HarperCollins, in contrast to so much of the “curated” publishing industry, is promoting real discussion about real issues facing America and her long-term welfare. In February, it published Brad Wilcox’s Get Married!, a book not just enumerating but refuting many of the myths responsible for why Americans delay marriage and why American culture marginalizes it. HarperCollins has followed up with another excellent book: Timothy P. Carney’s Family Unfriendly.
These books form a valuable pair because the problems they address, while independent, are interrelated. The first problem is getting people to take the marital leap. More and more people either defer it, resort to counterfeits, or ignore it altogether.
But even once they make that leap, many find an even greater hurdle facing them: turning the couple into a family—that is, having children. Moving from a couple to a family is, increasingly, a second great leap forward.
But people have always been having children and raising families, even large families. Why, then, does this seem so daunting a challenge today?
It’s the culture, stupid
Carney’s book is a superbly written tour de force contending that multiple cumulative socio-cultural factors are responsible for the current family-unfriendly environment. Culture is like the atmosphere: it’s usually invisible but necessary—and when contaminants get into it, they spread in many unforeseen ways, often overlapping with each other while boosting their mutual toxicity. Carney insists that what ails family formation and support in the United States today is, at root, cultural. That’s important, because it saves us from spinning our wheels ineffectively in places that won’t ultimately effect change (e.g., government or economics).
That’s not to say government or economics don’t play roles or that Carney lacks pro-family policy proposals in those areas. Rather, what may at first seem economic or political may, in fact, simply reflect prior cultural choices and philosophical prioritizations, which appear to emphasize the economic or political when they really reflect the antecedent values assumptions behind them.
Take government-supplied child benefits. The elite orthodoxy is that if we just created comprehensive, universal government-provided childcare, our family formation issues would go away. If we’d just be Sweden!
But, as Carney shows from the data, the numbers don’t bear this out. Even generous welfare states such as Sweden still face the challenge of not enough people having babies. Carney has a knack of driving points home with clarity: “Every hour in Germany, an average of 84 babies are born, and about 122 Germans die. This birth deficit has persisted since 1980 and is getting worse every year.” So simply being a generous welfare state does not fix the birth dearth.
France, on the other hand, does better. As does Israel. Why? Carney probes to find out things whose discussion–especially in our woke-inhibited public discourse–will see many people scurrying for their “safe spaces.” Happily, he is not deterred to raise them.
For one, he suggests that–all things being equal–many women would actually prefer being with their children, at least in their first five years, rather than handing them over to daycare. If feminism is about what women want, as opposed to what feminists think women should want, might that not suggest the money we spend on childcare programs might better be diverted to a cash child subsidy that a woman can use as she chooses during those early childhood years? Maybe she needs more diapers or kid’s clothes. Maybe she’d prefer to spend some of that money on homecare so she can spend time directly with her child. Looked at from the perspective of what actually fosters families and family formation, one can ask–as Carney does–whether the mania for government-provided daycare is in fact not parents’ but the green eyeshade set’s “solution”:
… if you eyes are trained not on family aspirations but on dollar-denominated outcomes—greater GDP and growth in the child-care industry—then you will see subsidized daycare as the most important policy. Ultimately, subsidizing daycare doesn’t really subsidize family. It subsidizes work. (emphasis mine)
But, you say, in the “real world” women want to work or have to work. Carney, like the child who busts your arguments by simply asking “why?” does just that. Yes, there are women who want to work, for whom state-sponsored daycare will be important. But, without making any value judgment about those women and their wants, he likewise insists the same value-free approach be applied to women who want to stay home. There is statistical data indicating no small number of women want that, especially when their children are very little. Why is their “want” ignored?
Likewise, regarding the two-income necessity argument, Carney poses a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Was the mass entry of women into the workforce in the 1970s “necessary” at that time or “wanted?” There’s no argument being made against the “wanted” but the fact is that, until that time, the concept of a single-worker family wage was real and not alien. Was the transition then to a “necessary” two-income paradigm the result, rather, of economic decisions enabled by expanded workforce numbers? Which simultaneously eroded the concept and buying power of the family wage while hyping consumer expectations and prices? In other words, did the “necessity” phenomenon originate in choices–and not necessarily by families but by consumer-driven economists? Carney cites no less an authority than Elizabeth Warren (in her pre-political days) as suggesting things may have developed this way.
What is “parenting”?
