Why Parenting Has Become So Much Harder

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Timothy Carney
The Bible tells us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. And if you have children, you wake up and there are hungry naked people right there in your house. They’re right there for you that the the idea of self sacrifice, the idea of actually desiring the good of another person more than your own comfort or immediate happiness. I think marriage and parenthood both make these things not easy, but easier and simpler and more straightforward.

Collin Hansen
Would you guess that, compared to the 20th century. Dads in the 21st century spend more time with their kids. Okay, how about this that moms work more hours outside the home? That’s probably you know that that’s the case. But let’s try this. Do you know that moms are still spending more time with their kids, even though they’re working more in the 21st century compared to the 20th and that at the same time, family size has shrunk. Well, he put that all together, and Timothy Carney is right. There is something wrong here, and in his new book,”Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder.” published by Harper. He writes this, somehow mom and dad have become full time chauffeurs, Secret Service agents and playmates, while both parents work full time jobs. Carney wants us to know that today’s maximum effort, high anxiety, low trust. Parenting hasn’t produced high quality parenting. He writes this, our culture expects a person more and more to handle his life on his own, stripped of the support, guidance, expectations and meaning traditionally provided by religion, community and extended family, this supposedly liberating modernity makes life a lot harder, absolutely.

Collin Hansen
Well, Carney is a father of six children, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and columnist at the Washington Examiner. He wants to show us a way of life that makes family easier, makes parents less anxious and makes kids happier. Well, Tim, who doesn’t want that. Thanks for joining me on Gospelbound, Tim,

Timothy Carney
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Collin Hansen
Well, we’re gonna explore a lot of things in this conversation, including why American civil society has collapsed in just the past two generations. Kind of the broader backdrop of the story that you tell in this book. But can you identify a moment or a date? Tim, when you believe that our culture became family unfriendly?

Timothy Carney
I mean, I think it’s been a process, and you point to one of the causes there, which is the collapse in civil society, something Robert Putnam famously charted in bowling alone I wrote about in a previous book. But I would say that what you have from the 1960s to the 2000s was one big shift where we became more individualists. Went too far in that direction, where, you know, the whole sexual revolution, including the birth control pill, introduced the idea that every child is a choice that you ought to agonize over, delay, postpone, plan. And so if you made that choice, you’re stuck with it. It’s your kid. It’s not our problem. To help you with it. And at the same time, I remember in the I’m going to throw you a handful of moments here, I remember the 1980s in New York City, when crime was really high and there were a handful of real high, high profile child abductions or disappearances, and that just struck this fear that this could happen to you and will happen to you if you don’t hover over your child at every moment. And then in the last 20 years, one of the things that’s happened in sort of what’s trickled down from the upper middle class to the middle class, is a high intensity parenting, the teaching that well, if you have fewer kids and you give them absolutely everything, then you’re doing your duty to the kids. So you replace the local Little League with the travel sports team, etc. Keep them busy. Don’t, don’t waste their time by letting them idly run around the neighborhood. That’s something that I think really has ramped up in the last 25 years or so.

Collin Hansen
Tim, am I wrong in saying, in response to that series of issues and events, that all of these are unintended consequences, they were not intended consequences. I mean, the birth control pill, obviously it’s intended to give more control of reproduction, but I don’t necessarily think that we would have seen the widespread adaptation toward an entirely different approach to parenting, where, as you pointed out there, the entire conception is, well, we don’t have to help you, because you could, you know what caused that? You could have stopped that from happening.

Timothy Carney
No, and certainly that. I mean. The birth control pill did not drive down out of wedlock births. There’s a lot more of them, and it did drive down marriage rates and the number of babies born to married couples. And I argue in family and friendly, that part of this is about the again, that idea that you just articulated there, well, it’s, your choice. I remember once there was a debate over universal basic income. This is an idea that we kind of just cut everybody a check. Sometimes people say, replace welfare programs where everybody gets a check for $12,000 a year. And I said, Would my family get eight of these checks? This is me, my wife and six kids. And somebody said, No, you and your wife would each get a check if you you chose to spend that money on children. I’m choosing to spend that money on gaming and riding my motorcycle. The government shouldn’t be picking winners or losers, and it’s an argument. I understand. We shouldn’t subsidize motorcycles or boats, but I don’t think that having a kid is like deciding to get a motorcycle or deciding to get a boat, but that notion really has trickled throughout society where we say, well, it’s not our job to help other people raise their kids. And I have a direct quote from a US senator saying that, and that idea is just foreign to all of human history. It has always been seen that bringing in a new generation is the responsibility of society. The parents, the nuclear family, are absolutely 100% the heart and soul of that they the parents have the decisions, but they need and deserve support from the community. And I do think the abandonment of that idea is downstream from a lot of the cultural changes of the 1960s.

