Edlund

Journal of Economic Literature, 2021, vol. 59, issue 3, 1001-22

Abstract: As Generation X's (born in the 1960s and 1970s) child bearing years draw to a close, its parenting practices are due for assessment, the topic of the book under review. The book organizes its discussion around Diana Baumrind's three parenting styles: authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative. It chronicles the drift toward the two latter and argues that income inequality determines which one of the two will be popular. When inequality is low, less is at stake and the parenting style can be more relaxed. By contrast, high inequality pushes parents toward the achievement-oriented authoritative style. More generally, the book argues, cultural differences in parenting styles can be understood as the outcome of altruistic parents' efforts to prepare their children for adulthood, a useful perspective when parental rights are limited, long the case in the West.

JEL-codes: D13 D63 I20 J12 J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/jel.20201559 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/jel.20201559.ds (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:jeclit:v:59:y:2021:i:3:p:1001-22

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

DOI: 10.1257/jel.20201559

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Literature is currently edited by Steven Durlauf

More articles in Journal of Economic Literature from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().