From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Best of The Duffys: Are Travel Sports Destroying Family Life?

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

As kids head back to school, they also head back to an array of after school extracurriculars — whether that's a sport, instrument, or hours’ worth of homework (often, all three). So, as another busy school year begins, Sean and Rachel are here to remind parents that, though extracurricular activities can teach kids valuable lessons, they shouldn't become your child's (or family's) entire world.   To dig deeper into the topic, the Duffys revisit their conversation with the author of Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be and father of six, Timothy Carney. Follow Sean & Rachel on X: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy, along with my co-host for the podcast, my partner in life and my wife, Rachel Campos Duffy. Sean, it's great to be back and we're talking about a subject that you and I talk a lot about. A lot. We're discussing a topic we're passionate about. And I don't think it's gotten enough attention. Every now and then you'll see an article or an op-ed and some parents sort of talking about these travel sports programs.

programs, obviously, if you have kids and you live in a neighborhood and your kids go to school, you know it's impacting family life, I think, negatively. But, you know, we're in a sports culture and you almost are like the bad guy if you point out the negative stuff that you see coming out of the travel sports program. It's one of those third rail issues in America where if you talk about... It's like talking about abortion. It really is. Or contraception. It's like, oh, you can't talk about that. And we always have not agreed on this.

We've kind of had an internal debate as parents because... I don't think we've struck the right balance on the other end of not doing sports. But boy, most people are falling on the other. So because you and I come from different perspectives. So I grew up playing hockey and back in the eighties, it seemed like, you know, it wasn't as, you know, parents weren't in and there's all this competition and all this travel.

And yeah, season didn't go year round. We played hockey from November until March. And I traveled since I was, you know, probably 10 years old. It was a few weekends here and there, but it was kind of 1980s sports. Which meant it was just a lot more hands off from the parents. There were groups of parents who would always travel, some that didn't. Mine normally didn't go with us, so I'd go with other families. You, on the other hand, didn't really play any sports, so you had really no kind of perspective of how great it can be. I was a cheerleader. Listen, it just was a different era. First of all, I am not very athletic, so it wasn't a big deal to me. Oh, come on, don't change yourself.

But also, I was a military brat, and we traveled all over the place. It was hard to just stay up with stuff. And I think both of us just haven't. And I have immigrant parents who were, you know, at least on my mom's side, she was kind of, like, confused by all the ultra sports stuff. But I think what's important in this conversation, as we're going to bring in our guest in just a moment, is that sports has consumed families, right? So

instead of going, sports are a pastime that build a lot of really positive skills within young kids. It has consumed the family where every night, every weekend, there's sporting events. And if you have, you know, more than one child, you have parents running like crazy, their hair on fire, trying to bring their kids to practice and then travel sports. And there's no time for dinners. Everything gets consumed by the sports. And at one time, it was, I think, a great benefit to a child. Now it's becoming family-centric, and it's, I think, leading to a lot of problems. And so that's why we're excited to bring

our guest. Right. Because we literally like have been talking with our, we've been talking about this topic with our producers and going, who would be the best person to come on? And then Tim Carney came on Fox and Friends and he was interviewed by my co-host Pete Hegstaff because he has a book called Family Unfriendly, How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs To Be. And I was like, Sean, we found our guy. And so we got him. Tim Carney, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. First of all, thank you for writing this book because I do think that a lot of people are making raising kids a lot more complicated than it needs to be. And I do think that the sports sort of component and how it's just kind of taken over is a big part of it. Absolutely.

And so chapter one, the first sentence is quoting my son's coach when he said, baseball isn't fun. Winning baseball is fun. This was to a bunch of 11 and 12-year-old boys at a winter workout. It's the one time we sort of accidentally signed our kid up for travel baseball, basically. And it wasn't fun. They didn't win. It was absolutely miserable. And a lot of it wasn't. The coach actually ended up quitting partway through the season because they were losing. And he said, I washed my hands of this mess. And I called my wife and said, every bad thing that happens this season is a good story for my book. But the broader lesson, the broader lesson is exactly what you guys were talking about,

