Parents everywhere need their children to become happy and prosper. However how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. For instance, American and Chinese parents are significantly authoritative and authoritarian, whereas Scandinavian parents tend to be more permissive. How come this?

Through personal anecdotes and first research, Doepke and Zilibotti show that in countries with increasing financial inequality, like the United States, parents push harder to make sure their children about Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise OUR CHILDREN have a path to security and success. Economics offers changed the hands-off parenting of the 1960s and ’70s right into a frantic, overscheduled activity. Developing inequality has also resulted in a growing “parenting gap” between richer and poorer households, raising the troubling prospect of diminished social mobility as well as for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In nations with less economic inequality, such as Sweden, the stakes are much less high, and social mobility is not under threat. Doepke and Zilibotti discuss how opportunities in early years as a child development and the look of education systems element into the parenting formula, and exactly how economics might help form policies that may contribute to the ideal of equal opportunity for all.