Collin Hansen
Sometimes, Tim, when I’m talking about biblical interpretation, I’ll say things like, sometimes things were so obvious or taken for granted that they aren’t explicitly mentioned in Scripture, and that their absence doesn’t mean that scripture has, you know, a modern view on that topic. I wonder if what you’re saying is somewhat analogous there, that the fact that society would expect children and would support children was in some ways so obvious as to not even need to be explicit. But then with these changes you’re identifying since the 1960s it’s like taken for granted that that’s not the case because it wasn’t explicit. Is that kind of what you’re getting at?

Timothy Carney
I think so. And I think that part of the what I argue and I look at subcultures in the US, in places like Israel, and they’re almost all religious subcultures my own, Catholic circles in the Washington, DC area, where it’s just kind of normal to get married, you know, shortly after college, in your early 20s, and it’s just kind of normal to keep going and have 456, 10 kids. And I say pregnancy is contagious, but what I really mean is that you don’t have to make you’re not making some bizarre, extraordinary decision if you get married at age 24 and if you have the fourth kid, or if you have the kid, that causes you to upgrade to the 12 seater van, what we call the Catholic assault vehicle. And we see other people doing it. We see that it’s possible and that what is normal really is a powerful force and but I want to be careful here, because also, as a Catholic, I believe not everybody is called to marriage and parenthood. We have priests, we have nuns, we have all sorts of other calls to sort of lifelong celibacy and singlehood, etc. But so that means that there’s kind of a normal path that you’re expected to take, but you can personally, individually make a decision to go off on another road. Now, I think we’re the opposite. The expected, normal path is this sort of you spend your 20s and 30s as a dude in an extended adolescence, and maybe when you’re pushing 40, you think, Okay, I’m done with the happy hours in the video games. Maybe now I’ll make the decision to settle down once that burden of decisions shifted to will i get married and will I have kids? I think not only did it, it reduced the number of marriages and kids, but it also it increased the sort of psychological burden of having children.

Collin Hansen
By the way, as Protestants, we just call those homeschool vans, it’s interesting that you singled out men with extended adolescents, because I don’t think we’d say, certainly not in DC, that women that would be an extended adolescence. Instead, that’s for grad school, making a lot of money, rising the professional ladder, developing economic independence, and then considering marriage, why would those two scripts be so different?

Timothy Carney
I mean, it really is a story. I mean, I think just that would be a great basis for an article. You should write it. I will. But, but so that career comes first, I think, gets pounded into the head of both men and women in upper middle class and middle class.

Collin Hansen
People go into DC, that’s pretty common in general.

Timothy Carney
But also in here in DC, to sort of give you an insight what being a congressional staffer, for instance, you work on Capitol Hill, and there are happy hours, five, six nights a week that you’re that you can go to. And my wife actually worked on Capitol Hill, and she was about 22 and she was having fun at something, and she was talking to one of her colleagues, who maybe was the legislative director, and she realized he was, like, 38 and she thought, wait a second, I’ve had fun doing this for the last year. I do not want to be doing this for the next 16 years. And she had to, like, like, put the car and break and stop, take a hard right turn and go back and live with her parents to avoid that that track. But, yeah, the career ism and the work ism I talk about, and I think that there is an idea that really is pounded into the heads of a lot of women that you do need to have that financial independence before you can get started. And I quote one woman I interviewed in my book who said I would like to get married and have kids. The obstacle is that if I did that, that would require dialing back from some of my work, which would leave me with some erosion of my skills and connections, and then if my husband left me, I would really be in bad shape, which is not a false story. It’s not a 0% probability, but that so many people are building their lives around worrying about that. What does that mean? It means that independence is the goal. And maybe the reason the stories are different is partly that, you know, men are more likely to use their independence for just sort of frivolous pursuits, and women are more likely to use them for advancing something worthwhile, which is a reason for men and women to get married to join.

Collin Hansen
Quite true. Yes, quite true. I can’t remember, Tim, if you put this in in your book, but it’s one of the most shocking things I’ve seen, probably, in my career. And we wrote about it at the gospel coalition. A survey had gone out about parents expectation for their kids. This would primarily be Gen Z, or, excuse me, Gen X parents, millennial parents. Millennial parents. Maybe there were some boomer parents in there. I can’t remember the survey dates, but when it came to priority for their kids, almost 100% of the focus was I want them to be financially independent. I want them for good jobs. And then when it came to marriage and having kids, these young people’s grandkids, there was almost no priority at all. So it’s easy to focus on the kids in these situations, but it’s plainly evident that the kids are basically doing what their parents told them to do, which is focus on money, focus on career that will bring happiness, and if you feel like it at some point, maybe you get married, maybe you have kids, but it’s really not a priority. Did you talk about it in the book? I can’t remember.

