The Priceless Child Turns Twenty-seven

Children’s economic worlds have long baffled and divided specialists as well as lay observers. While at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States the battles centered on the producing child, the twenty-first century worries mostly about the consumer child. Are children being morally debilitated by excessive consumption? Should parents resist their children’s demands for toys, sweets, and ever-multiplying electronic wonders? If children receive an allowance, should they be able to decide how to spend the money? Different versions of such questions, to be sure, perplexed parents as early as the nineteenth century, when they might worry, for instance, that their employed child “fooled” away their earnings on consumer goods rather than handing the money over to the household.¹ But the explosion of consumer goods has multiplied parental concerns. Meanwhile, children keep getting more expensive: the cost of raising a child born in 2010 to a middle-class US family to the age of seventeen is estimated at over $220,000.

Close to three decades ago, in Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, I set out to investigate the changing economics of childhood. Now twenty-seven years old, the “priceless child” has officially become a grown-up. Since its publication, the book has brought me a great deal of joy by connecting me to childhood specialists around the world working on similar problems from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, legal studies, and more. (A couple of years ago, Pricing received an unexpected distinction: It was selected by Sociology for Dummies as one of the ten sociology books that “don’t feel like homework”!)²

I am immensely fortunate that a group of eminent scholars in history and sociology have come together to celebrate the book’s birthday and reflect on that early effort. Each of the contributors to this symposium (which originated at a Social Science History Association session in 2011), Daniel Cook, Paula Fass, Linda Gordon, Michael Katz, Birgitte Søland, and Barrie Thorne, have advanced the field of childhood with their own memorable books and influential essays. I am honored and grateful for their participation in revisiting Pricing the Priceless Child.³

My own paper first offers a few reflections on the book’s past; second, it advocates a closer exchange between childhood experts and economic sociologists; and third, focusing on the case of consumption, it identifies four areas of research for potential interdisciplinary collaboration in the investigation of child consumption.

First, about the “birth” of the “priceless child.” It was unplanned! I wandered into children’s history almost by accident. In the late 1970s, I had finished a book, drawn from my dissertation, documenting American resistance to life insurance. It focused among other things on the moral and cultural problem of pricing life and death. In one of the many industry histories I read I had noticed an obscure footnote referring to an intense turn-of-the-twentieth-century controversy about the insurance of children’s lives.

Curious about how issues of monetary valuation applied to children’s lives, I investigated the dispute. After a frustrated effort to find archival materials at the Prudential Life Insurance company (a fire had ruined their files), I was fortunate to find a resourceful elderly librarian—just about to retire—at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company who magically unearthed a large set of documents about children’s life insurance.

Studying children’s life insurance drew me into the broader analysis of changes in children’s economic and sentimental value. I remained intrigued by the question, How do we go about setting economic equivalents for people or objects defined beyond economic value? To answer the question, I focused largely on adults’ changing valuation of children in the United States between the 1870s and 1930s, the emergence of what I called the economically useless, but emotionally priceless child. In the book, partly because of the absence of historical sources, I could not reach far into how children’s own experiences and interactions changed.

Pricing the Priceless Child centers on the construction of collective standards for valuation...