But I’ve dropped the reader into the deep end of the pool and, to be fair, it’s not where Carney plunges in. He starts more at the kiddie end of the pool, specifically, how we raise our kids. He begins with the phenomenon of “helicopter parenting,” which he argues is a particularly class-bound model of “parenting” that unnecessarily complicates things. What’s most important is how he unpacks the constellation of value assumptions that animate “helicopter parenting,” including an almost paranoid assumption about other people and their intentions as well as a paralyzing risk-averse approach to life that generates “anxiety.” This is amplified things by a social expectation that this is “good parenting” (and, therefore, a more relaxed approach is “bad”), an idea reinforced by neighbor Karens and some intrusive jurisdictions whose “child protective services” imagine themselves as co-parents.
By the way, I’ve put “parenting” in the previous paragraph in quotes because Carney poses a valid question: since when did “having kids” become “parenting?” What set of social expectations is packed into turning what was routine for generations into a special verb? “Even the word parenting makes it sound like some sort of profession, as other commentators have noted, rather than simply part of ordinary daily life. When people just have kids, it’s natural. It doesn’t even deserve its own verb”. But turn it into a verb, especially in a world fixated on autonomy and unwilling to privilege children, and—as he notes–it suddenly becomes a specialization for which perhaps only an elite are practiced in the art.
Carney argues persuasively that all sorts of factors have come together, many seemingly unrelated, to coalesce in our family-unfriendly ethos. Take city planning. Postwar urban design favored the automobile, which enabled parceling out the aspects of living–work, school, commerce, recreation, home–into discrete and separate spaces. The suburban cul de sac was the ideal.
But, without sidewalks and far removed from other aspects of life, socialization becomes difficult, if not impossible. Adults can jump into cars; kids, on the other hand, require drivers, since they could hardly walk to school or anyplace else without sidewalks. Thus was born the parental child chauffeur, a vocation intensified when coupled with “enrichment activities,” “competitive sports,” and helicopter parent “play date planning.” A kid couldn’t be a regular kid even if he wanted to.
Carney multiplies examinations of all the factors that affect the contemporary American parent, masterfully pointing out dysfunctional but perhaps unnoticed synergies among them. Other examples of such factors include the iPhone, with its twin impacts of competing with fathers and mothers as “co-parenting” value educator (e.g., through accessibility to pornography) as well as fundamentally redefining what a generation regards as “real” amidst impoverished socialization.
“Religion” is another factor affecting families, though its impact on family formation is complex and sometimes indirect. When he discusses Israel, for example, Carney notes that while Orthodox Jews may think childbearing is a mitzvah—both blessing and commandment—secular Jews don’t. But living in a country where the religious have large families also shapes social expectations, so that secular Jews in Israel also have more kids than, say, their American counterparts. Maybe they do, Carney notes, because they feel an obligation to the Jewish “tribe.” Perhaps they do to reaffirm l’chaim—life!—after the Holocaust. Or maybe they do just because society, rather than disapproving, thinks bigger families are okay. Again, culture matters.
That’s why, in turn, “autonomy” regularly comes in for criticism, precisely because it is the North Star of secular American anthropology, at disconnected odds with the “sacrificial love” families require. That autonomy is in fact antithetical to the communities that families both simultaneously presuppose and promote. (How so permeates the book, but that would require a separate essay.)
The biggest impediment to family formation
Community forms people in myriad ways. An involved, supervisory community facilitates “parenting” in part by sharing the work. A personal anecdote might help. (I share it because Carney’s book is full of personal anecdotes and asides, another example of his expert blend of authoritative data, solid argument, and the human touch of a father of six who’s “been there, done that”). My eldest daughter hit puberty when we were living in Switzerland. One day, she announced she wanted her “independence” and to come home from school by herself on the tram. Having grown up in the shadow of New York, I might have been terrified of that proposition. But we were in Bern where – except on “wild” Thursdays – the sidewalks largely rolled up by 7:00 p.m. and kids were under the ubiquitous gaze of one of the world’s most effective security services: window-perched Swiss grandmothers. “Knock yourself out, kid” I could say, aware that I had a village–maybe even a canton–backing me up.
But community, as Carney notes, is mutually conditioning. In Polish, we say that two kids–for many Americans, the ideal family size–are simply two “only kids” living alongside each other. That was very clear to me when our third arrived. When Karol came into the world, Alexandra was 11 and John 8 years his senior. Their relations were not just siblings. Sometimes, the relationship was parental, sometimes mentor, sometimes friend. I remember coming home from work once when Karol was 7 and had a fever. His siblings by then were 17 and 15 and had him swathed in so many damp towels you could only see his eyes saying, “Help!” But they learned to care for a child and he learned to associate with kids outside his age range (something Carney notes our “enrichment” activities tend not to do). I think their trinity community enriched them all. But I also remember when my boss—now a Congressman—who, knowing nothing of our domestic situation—regularly expressed a kind of regret having a wonderful human being at age 49 must have been some kind of “oops” moment.