Timothy Carney
I do. And one of the you always wonder what’s going on, like, I would love to sit down and have follow up interviews with a lot of these parents on it, because I I have trouble thinking that it’s just materialism, that it’s just, Oh, I hope my son is as rich as possible. I hope my daughter, I don’t think it is that. I think some of it is a perception of precarity that, like, if you, if you try to go the middle of the road, you might fall off into poverty, that that perceptions really increase, especially among middle class and upper middle class parents, who sort of feel like, wow, I got kind of lucky. I don’t want my kid to fall off the other side of a cliff.

Collin Hansen
A since 2009 in particular.

Timothy Carney
Yes, since the financial crisis, has created this, this perception of that we’re constantly precarious. I think another part of it is not wanting to seem preachy. Now, if you’re a parent, you are supposed to be preachy, and all parents basically accept that you are supposed to dictate certain things, but dictating do your homework, get into as good a college as possible, get a job that seems to be less judgey, less value driven than saying, You know what, what we did, what our friends did, getting married, raising kids, raising them in the church. That’s good. Well, for a religious parents who have that at the Central or their life, that seems very natural. But if you’re less religious, you think, okay, I don’t I don’t want to be too preachy in how to live your life, especially if there’s multiple good options out there.

Collin Hansen
I think that’s a boomer shift. I think that was the boomer parents that shifted in that regard, and certainly I’ve seen that in my my own experience, but that seems to be where that changed. There’s another thing you write in family unfriendly quote, someone has convinced us that parenting should involve much more effort than any generation before us put in. I. My question is, Tim, who’s the someone?

Timothy Carney
I don’t know, the devil?

Collin Hansen
It’s gotta be. That’s an acceptable answer on Gospelbound.

Timothy Carney
So you may have had the same experience in childhood I did, which was, you get on your bike, you’re pulling out of the driveway, and mom says dinner is at 630 be home by then, and this is at 830 in the morning on a summer day. And, you know, and the constant line, the cliche for Gen Xers and older millennials, I think, was when the street lights turn on, that’s when you come home. And the level of freedom implied in that is out the window for most parents, most kids, you have to almost actively choose that, or be lucky enough to end up in a neighborhood or social circle where that’s the norm, because that is not the norm for two reasons. One, fear of safety, some of which, most of which I argue in the book is is overblown. Your child is not likely to get abducted.

Collin Hansen
The milk carton phenomenon, just so people know where that comes from. It’s the milk cartons in the 80s. Go ahead.

Timothy Carney
Yes, and so that one in a million risk of a child abduction gets made to think, well, this is constantly happening, and this will happen to your kid unless you’re constantly vigilant. But also it happens because we want to over program our kids to make sure they have every advantage. We had friends who they we when we lived next to a playground, basically friends who lived on the other side, who we never saw because they, you know, there was school to ballet to violin to dinner to homework to bed, except, you know, after dinner on Sundays, maybe they can get together. And so there’s that. But then there’s also, in addition to the fear, the over programming. There’s also stuff like the built environment. I talk about walkability, bike ability. I mean, even where we live, we let our kids ride and walk around the neighborhood, but there aren’t sidewalks in part of it, like, come on, how are you building a place that’s totally car dependent? Because what is car dependent means? It means that the kids are largely parent dependent, and that’s a drag for parents, and it’s a big drag for kids, and that lack of independent play really is harmful. I cite op eds by a pediatrician saying, Yeah, I think there’s a childhood anxiety epidemic, and the root cause is the lack of kids just running around the neighborhood.

Collin Hansen
And ironically, Tim, those kids then grow up and don’t want to drive because they haven’t had independence, so that car built environment ends up collapsing on itself. Tim, are these trends on parenting, particular to the United States or the West?

Timothy Carney
Well, some of them are and some of them aren’t. So I talk about the birth rate, I think, I mean, that’s a great place where, you know, we should probably mention it by now at least, that we’ve gone from 2.1 babies per woman in 2006 when my wife and I started a family, down to 1.62 that is from the level the replacement level down to well below it. Other countries, wealthy countries in Europe, Northern Europe and southern Europe in in East Asia, they have all had the same sort of collapse down to well below the replacement level. And I think that economics has something to do with it. I think culture is the main explanation. And in some of these cultures, it is work ism certainly in Asia, certainly in Northern Europe, where you see the government try to help families by saying, Okay, here’s universal daycare. And what does that do? That just makes everybody more work centric and less family centric, and then, and so that work ism where work replaces God and family. That’s a huge cause that’s not present in all the culture. So in some places, it’s a lack of men having ambition. I think that’s Southern Europe. I think that’s true in part in some subcultures in the US, where men are, as I’m saying, are in this perpetual adolescence. So there are cultural differences across all of these. The walkability is true in some places. I think that’s mostly a problem in the US. The common thread culturally, I would argue, is what I call civilizational sadness, that is a belief that we’re not good. You ask yourself, you know, are we generally good? Well, I think the Christian answer is, we are good, but fallen. I think that, you know, we we ultimately made in the image of God and that humans are something to celebrate. And I don’t think that that is the modern secular answer. I think the modern secular answer went from being, well, well, you are whatever you want, just be yourself, let your freak flag fly, to now being you are 52 tons of carbon dioxide. You are fundamentally racist, you and that that argument. And then, frankly, if you spend any significant time on social media, and sometimes I spend too much time on Twitter, you have trouble believing that the human race is good, and you start to feel really bad about yourself. And so, I mean, I’m not. I think all. Of those things have convinced and so that’s the thread from the US to Germany to Italy to Japan, is Well, are we good? And for a lot of people, the answer is, No, I don’t think we’re good.