that somehow we've replaced sort of the local little league that you ride your bike to. And that mom and dad can come if they want with intensive expensive travel sports and there are all sorts of harms you guys touched on what i think is the most important one though the one to start with it disrupts family culture that mom and dad should be the ones who you know we don't get to move our kids around like pawn pieces they're going to be their own people, but we should be setting the culture. Well, nobody's home for dinner. If you're on a swim team, a travel lacrosse team and a, you know, and hockey, hockey and swim are really hard to pull off. But also I think it adds to the childhood anxiety, not just because of the high pressure of the sports, but because

you're depriving them of sort of unsupervised play, a pickup sport, just making up a game in the backyard, being bored and grabbing a book off the shelf. All of those things get taken away with this hyper-scheduled, hyper-intensive sports. Or Tim, how about just participating in family chores? I mean, I've met so many parents where they'll say, well, their job is baseball or hockey. And I'm like, really? Like, what happened to taking out the garbage? Like, nobody can. There's no time for the kid to do that because that kid is is made to believe that this is their life, that literally they will all go on to college.

They will all get scholarships. to college. They will all get scholarships. I saw a meme the other day and I made a photographic picture of it for this podcast, Tim and Sean. And it was like, it said this, it said, your child has a 0.01 chance of going pro in soccer, baseball, or even in the sport. They have a 100% chance of meeting their maker and being judged on how they, and I just thought that's the other component that's missing, right? Is that so many of these sports are on, I mean, they don't care that the kids miss Sunday school or kids miss church. It's like, they got to be there and they'll be penalized for it. Sunday school or kids miss church. It's like they got to be there and they'll be penalized for it if they're not there. And a lot of parents are making really stupid decisions to say,

oh, well, the team needs you. So no one goes to mass or no one goes to church. Well, and so you're pointing not to get too far. You started, Rachel, but with meeting your maker. But if the good things about sports are, okay, well, if you put in these efforts, you see that it pays off. This is practice for work. This is practice for any good habits, right? But then when you're alleviating that kid of any family responsibilities, and especially if it's an individual sport, then they start to just become totally self-absorbed. So good things like diet, exercise, training, if the kid is just thinking, okay, I have to do everything to make myself get my personal best. That all sounds good. But then

you realize, wait, no, I'm not going to, you know, have pizza night with the family because, well, this is, this is what I'm eating and I'm going to go to bed late or go to bed early and wake up or whatever it is. If the kid is just obsessed with improving himself, all that sounds good, except when you realize that as humans, we exist in relation. As children, we exist in a family. And so the child becomes child-centric, the family becomes child-centric, and they're not thinking about their duties to the bigger whole. And to throw on one more problem, it's the specialization is one of the things that kills me. Like I talked to 14-year-olds who said, oh, I had to quit football because a coach said, I have to play baseball in the fall too. He said, because you'll fall behind if you're not going to

practice. No, he's saying that I'm shirking if I'm playing only in the spring and the summer. So it's this horrible trap that kids are robbed of that broader experience and maybe trying a new sport. Nope, nope. You got to specialize, pick your sport, pick your position by age 13. So Tim, we're having this conversation and we fully understand that we'll make a lot of parents pull their hair out because they can't believe we're having a conversation that too much sports can not be good for your kids. It's kind of been ingrained in culture today and everyone buys into it. So to be a little bit countercultural in this conversation, we know some people are going to give us some pushback. But as both you and Rachel have pointed out, when you overschedule your kids and there's no downtime, they go to school, they go to sports right after school. Then on the weekend, it's also

full of practices or games. They have no time to be kids. And there was a time when we did think to, and you made this point, Tim, that kids get really good skills from playing sports. They learn how to work on a team. They learn how to be responsive and responsible to their teammates. They learn how to win. They learn how to lose. All really good life skills that can come from playing in sports. But when it becomes, like, again, my kid's going to play pro baseball. Well, listen, your kid's not going to play pro baseball.

He's not going to play pro hockey or probably pro soccer. So you're given all of this family time, all this precious time that we as parents have with our kids, we're giving all of it to sports. And in the end, they're probably not going to play college sports. And so in the end, you've given all of this to sports and you've lost something in your family. And so failure is an important part of sports.