And that is the message of Carney’s book: that the biggest impediment to family formation in America and the West at large is attitudinal. A culture that depreciates families, whether explicitly (how dare you reproduce and endanger the planet?) or implicitly (if we require multiple bulky car seats, only so many of which fit in a Toyota Camry versus a Toyota Sienna, how does that effect family formation for limited budget families?) Carney makes all these sorts of connections, bequeathing his readers lots of “aha!” moments.
Carney himself is a Catholic and father of six, living and working in the metro Washington area, so he knows of what he speaks and, when it comes to religion, also does not hesitate to talk of its experience on the lives of him, his wife, and children. But he is not sectarian. He regularly speaks of the Jewish family community found in Kemp Mill, Maryland (mentioned in Seth Kaplan’s Fragile Neighborhoods, reviewed here) and in Israel. He also regularly invokes the young people of Brigham Young University and the pro-family attitudes of Mormons to see what can be gleaned from their experience.
What’s most important is Carney’s readiness to raise all sorts of questions, and not just take the simplest or most apparent answers, to explore how to support Americans in starting and growing families. This book is the start of a potentially rich and broad-ranging social discussion not limited to Catholics, but one to which the Catholic worldview can bring a lot.
Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be
By Timothy P. Carney
HarperCollins, 2024
Hardcover, 344 pages
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I went back to work after raising the kids. A co-worker is pregnant with her second. Her oldest is very social and loves the day care/preschool she is in. I asked my co-worker if she was coming back after the baby was born.
The answer was a 10 minute apology of sorts for wanting to stay home with the baby. Even after assuring her I got it, I was a housewife, she continued on.
.
It was kinda sad she felt the need to explain/apologize, but very instructive really. We are not kind to stay-at-home mothers.
One tiny but meaningful piece of evidence: No Children Allowed Weddings. Sounds like an oxymoron but it’s happening all around us.
A big part of the problem is that wages have not risen since the 1970’s. The Federal minimum wage has not moved in 15 years. The billionaires get richer, while everyone else falls behind. If anyone mentions this, they are accused of being a “Communist” which is nonsense.
I liked the capitalism oftge 1950’s and 1960’s. We are now in late stage capitalism which is where the billionaires get richer and everyone falls further behind. There are about 800 billionaires in the US today and their combined net worth is more than the bottom half of the US population, that’s 165 million people.
The billionaires distract the working class with culture war issues, while they pick our pockets.
That would be sad indeed Joseph, but perhaps it also reflects some children’s public behavior that you see tolerated by parents these days.
Weddings have become very expensive theatrical productions which is pretty silly itself, but if you invest that sort of money you don’t want to see poorly raised children detracting from the event.
I’m weary of the entire wedding industry. We need more marriages, more families, but going into major wedding-debt is just one of many things that make couples think twice about tying the knot. And children brought up to not respect boundaries in public are no incentive to having one’s own children.
Not sure how my comment meant for Joseph got into your territory, Will. Sorry about that.
🙂
Continuing the hijacking of Will’s comment…
I somewhat suspect that having more children is the solution to the problem of badly behaved children. Mom and Dad stop treating the older children like babies when they have younger children who are actually babies. The older children proceed to stop acting like babies. More people with more children also means more people who have encountered similar child-rearing problems, meaning you’re more likely to know someone who’s figured out the problem you are currently having.
I think this is also part of why traditional parishes are accumulating young people with lots of kids. While it’s obviously possible for parents to abide by Church teaching on birth control in mainstream parishes, in a traditional parish they’ll be surrounded by other parents with lots of kids. They have community.
Yes, Amanda thank you. With a few exceptions I’ve noticed that children who have several brothers and sisters seem to behave better in public settings. But I’ve also noticed that in the UK and other countries even children with few to no siblings seem to be better behaved than those in the States.
In France where many mothers work outside the home they still find the energy to set and enforce reasonable boundaries for their children. Especially in public places.
Will, I think billionaires can distract & pick our pockets at the same time with social media, shopping, & entertainment streaming sites.
About GDP growth and the thriving child-care industry, we might as well include the student-loan path to indentured-servanthood, engineered by the Banking/Education interlocking directorate, whereby woke universities have been raised (razed?) into the largest child-care system in the United States and even the world. Financing lots of administrative layers and palaces with corner offices.
And, routinely adorned with competitive kings-X rooms, as featured not long ago by pace-setter Brown University: the “safe space” was/is (?) a room offering “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh [not Plato], calming music, pillows, blankets, and a video of frolicking puppies” (New York Times, 2016).