Collin Hansen
So is abortion a cause or a result of this infertility decline?

Timothy Carney
So almost all of these things, I always say that causality goes both ways, but there an abortion rebound started before COVID. You know, it was falling for for decades, right? And it started, and the rebound was mostly concentrated among married women already in their 30s. So that’s still a minority of abortions, but it started there, and so to me, that was saying abortion was shifting from desperate women facing a pregnancy with nobody to support them, making the wrong decision in a horrible situation, to a sadder, almost story of people who could theoretically raise a kid and just decide, well, no, it’s not, it’s not a good thing to bring to let this child come to this world.

Collin Hansen
Well, what do you we’ve been talking about this already. My guest Timothy Carney, talking about family unfriendly, how our culture made raising kids much harder. We’re talking about this family breakdown. See, in the West, especially in the United States, since the 1960s but what do you see as the biggest reason behind that? Because answering that question, I think, helps us know what to do today or what to focus on. I’m wondering, is it primarily a matter of secularism, or a secularism kind of downstream from some other change? Because one of the themes of your book is that the more religious, the highly observant. And it’s not unique to a particular religious tradition. That tends to be the case within Christianity, whether it’s Catholic or Protestant. Also happens to be the case with Mormons. I believe it’s also the case with Muslims. That’s certainly the case around the world, no doubt. And so there clearly is it’s kind of a It’s not that the entire, I mean, yes, the aggregate is going down when it comes to family breakdown and fertility rates and all that sort of stuff. But as you point out, there’s all these different subcultural differentiation, and it’s almost always religious. I’m actually not sure. Are there any examples that aren’t religious?

Timothy Carney
There is nowhere you could find a significant group of people having more than three kids, say, who aren’t regular churchgoers or, I mean, you can find individuals, but I’d be surprised how many individuals you would find who, as a married couple, had more than five kids outside of a religious community, Orthodox Jews. I should mention, yes, Orthodox Jews, absolutely. And so they, they play a big role in family and friendly because I used to live in a neighborhood right next to where there were two orthodox synagogues and and got to know that neighborhood decently well. And they just that talk about letting the kids run around. I mean, well, you don’t even drive on Saturday like there were. There are people who would describe coming into their house, looking down, seeing like six pairs of shoes and knowing they didn’t belong to any of their children. So their children were at somebody else’s house, and these six kids were at their house. And so, I mean, mathematically, you could describe almost all of the birth rate decline by saying religious people have more children, and America is becoming less religious, and that that the reason that I would put that at the root cause is that all the different things I point to in the book are sort of secular changes that secularism has brought on the society. So the belief that your child’s achievement determines his or her value is a rejection of the idea that were made in the image of God and that humans have infinite value, the idea that you can’t, that you don’t have an obligation to help your children raise their kids, is a rejection of the commandment to love your neighbor. The idea the the idea that we’re fundamentally bad, I think, is a rejection of, again, those ideas, and in general, the hyper individualism, the sexual revolution. A lot of these were fruits of secularism, but also community. For the you know, married, college educated, upper middle class, secular people, they’re still likely to to have community. I wrote about this in my previous book, family and friendly. Robert Putnam and bowling alone. Charles Murray in coming apart talked about this. So there is still pretty strong communities. If you go to these sort of wealthy, mostly secular, people still leave their their kids still leave their bikes on the front lawn, etc. There’s a thriving little league where, you know the dads are all volunteering to coach, etc, but for the most part, and especially for the middle class and the working class community in America, has always meant church, and so that collapse in church going has meant a collapse in community and belonging for the middle class and the working class. So when you look at low. Marriage rates and high divorce rates among the working class. I think you chalk that up to a de churchifying of the working class, not because the the sermons from you know, Pastor brown were so convincing that you should stay together, but that the community support the modeling of the couple that’s 10 years older, the advice, the mentoring, the norms, the babysitting, the things for your kids to do, et cetera that was so valuable and that has been lost. So even that collapse in community support we were talking about earlier, that is downstream from the secularization, the unchurchifying of American culture.

Collin Hansen
So is there an economic and political argument then that we need to engage here, because you’re mentioning class dynamics in there. So I guess we could go a couple different branches. We can go the branch of, are we blaming NAFTA for this? Are we blaming the breakdown of kind of labor unions and kind of high you know? Or are we, on the other hand, blaming government intervention. Government came in too hard and gave to give away too much, and that created government dependence, which brought people away from dependence on their community and church, and then it incentivized family breakdown as well. Is there an economic political argument we need to bring in?