I mean, losing, and it's an important part of growing up. But what if you make your kid think that her identity is a lacrosse player? She's a lacrosse goalie. That's who she is. And you make her think that because that's how you spend your time. That's how you spend your money. The family revolves around her lacrosse goaliness and she climbs up the ladder and she's a starting goalie. And then she plays in a regional tournament and she's a starting goalie,

but there are people better. And then she goes up and she finds out that she's the 500th best lacrosse goalie in the state of Maryland. And suddenly she feels like a failure, but at a thing that she's invested her identity in. And so in Family Unfriendly, I point to studies that actually show these specializers, they have a lower assessment of their own skill at their sport than people who, you know, only play for three months and then either play a second or third sport, or maybe just spend the off season hiking, breeding, canoeing with mom and dad. So the specialization really, it turns a game into a job,

and it alters a kid's understanding of their own value. Well, it's a job. It's also, you know, it becomes a job for the kid, which kind of sucks some of the joy out of it. It's also big business. I mean, some of these sports camps and so forth, it's a whole cottage industry and there's a lot of economics driving this as well. And then you, as our, you know, the ability of parents to pay for these things has become more difficult

under Bidenomics. There's just a lot more class pressure where you see that, you know, the rich, the privileged get to do this and get better. It's kind of like the way the SAT was, right, where the rich kids could, their parents could afford to put them in an SAT class to help them do better. So there's also some strange class components that start to play into this, especially because our country right now is struggling in that way. But I want to make sure that we don't underestimate the virtues of sports. I think that I am somebody who I'm not a very sports-oriented person, but a lot of the characteristics I like about my husband and about some of the people I know in my life,

I believe are absolutely part of, you know, the competitiveness, their discipline. There are amazing things that happen with sports. But I just think like so many things in American culture, we take things to this extreme and we also have allowed the economics of it to drive and sort of keeping up with the Joneses. There's just so many different factors that now this is the way, like you're actually a bad parent if you're not, you know, your kids aren't getting on a sports travel team or you're not going to every single game and every single practice. And I want to talk, you mentioned earlier, Jay, about...

Tim. Tim. Keep calling your brother's name. Does that happen to you all the time? Well, John. Brother John? John is my brother. Jay is a former Obama guy, yes. Yeah, sorry. I'm sorry, Tim. Any relation?

No? No, not that I know of. No, I was going to say that. I would be shocked if he was related. Based on the politics of you and John. John's on the bottom line. Fox Business, 6 to 7, everything, all the time, great economist. Okay, so, Tim, you brought up earlier dinner and, like, that, you know, maybe these kids are, like, eating something different because they're, I find it quite the opposite.

I find that because no one's sitting down for dinner, everyone's doing what's supposedly this healthy sport, and then moms are running here and there and having to pick up, you know, fast food. And I actually think it's very counterproductive. Also, we know the benefits of family dinner. They're so well established. We know kids get better grades. They're less likely to have sex or less likely to drink. So talk to me about what's happened to dinner time, because that's something Sean and I have held on to. And the kids love it. Kids love dinner time.

Yeah. It takes a real effort. And this is what I always say. Our culture is family unfriendly. So you have to be countercultural, whether that's, hey, your son's a great soccer player. Why is he just playing rec? Well, you know what? Your norms, we're not going to do.

And actually, no, family comes first. And that counterculturalness, what I found is that if you act on it, if you say it, if you believe it, that people actually start to respect it. And so I, back when I was young, sometimes I would get phone calls to go on MSNBC and Fox more before my brother displaced me. But every once in a while, I'd say, actually, no, tonight's family dinner night. Once I said no to Chris Hayes on MSNBC because I said, tonight I'm showing my kids Empire Strikes Back for the first time.

And they said, that's a great reason to not do this thing. You know, as a young journalist, we're really supposed to aspire to it. And that you do have to. There's always a good excuse not to not do this thing. You know, as a young journalist, we're really supposed to aspire to. And that it's always there's always a good excuse not to do MSNBC. You do have to push back on the culture. And but once you start doing it and people start respecting it and on a local little league, when they move the practices or once a week practices, which I didn't think were necessary for seven-year-olds, but they moved it to Sunday. I said, look, we're probably not going to make it. Just, you know, very few things more important than baseball in the Carney family.