Yes, many young people owe over $50,000 in student loans which postpones marriage, buying a house, etc. the colleges jacked up the tuition and the banks and Government went along with absurd increases in tuition.
So, if you have a liberal arts degree and $50,000 of debt, then what?
Then what? You get several jobs and pay off your loans. It’s called assuming responsibility and being an adult.
Yes, they should pay their debts. That said, I think that we should discourage the massive student debt that so many kids incur. The colleges raised tuition much faster than the inflation rate and encouraged narrowing. We should not forbid the loans, but we should discourage this huge debt business in the future.
I think at that point you stop blindly trusting the members of the previous generation whose advice got you a liberal arts degree and $50,000 in debt (unless they told you not to), and learn how to think your own way through the problems.
I don’t think there’s a way to fix all that is wrong with society, economics, and personal finances without a lot of people having a much lower standard of living than their parents and grandparents had. We can either walk into it deliberately and with preparation, or be shoved into it suddenly. Either way, we’re going to have to suffer.
What? No Pampers?
Every other young man who are peers of my young adult sons are “Lost Boys” – in complete despair. They can’t find jobs which give them a sense of dignity, so have stopped looking, are so completely pessimistic about the future that they do not date or have any intention about marrying and having children. And worse they believe that all religions are just sociopolitical gatherings of dying cultures. Hmmm…actually – As I reflect on these young men I do now realize that their parents are without exception luke-warm to their various proclaimed religious ties if not complete materialists. As my wife tells me, you shouldn’t be worried about then because in reality our sons are only one lost job away from joining their ranks. I makes it all very discouraging and hard to understand why the Holy Spirit is allowing the U.S. to continue to fall.
They aren’t working, they aren’t looking for work, they aren’t married, they aren’t looking for marriage, they think religion is useless, they were raised by parents who thought religion was useless, marriage was for divorce, and work was so you could serve yourself. In other words, they have no faith, no hope, and no love.
I don’t think it’s that hard to understand why the Holy Spirit is allowing the US to fall. He can’t reach them directly because they won’t listen. He can’t reach them through priests because they’re never around priests. He can’t reach them through their parents, because their parents wouldn’t talk when they were children, much less now. So for lack of any gentler method, He’s reaching out via suffering.
The problem of today is how we have revised the culture. In many ways, I grew up in a idealized culture. (Before I go on do not want to minimize the racism that was around at that time). Any ways in the 50’s and 60’s life was simplier, no color TV, only 1 dial phone, vacations were simple, in my case going northern part of Michigan, Catholic schools were taught by mostly sisters. Even when I went College, started at GRJC at $7.00 a credit hr, then to WMU.
What was the Economic Backdrop. To start (1) essentially by winning WW2 factory blue collar jobs were relatively plentiful, (2) Taxes at the state and local were low. (3) The elite class still cared about America.
For society we were still a Christian culture, as a Catholic it was a very Catholic Culture, mass was well attended, people still said the Rosary. BTW it was before VC2 fixes were established.
Now all of that is gone, we are highly techno white collar culture, ruled by elites that have no links to America, except as a source to by stuff. The Government is resourced by Grads from Ivy League Schools who look at have no religion, no appreciation of the country and as result distain everyone else. Finally we have a secularized education and mass media establishment who promote and impose as possible a secular anti religious culture. They are by and large achieving there indoctrination goal on younger set who minds are mush and for the taking.
So in the end what do we have, no religion, small families, high divorce rates, father less children, abortion etc.
What could rectify the situation, well it has to be thru the intercession of you know who, yup God, Jesus our Lord. For this to occur America needs to return to Church, in particular Catholic need to return to going to Mass, taking all sacraments seriously, making prayer, including the Rosary a daily activity. Many even Catholic elites, would scoff at this, which just illustrates their secular nature. But anyways returning to Our Lord is really the answer.
Whenever I read articles like this, two thoughts come to mind: The Holy Family has always been the ideal, and the integrity and foundational role of family has always been challenged in some way. We live in the world, and the relative few have incessantly sought to gain greater wealth and power to the detriment of the majority, often to the oppression of the faithful.
However, what has also been proven is that societies that recognize, respect, and support father-mother led families are more likely to thrive. Moreover, economic stats, political theory, and concepts about psychological regulation should not be used to rationalize what we know does not work for the rearing of God loving children with virtuously formed consciences, and knowledge and understanding of good citizenship here and for eternity. That may and will look differently for parents at different times, but adherence to truth is critical.
Mrs. Hess A short story of how we parents tried to cope with a challenging world. It took many prayers.
