We take a new look at the role of parenting style and poverty in human development by conceptualizing parenting style as an investment that parents make in the development of their children. Unlike previous researchers, we capture the idea that the investments parents make in their children -including in parenting style -are not only costly in terms of the parents' time and money, but they are also demanding in terms of parents' attention. Thus, parents whose attention is diverted by other things will be less able to invest in their children and adolescents (e.g. to help them with school work, to read to them, to provide a good diet, to monitor their activities, etc.). Finally, we also consider the idea that poverty itself limits parent's attention.We see whether our conceptualization of parenting style, poverty, and child development is likely to be correct by looking at the relationship between parents' parenting style and the development and outcomes of their 18 year old children, captured in the Youth in Focus (YIF) Data. These data combine detailed Centrelink records with extensive survey information from both young people and their parents. We find broad support for our conceptualization of parenting style. In our data we can clearly disentangle parenting style from other more commonly researched aspects of parenting, such as the time and money parents invest in their children. Moreover, parenting style is related to poverty. In particular, poorer parents tend to monitor their young-adult children less than richer parents, even amongst parents that are comparable in other parental aspects of their investment in their children. Parenting style is also related to the young adults' personality development, their behavior, and their schooling outcomes even after accounting for other parental investments. This paper's main contribution is to formalize the complex relation between parenting, poverty, and children's development. Formally modelling the tradeoffs that parents make in raising their childrenas we have done here -is fundamental in the formation of social policy designed to generate better outcomes for disadvantaged children. Such policies are increasingly being enacted by governments across the world in the form of parenting interventions. Evaluations of parenting interventions, however, typically focus only on specific parenting behaviors (e.g. reading to children; monitoring; health care; helping with homework; providing routine; etc.) without considering their consequences for other parental investments. Understanding these tradeoffs is an essential first step in evaluating the overall impact of policies aimed at changing parents' behavior towards their children. Moreover, to the extent that poverty constrains parents' available attention, income transfers that move families out of poverty will not only increase parents' financial resources, but also permit parents to pay more attention into raising their children. The additional attention and financial resources are both expected to result in bett...