Timothy Carney
There’s certainly, I mean, I’m much better at diagnosing the problems and prescribing solutions. And I don’t mean to sound too cynical in that I really admire the other type of people who will prescribe the solutions, and we can talk about some of them, but on the trade thing, I do believe that factory jobs were a great pro family force in the 50s and 60s and 70s, and I say in those decades, because it’s easy for us to think that that was just sort of the norm, and then it got broken up by NAFTA. No. World War Two created this situation where the you the a lot of the men got training in the military. Europe’s economy was in shambles, and so we had to provide for everybody. So it was really easy, especially if you were like a white guy outside of Pittsburgh, it was really easy for you to get a job with no college education. Count on that job lasting for 30 years. And one of the things I wrote about in my book was talking to this guy who just got laid off from a factory, and he was talking about how surprised he was, this was in 2005 how surprised he was that they asked him when he started, if he had experience. He’s like, this is basically unskilled labor. I thought you’re just going to train me in a morning. What is the what is the skills that you need? What experience? And the hiring guy said, Do you have experience showing up on time every day. Do you have experience working to the whistle? Do you have the experience doing what you’re told, even if it’s boring, for a long amount of not being on drugs, not being on drugs? And I realize years later, all of those sort of unskilled skills were the skills I needed to be a dad, right? Like I didn’t have to get a PhD, like diaper changing and baby swaddling and doing whatever my wife needed me to do, like those were just basic virtues of being a reliable person. That anybody can have those skills, but not everybody does have those skills. So that’s one way and just having the working class, reliable job really was a way to turn most men into good husbands and dads, and so losing that was was definitely part of it. Again. I’m not confident that the right trade policy could bring those back, but I anybody who says, Oh, well, there was nothing particularly great about that period is wrong. It really was a pro family situation to have that you talked about welfare. Certainly welfare, pre 1990s was an anti family force. Now it’s more complicated, and this is something I try to balance in family and friendly when I talk about, Well, should we increase aid to family. Should we increase a child tax credit? And I argue that some level of a child tax credit, a little bigger than we have now, is fundamental fairness. But I also say, well, at some point you discourage work. Now, is that bad or good? It depends if you have a married couple, and they get a little more money and then mom or dad is able to work less. That’s good. It’s not good for the GDP, but it’s good for the society. It’s good for the parents and kids. If you have a single mom and you just and you discourage work, is that good? There’s no good answer to that question. It’s it’s bad to not have a parent around because they’re always working. It’s bad to not have an example of a working parent. Once you’re in that situation of a single mom, there is no good answer and what the right policy is, is a really, really difficult question.

Collin Hansen
I think just backdrop here for people who are watching or listening, they just need to recognize that these debates have been happening for a long time. I mean, especially and they’ve been focusing on. The economic sphere. I think what’s changed more recently, and I think people like guests I’ve had here on this podcast before, Jonathan Haidt, Gene twangy and many others, have helped us to shift the conversation toward culture, to recognize that there’s a cultural issue going on here that is not merely downstream from some sort of political or economic enactment, because that’s related to the solutions. We can talk about policies that would be better or worse. But where we’ve seen this around the world, they haven’t had, it hasn’t always worked, and in fact, it’s rarely worked in terms of making major economic or political changes, and––

Timothy Carney
Economic policy trying to or potential government policy trying to reverse a falling birth rate or parental stress or childhood anxiety. There’s no great example of that work. And a lot of these countries have really tried much harder than, I think we’re even talkin about.

Collin Hansen
Nordic countries especially. And just before, you know, we started this podcast. Brad Wilcox, who comes up often in these interviews on gospel bound, just posted that Nordic countries have reported, they’ve fallen right back.

Timothy Carney
Yep and part of the reason that I discuss in the book is that their approach of they said, Okay, family and work are intention and there are massive trade offs, absolutely correct. So we’re going to solve it minimizing the trade offs between family and work by relieving parents of having to raise their kids. Well, I mean, what that that really fosters? One study by Lyman stone at the Institute for Family Studies. He said that 10 years later, all of those cultures that did that they all valued work more than they had before, and they valued family less than they had before.

Collin Hansen
They also, by because of their culture, dictate that there can be no difference between the father and mother, that that’s a cultural value that they have to impose on the situation, which also, in the end, ends up creating more of a focus in the aggregate on work, because there’s no particular intrinsic value to either father or mother.