My wife and I were a team with no cookbook on how to raise children in a seemingly hostile world. She was, by far, the heavy lifter attending to our children’s every need, morally, socially and their education while I was the breadwinner. Did everything go smoothly? No. How to use discipline was a key. One child got hooked on drugs. Fortunately, he has recovered.
We had no training and no matter how dedicated to the future of your kids you are, as with many parents, we had our challenges. Today, there appears to be a need for a parental curriculum for child rearing. The church seems to tout home schooling as a method to combat not funding Catholic education. I disagree.
As the child moves to higher grades, we would not have a clue as to how to develop increasingly more complex course material. I think that there are many parents who would agree. The child needs exposure and interaction with other students who may have a differing backgrounds. Extracurricular activities are very important. My boys were good athletes in school.
We were fortunate that I had a good salary. But after five years of nurturing and with the kids in school, Carolyn wanted to expand her future and went back to work. Fortunately, she was available before and after school. I did the cooking.
We pray to Jesus to guide our families through this seemingly impossible maze.
God bless.
With two exceptions, every kid I grew up with who went to Catholic school is no longer practicing the Faith. While it would certainly be nice to straighten them out so that there is a reliable Catholic school accessible for most Catholics, that is going to take years or decades. I don’t see why anyone would send their children to a Catholic school without carefully checking it out so that it doesn’t end with them leaving the Church.
There are a plethora of homeschooling curricula for the upper grades, plus online learning. I haven’t heard of a single homeschooler developing those themselves, and I know a lot of homeschoolers. At this point, there’s enough online resources to get yourself to college, except for the actual diploma. They get tutors for their kids when necessary, and they make use of free and paid resources. Even 20 years ago, homeschooling parents weren’t developing their own course material unless they wanted to, and now there is even more resources and mutual support available.
They also recognize the need for extracurriculars and encourage their kids to learn martial arts, get jobs, tear around unsupervised with other kids, sometimes join the sports teams at a local public/Catholic school, and otherwise develop their independence and experience of the world. Since a homeschooler can generally achieve 3-4 hours of classwork in 3-4 hours, while traditional schools take 6-8 hours to get in 3-4 hours of classwork, homeschooled kids actually have more time for extracurriculars than other students. And since they aren’t forced to socialize with highly unsocial people, as happens in many public schools, they can actually get good at socializing and setting limits. With all the school shutdowns and ad hoc distance learning during COVID lockdowns (or in NYC now, so that the schools can house illegal immigrants) homeschoolers wound up with far more stable schooling AND socialization for their kids.
Not to mention, home life is the parenting curriculum that is taught to the children. Homeschooled kids have lots of time to see how it’s done.
This is not to say everyone must homeschool. That’s a prudential decision with a lot of factors that vary from family to family. But the prospect is hardly so daunting as you describe.
I agree.
I homeschooled my three. Did I have have help in the form of part-time private school and co-ops? Yes, K-8 is very doable for the younger grades (even with severe dyslexia, which one of my children faced), and I believe should be seen as a societal standard.
Obviously Carney is going is to say that the biggest impediment to family formation is “altitudinal” because he is a libertarian who works for AEI and he would need to find a new job if he started reaching center-left conclusions. The core problem is still economic. If you want to have 6 kids in Norway or Sweden, its much easier for you to do so than in the US. Full stop. That the TFR there isn’t super high because most people are individualist atheists doesn’t mean the economic systems there don’t benefit the minority of people who do want families.
The post-industrial revolution, capitalist economy naturally disincentives family formation in ways traditional societies did not, and egalitarian economic policies taken by the state are the only way to offset this process. A DINK (dual income no kids) couple where both spouses make $200k will have a massive financial advantage over a traditional Catholic family where dad makes $200k, mom works at home, and there’s 5 kids (the same goes for a family with disabled or elderly family members). Now make that $100k, or $50k, and the choice between DINK and traditional family is even starker. Children, the elderly, and the disabled can’t work (and usually can’t or don’t own assets) so there is a tax on people who have kids and don’t abandon their elderly parents built into the economic system–virtuous behavior is punished by the market. The welfare state basically reimburses working relatives for having non-workers in their household. It takes from the DINKs and gives it to the breeders. The market cannot do this, only the state can. Libertarians won’t tell you this because they want you to think of the welfare state as redistribution from smart hardworking people to stupid lazy people, not between people with the same salary but different lifestyle choices.
And what about people at the bottom? Is a retail worker in a union making $25/hour with decent bennies and vacation time less likely to start a family or have another kid than a non-union retail worker making $8/hour with no bennies or vacation time? AEI and its donors does not want people asking these questions, or googling the phrase “Catholic Social Teaching”.
Read Matt Bruenig instead.