But mass is one of them. And Sean being an altar boy, that's more important than him showing up at your baseball practice. And the coach absolutely understood it because he knew we meant it. I mean, a nice outward signal is when you have a bunch of kids and people say, OK, these people really, really believe this. Obviously, we have we have six, only six. But then people when you live that way, other people feel they can live that way, too. And you start to set that norm and reverse the tide. We'll be back with much more after this.

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because the more people that do it, maybe we can come back to where we were. You know, you keep mentioning Little League and it strikes me because I play Little League and we would divvy up our town into teams. And on those teams, we would all have our own practices, but we'd all play each other in like our – I came from a 2,000, 3,000-person town, and we had like 10 teams of kids playing Little League. And it was great. And we really enjoyed it. And now it's like there's travel Little League? What the hell is going on?

And it harms the local leagues this travel trap it harms the local leagues because all of a sudden the best i talked to one guy in in rockville maryland the one of the high school coaches like oh i tell them not to play uh in the local league there because the coaches are all just volunteer dads as if that is a bad thing but no and so that's what this was right volunteer dad's going i got some time i'm gonna and i love baseball i'm gonna you know as if that is a bad thing, but no. And so that's what this was, right? Don, your dad's going, I got some time. I'm going to, and I love baseball. I'm going to, you know, teach the kids how to throw and hit. Which for me,

that's my dream job is to be a first base coach for, for little leaguers. But then the, the best pitchers then aren't playing in little league. And so then, you know, all of a sudden it becomes this walk-a-thon where nobody can get the ball over home plate. And then parents are like, oh, this isn't competitive. I guess if I want anything competitive, I got to. So it starts this awful, vicious circle. That's why I call it the travel team trap, because it's not just about individual decisions that parents are making. Some parents are going to make that decision.

I think it's probably a mistake. For some parents, it's the right decision, whatever. But when the whole culture starts moving there, and there's some parent who's never thinking, oh, I want a D1 scholarship, but he's just thinking, I guess the local little league doesn't have good umps anymore. It doesn't have good pitchers. I got to do travel ball. Or then they drop out of baseball and then they specialize in lacrosse. And then again, they become specializers. They fall into this trap without thinking about it. And you can be a crappy baseball player at eight years old

and you could be a great baseball player at 18. And we're kind of deciding the future of kids in sports at eight. And Rachel knows the movie I always quote is Miracle on Ice when Herb Brooks tells his 1980s Olympic team that you were born to be hockey players. You're born to be hockey players. And our kids, they're not born to be on travel sports. They didn't come into the world and be like, I got to play travel sports. It's the parents who are driving and pushing their kids to be better and to make the next team.

And it almost seems like the parents are living vicariously through their children and pushing them. And it's not necessarily always what the kids want. The kids are maybe trying to please the parents. But if you actually ask the kids, they might go, I wouldn't mind having a Saturday off, Dad, and hanging out with the family and maybe raking the lawn with you and Mom and my sister. And maybe raking the lawn with, you know, you and mom and my sister. But that's not, it seems that the kids don't have a say in the decisions that are made about what they're going to do in sports. I was going to say, if you know kids who like raking lawns, send them my way.

But also, even if the kid, a lot of parents say, well, it's all he wants to do is play this one sport. And I say, okay, and let him do that a lot, but that doesn't have to be the quote unquote best team. If your kid's too good for, you know, 10 year old rec soccer, play them up a level, let them play 12 and under rec soccer. The best team is the one that practices across the street. The best team is the one that fits into your family schedule. And guess what? You were talking about the virtues of sports and competitiveness. When I think back on that, I got to play varsity baseball, varsity basketball. The leadership opportunities of that was great.