Speaker 1
And we try to turn women into company men with these policies. Now I argue that I make a feminist argument that argues there should be more equality on a lot of family things, and I say, instead of turning women into company men, we need to turn more company men into family guys, family guys, yeah, and just be, be the if, be the guy who says, it’s five o’clock, I gotta go. My family needs me. That sort of leadership. And I’ve always worked in conservative institutions, Washington Examiner, American Enterprise Institute, and I’ve always had bosses who said that sort of thing, who told me, your family is more important than this job, and that that was really important having policies that do that, and that I there’s this sort of old thing, I think a little inherited from the boomer. Some of my friends once, one guy said we’re a bunch of dudes standing around. He’s like, Oh, my only job is to earn the paycheck and pay the mortgage. And I said, That’s not true, Dave, like I saw you the other day pushing, pulling your kids in a wagon to the playground. Okay, you coach your your daughter in in basketball, like you’re saying that, because you feel like it’s the macho thing to say. And so that’s sort of my feminist argument is Dad’s just leading with being a dad. I’m a dad. First, I’m a writer. Second, you know that sort of discussion of your occupation? That’s the kind of feminism we need, not the kind of feminism that says we’re going to turn you all into brass tacks, girl bosses. Who do do what’s productive for the GDP?

Collin Hansen
Well, Tim, I’ve lived in a lot of different places, DC, New York, Chicago. Grew up on a farm in South Dakota. Now LIVE in Birmingham, Alabama, and what you’re describing, culture wise, the community where I live is an interesting mixture of every single thing that you’re trying to commend. It’s a high religious environment. It’s also a highly conservative environment. It’s one of the most educated communities in America. It’s also one of the highest income communities in America. And one of the thing, first thing I noticed when I came here as a dad, is that nobody thought anything of expecting all of the dads to knock off at four or five o’clock to show up for their first grade or kindergarten T ball practice and be there for the whole thing. I’ll never forget last year in football, a friend of mine’s third grade football, a friend of mine rushing in and his son was probably 510 minutes late, something like that, which was kind of a big deal. You weren’t supposed to be late. I mean, it’s not a big deal, but kind of a big deal. It rushes in, and I look at him, and I’m like, and he says, Yeah, I had to leave work early, but I left it to my colleagues. I looked at him, and I said, You’re a neurosurgeon.

Timothy Carney
Whose brain did you leave to your colleagues?

Collin Hansen
That’s right. It’s like, ah, the nurses have got it under control. I was fine, but it was such pressure for him to leave to get his kid to the football practice because we were in the playoffs. We were heading toward the Super Bowl titled third grade tackle football. But I just noticed that there was, there’s a totally different value here on the involvement of the dads in the community. And then there is in my experience with the subcultures I was in in New York or Chicago, where the dads were routinely working 6789, o’clock at night. No. And as a culture thing, it’s not an Yes, it’s some economics, but I’ve lived in similar places with education economics, and they don’t have the same culture.

Timothy Carney
Yeah, and it’s hard sometimes to predict what’s going to dictate culture. I will say you do have to be on guard against the way to hyper sports culture. That’s That’s chapter one in the book.

Collin Hansen
We have that issue. And then the hyper involvement you have to be able to achieve culture. We have that problem.

Timothy Carney
And I don’t think, I don’t think you should have to attend, certainly not practice. But when I said pretty intense, family and friendly starts with a T ball program that I sort of stumbled into and realized we were all there at Friday Night on the field at St Bernadette’s, and that. Then suddenly all the parents were talking to each other, and the little kids all ran off to the playground, and it became this giant social thing. And I just thought, this is this idyllic thing, and I love baseball, so I would sit on a bench up on top of a hill chatting with another parent until my son came up, because it was first grade baseball, so it wasn’t gonna be great baseball. I just wanted to cheer wanted to cheer for Charlie when he got up. And then realized, like it didn’t actually matter what happened in the game and so, but that was such an oasis that I realized we had to create and replicate that, and create these situations where we’re trying to get as the priest in my parish put it a place where you can bring your children and ignore them while you have fun with other adults, and that that was part of what was needed. So greater paternal involvement is a big part of what I write about. But at the same time, an intention with that is that kids being left alone and parents not parents. Actually having friends is really important. I bet if you were to interview young adults who don’t want kids, I bet disproportionately, they would say that their parents lived isolated lives. I agree. And I think if you look at my oldest, who has indicated that she basically wants to do what we’re doing, like get married, have a bunch of kids, have a bunch of backyard barbecues, go to church. It’s because she sees that we have fun lives that are having kids brings us together with other families, instead of making us hunker down and drive for maximum achievement of our children.

Collin Hansen
The 23 year olds who don’t want to get married and don’t want to have kids were not that long ago, the 14 year olds whose parents were running ragged to every single thing that you described in there. So it’s logical that they would not want their parents lives.

