Pricing the priceless childcare: Early childhood education for babies and toddlers

This article connects Viviana Zelizer's theory of the social meaning of money to family studies, using the case of American parents’ spending on children. We investigate how money spent on the youngest children—babies and toddlers—reflects the growing expert emphasis on the importance of parental investment in the critical early period for child development. First, we review literature on expert knowledge to trace the shift in increasing emphasis on the importance of building children's cognitive skills through formal education beginning in infancy, offered in center-based care, moving from spaces of “childcare” to “early childhood education” centers. Second, we use quantitative data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (1995–2017) to show that parents have increasingly spent money, and an increasing share of their income, on center-based care for babies and toddlers but not on other child items. Additionally, lower income families have been spending a greater share of their income on center-based care for their infants than other families. We interpret our findings using Zelizer's theory about the cultural influences on the meaning of money, showing how these can be expert-led and persist even when families are faced with structural economic constraints.