The learning how to be the last guy on the bench one year after being the captain the year before, that was great. But my favorite is probably playing pickup football and basketball against my friends, covering John Altieri in football, covering, you know, Mike Manganiello in basketball. One-on-one, these rivalries that go over years. I remember thinking, if this guy scores a winning basket against me, I will die. I will do anything to stop him from scoring because he was like my best friend for eight years. That was really just as valuable, more valuable in some ways than the official sports that I got to play. Yeah. And the camaraderie and what happens to some of these these travel sports is they draw kids from so far away that, you know, from all these different parts because they're the best or, you know, whatever. The thing is that often they don't have time to get together socially

anyway. But they don't live in the same neighborhood. So they can't have those like really quick pickup games and kind of hanging out and the friendship. Well, I'm assuming they've forgotten how to do it. Right. I mean, because Tim, we did the same thing. Like we had all these kids in our neighborhood and everyone's bored and all of a sudden everyone's congregating to the big lawn of our neighbor. And we're like, okay, let's play baseball today. All right. And we wouldn't have nine players per team.

We might have five and six players per team. But you divvy up, and you play the game. And you had more fun playing pickup baseball in your neighbor's yard than oftentimes you did or probably do. I actually had fun playing Little League as well because it was very local. I really enjoyed that. But more fun than many of these kids probably have on these travel sports teams. Yeah, but we shouldn't make it just about sports. In the same first chapter, Family Unfriendly, I quote this music teacher who,

she was asked once when she was being interviewed, she teaches in inner city said it was a black history month. And he says, is one of your goals to see your, in one of your students play at the Kennedy center or Carnegie hall. And she laughed for a second. She said, okay, first of all,

that would be great. But my favorite former student is now a park ranger. Who's constantly emailing me about how he's learning ballroom dancing and he's studying geology. And so she said, music taught this kid who grew up without a lot of privilege, taught this kid to love learning. He didn't love learning in the academic subjects, but music made him realize, wait, I can learn something new and it enriches my life. And she says, that's what I'm doing. And I see these parents, their kid has a little bit of promise in violin and they turn it into a job. That's what I'm doing. And I see these parents, their kid has a little bit of promise in violin and they turn it into a job.

That's what happens in sports. That's what happens in so many things. We take these beautiful things that have all sorts of virtues, but we think, oh, well, the violin is the end in itself or the pitching arm is the end. No, those are means to helping you grow up, develop these virtues you were talking about and become a happy adult. you grow up, develop these virtues you were talking about and become a happy adult. Have you ever thought that maybe, I mean, so part of it is, okay, there's always like tiger moms and women who, you know, and parents who just want, you know, excellence and they want, you know, they really have them concentrate in that way. There are other parents, I think, who maybe, you know, there's a lot of pressure, like you feel like you're not doing enough because everybody else is doing it. And so you just sort of, it's like keeping up with

the Joneses and they feel that, that pressure to do stuff. Um, not necessarily because it fits into the family life, but because everybody else is doing it. But then there's this other part where, you know, it's become so expensive to go to school, to university, that some people are maybe thinking that I need my kid. Yeah, this is the ticket. My kid will get, and it's not even expensive, but even to get in, like my kid has to be the best tennis player or the best, you know, oboe player, whatever it is, some quirky thing that they specialize in so that they can write a great essay or have this thing that makes them special to get into school.

Is that driving it? What do you think is driving this? And then we'll get into some more general conversations about how to make families better and how we can make that. I do think that pressure. A lot of people do feel like there's a gap between sort of the upper middle class or the upper portion of the middle class and an underclass. And if my kid doesn't get into a good college and he's going to he or she is going to fall off the ledge and life's going to be miserable. So we've got to give them some sort of advantage. So that sense of precarity. We're wealthier than we've ever been, but there's this sense that, oh, well, we're hanging on.

We're just barely hanging on. And some of that sense does have to do with the, you know, we've lost a lot of the blue-collar jobs that a high school graduate could get and work in a factory for 30 years. jobs that a high school graduate could get and work in a factory for 30 years. Some of it is sort of just the spirit of the age, a sort of sad depression and a lack of hope about the future. And so all those things drive parents to turn childhood instead of you're going to expand and you're going to learn to an audition for college. And just the pressure of that, again, epidemic of childhood anxiety. You don't let your kids run around. You put them under pressure. One of the studies I point to in

the book is that wealthier kids are more, kids from wealthier families are more anxious. And they actually do drugs and alcohol more than kids from middle class and working class families. And I think it's because in so many of these great public schools or some of these great private schools it's just pitched as this is you your audition for college don't mess it up you know i i auditioned i mean i i've toured a school once and it's like one of these prep schools that like specialize like pride themselves on how many different you you know, universities and great universities. And so after school, they have these like 30 minute increments before sports so that they can say that they did a club.