Timothy Carney
And their parents that were driving home a message when I talk about the travel sport trap, I talk about these studies showing that the specializers, the kids who for 12 months out of the year, are doing one sport really intensely, they end up with a lower sense of their own worth, their lower sense of their own sports achievement, but just human worth, and part of it is their parents accidentally and trying to give them the best of everything signaled to them. Well, what really matters to us is that you are a great goalie at field hockey, and then you get up to this higher level and you realize there’s 10 other girls my age who are better field hockey goalies than me, which is good to realize that you’re not the best, but it’s depressing when you’ve been sent this message that this is where your value is.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a few more questions here with Tim Carney talking about family unfriendly, how our culture made raising kids much harder. Last survey I saw even, and I think we’ve had something of a breakthrough even this presidential campaign, there’s been more talk than I’ve ever seen before about family policy, about infertility, fertility rates, all this sort of stuff. Family formation. I’ve never seen this discussion reach this level, and yet, the last survey I saw most by far, more people still thought we have too many kids, not too few kids, but too many kids. That 1980s over population propaganda that turned out to be completely false. I just still, still think it’s lodging people’s minds in addition to everything you’re talking about here. So I’m going to ask the question that comes out of those, those folks. Yes, why should our society care about what you’re writing about? Wouldn’t there be some positives for a society with fewer children?

Timothy Carney
I mean, so that’s absolutely the question I get. And I quote people when I was working on this book, asking me on Twitter, like, Why do you care? Are you trying a are you trying to control women’s bodies or whatever. And I point out a 2.7 that’s the the average we get when people ask, what is the ideal number of children to have? Now I wish it was higher, but it’s actually on the way up. But that’s not the main thing. The main thing I’m right about is the difference between that 2.7 and the 1.6 we’re already having. So we are failing as a culture if we have that big of a deficit in something that’s so important as family. But then, as far as the benefits of a shrinking population there, there would be some I mean, so right now, think about the current 12 year olds when they’re in the labor market. 10 years from now, unemployment is going to be pretty close to zero, because way up, salaries are going to be up because there’s going to be so many retirees, the more retirees than ever, and fewer workers than ever. The working age population, even with our immigration rates, working age population is going to start shrinking in the next few years, and so they’ll see higher wages, unemployment will be very low. The flip side of their taxes too. Flip side of that benefit is higher, higher taxes and just inflation and and longer wait times there’s not somebody you know, you and I, when we’re, you know, too old to do a home repair, call somebody say, Hey, I’ve got this leaky sink. Okay, yeah, I’ll come in 12 days, and they’ll be able to charge whatever they want. And then I one of the big the main ways in which economics is contributing to the baby bus is the cost of buying a home has gone so far up, and so about 30 years from now, maybe it’ll turn around. Because the problem is the millennials are the biggest generation, so for the next few years, they’ll still be buying homes. But then as the people in the generations that are shrinking, which, again, I put, you know, around age 12, 1314, as they become the prime house buying generation, you will see, so now we’re talking 1820, years from now, I guess you will see a slight downward pressure on home prices. And so theoretically, there could be a very delayed, offsetting thing. But the problem with there’s a problem with that theory. Look at Japan as these small towns got so small that they couldn’t even support basically like a sewer and water infrastructure. Everybody moved into Tokyo, and Tokyo did a great job of building a ton of apartment buildings so that housing prices didn’t go too high. But then what happened? Everybody started living in apartments. And that’s not that ends up not being pro family, not family. And so it’s possible that, you know, when the population is really shrinking, 20 and 30 years from now, it’ll be more affordable for people buy a house in the suburbs and raise kids. That’s the possible positive upside I can see about this, but watching what’s happening countries that are 30 years ahead of us, that’s not the way their populations reacted.

Collin Hansen
How did the sexual revolution give us a sexual recession?

Timothy Carney
Yeah, so this is one of the things I wouldn’t have predicted. You know that 20 years from now, we would be worried about like young people not getting together enough, but if they so, I quote one woman in the book saying, yes, there’s hook up culture on college campuses, but that’s really a lack of relationship culture. They’ve men and women have forgotten how to get to know each other, how to have relationships, both friendships and romantic relationships. And so I argue that one of the things is that the the normalization of casual sex has created this situation where people are afraid to go on dates. Yeah, if you a girl says, I don’t want it to be that if I say yes to dinner, I’m saying yes to a lot more and maybe really freaky stuff, but that’s the way a lot of them feel because of that normalization. So the result is less states, and less getting together, and less getting married, and then the hyper individualism implied by the sexual revolution. Means, well, autonomy is the only good if you’re married, you know that you’re giving up a lot of your autonomy. You don’t wake up every morning and say, You know what? I do want to say married to you today, it’s a lifelong commitment, and it’s even more so with children and so and then finally, as I we argued earlier the I think that the normalization of the birth control pill and all of that made it so that people don’t feel any obligation to help other people raise their kids.

Collin Hansen
Well related to this four years ago, David bro Brooks wrote a Brock blockbuster article arguing that the nuclear family was a mistake. Now, Tim, I I doubt you would frame your argument the same way that he did, but. Explain your view on the shift from extended families toward the nuclear family, and how it’s contributed to your concerns.

Timothy Carney
Part of what Brooks was talking about in that article was just saying the nuclear family can’t survive on its own right, and I say this as somebody who believes so firmly from my own childhood and a really tight knit nuclear family and my own adult life, where it’s it’s what I primarily identify as, as a husband and a dad, that’s like saying the heart or the brain are the most important organ, fine, but they can’t exist on their own. They need to be supported. You need cousins. You need in laws. You need grandparents. In fact, the contribution when one study looked at when you have a first kid, are you more or less likely to have a second kid? Given various factors, having affordable daycare didn’t actually make you more likely to have the second kid. That surprised me, having help from your mom or your mother in law did make you much more likely to have that kid. We talk about how our younger my wife’s younger sisters did so much babysitting when our kids were younger, and now those same kids of ours are babysitting for their nieces, and, I mean, for their cousins, my nieces and nephews. And so the way that that works, the modeling, the the advice, the the commiserating, oh my gosh, I got woken up again. Why is a six year old reverting all of that that’s so important for parents, extended family is the best. And then the second best is going to be tight knit communities that provide that.

Collin Hansen
Couple more questions here, and this one kind of too hard on yourself saying you don’t have any solutions. Because I do think some of the best parts of the book are related to some of the some of the not solutions, but recommendations or examples that you allow. So I’m just wondering here, what’s the best thing churches could do right now to help encourage families? Because I think a few options here, and the real answer, I’m sure, is all of the above. But I’d love to love you to identify where you want to focus. We can set up singles to marry. We can help them to do that. Date nights for parents. You already referenced your family. Fridays with games and food, direct teaching on the biblical importance of family. Where do you want to go with that?

Timothy Carney
I mean, I think all of those are important. And just starting from, you know how sometimes, like nowadays, corporate America feels they have to put, like a climate impact statement in there. And some people like climate leads on everything, I think we need to put family there. And you pointed to help people get married. Help married people have kids. Help people stay married and not murder their kids when their kids are driving them crazy, and a local congregation providing sort of material support, what we Catholics call the corporal works of mercy Ministries for supporting the not yet married, the married those who have kids, and then the Teenagers, et cetera, that that is all important. If, if you were to ask me to emphasize just one of them, I would say that, yeah, the helping families get together in ways that provide both mixed age play, but also parents having connection the isolation of, you know, suburban middle class, upper middle class, parenthood is one of the real curses.

Collin Hansen
So that’s where the date night might not be helpful.

Timothy Carney
So date night is good. Date Night is good, but also like trivia night, and then you provide babysitting. So we have Catholic trivia night at my local parish, and so we get together, and it’s like 12 of us at a table after a little reception with snacks, and if you also provide babysitting there, then all of a sudden you’re, you know.

Collin Hansen
So, is it trivia on Catholic things or just Catholics doing trivia?

Timothy Carney
It’s both and so like, was it Pope Leo the second or Pope Leo the first? Yes.

Collin Hansen
Okay, very good. Well, that’s I do commend people in the book to check out the family Fridays was one of the most helpful things. I’m so glad.

Timothy Carney
And it’s right in the first section. So yeah.

Collin Hansen
Right away. And I appreciate you mentioning that that is the alternative to what I was talking about earlier, with the positives in our community, but yes, the thing that goes along with general wealth in a community and education is a tendency to over program. You just have, you have parents who are, they’ve gotten ahead in life by being very responsible, and they intend to pass that along. But it’s not replicable, necessarily, and it’s not even ideal family. Family Fridays offer a good alternative, good good example that any church, I think could pretty much implement. Last question is, why do you say parenting is a cheat code?

Timothy Carney
So I’m glad you asked that, because that probably should have been my answer to the previous questions. Uh, the Bible tells us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. And if you have children, you wake up and there are hungry naked people right there in your house. They’re they’re right there for you that the the idea of self sacrifice, the idea of actually desiring the good of another person more than your own comfort or immediate happiness. There are people who pull that off naturally. There are natural saints like that. But for me, it took marriage for me to first want to, you know, subordinate myself to my wife and rank her number one, and then children sort of makes that more natural where your happiness is actually rooted in their happiness. So these good traits that come to us, I think marriage and parenthood both make these things not easy, but easier and simpler and more straightforward.

Collin Hansen
We just had an event with the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, which I lead. We did an event with Ross Douthat in New York City, and one of the things we talked about with marriage and singleness, and he mentioned how within within the Catholic Church, there are they’re both opportunities, are commended. That’s something that we Protestants sometimes have a challenge with, because as soon as we commend the one, it seems like we’re forsaking the other in there. And so it’s a good way to understand that there are there’s a dignity to both vocations. There’s a dignity to both callings, their advantages and disadvantages. But generally speaking, there are not many voices right now commending a lot of the wisdom that has been taken for granted in the past about parenting.

Timothy Carney
Exactly.

Collin Hansen
Well, one of the places you can find that wisdom, Timothy Carney’s new book, “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder.” Tim, you’ve been a great guest. Thanks for joining me on Gospelbound.

Timothy Carney
Thank you. My pleasure.