And it just, I was thinking like, what do they accomplish in like the 20 minutes that they have by the time they get there before they start the sports program? It's all about just being able to write this resume that says, I was the vice president of this club, and then I also did lacrosse, and then I also did this. And it just seems like so much of it is about the resume. You know, Tim, I think balance in sports is important. So in our family, I think we've probably erred on the side of probably not engaging our kids in sports as much as we should have. And it's been hard because of where our kids go to school and a number of having so many kids makes it more challenging. You know, if you

have, and you have six, but I mean, if you're doing two kids, four kids, you start to get to six, nine kids, it gets to be a little more challenging and almost all consuming. And there's not enough drivers to get kids into sports. So making sure you have the right balance on this, I think, is important. But, you know, we look at the pressure that this causes kids, to your point, and more the anxiety that they have because we're not letting kids be kids. Kids are forced into adulthood and thinking about their adulthood and their college and their careers

when they should be just hanging out, you know, playing, you know, street basketball. So as we kind of talk about your book, Family Unfriendly, you know, kind of talk to us about the biggest things you think that are affecting the family in today's culture, because I do, I think we have a lot of problems in America. My motto is if you want to save America, you have to save your family. We need more parents, more adults saving their own families, which will save this country if they're effective at doing that. I think you're right. But I also always try to emphasize to people who are already family-oriented, the family is like the heart or the brain. It's the most important thing, but it can't survive on its own.

And I might get in trouble for quoting this person, but it actually does take a village to raise a child. And Hillary might have meant the Department of Health and Human Services when she said a village, but you know what I mean. We need extended family. Tim, you do belong in MSNBC. I'm going to take it back. You belong in MSNBC with Chris Hayes. Go back to MSNBC. It'm going to take it back. You belong in MSNBC with Chris Hayes. Go back to MSNBC. It takes extended family. It takes church community. Extended family. That's what I was going to say. That's exactly it. She means the government, but you mean interconnected community and especially extended family.

Especially extended family, especially church community. Especially extended family, especially church community. And so for us, I mean-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn, but it becomes a little more sane when there's a 12-year-old to help out with them. The advice, just even the dating and meeting people of common values that happens when you're embedded in a community. The most important one throughout American history has always been church community. And so as Americans either secularize or just fall away, a lot of religious Americans don't belong, don't attend church. And so they don't get a lot of those benefits. And so all of those things leave the American family alone. And then it does this

next step where we think, well, there should be somebody helping us. Yes, you're right. But then we think, okay, it should be the government. And so a lot of that turn to, well, the government should provide universal daycare and the government should provide this. That comes from people who know that the nuclear family needs help. They don well, you can't ask grandma to babysit the kids. Grandma has to worry about herself. Just even relying on neighbors is seen as problematic these days, a system of oppression that needs to be torn down. So that's the most important thing that families need to remember is you need to belong to a community of people, different ages, different stages, but similar values who are pro-family, who will give you good models, good examples, and support you on a human level. We'll have more of this conversation after this. I think that's really fascinating. And again, we're part of church communities.

One church where the kids go to school, a vibrant, young church, a lot of families, a lot of kids. Another one is a little bit older, not as many young families. What advice do you have for parents that are looking for that community? Because I think you were just thrown into it 40 years ago, but today it's harder to find. Where is it? And if your church community isn't young and vibrant, what do you do? Where do you find it? It's really tricky.

And I mean, I remember when I've traveled out to Western Pennsylvania and sort of the collapsed steel towns outside of Pittsburgh and just standing on a front porch and looking out. And I could imagine just the kids riding bikes. It's hilly. They're shouting from one hill to the next. Everybody's going to mass at the local Catholic church right there. And it's easy. You could be, you don't need two cars. You don't need a great income to get this. And nowadays, I look at what my wife and I do. We piece together a community. It requires the fact that she grew up in northern Virginia and that we have enough money to afford a Catholic school and a car even for a 17-year-old to drive. We're piecing this thing together. So you go and you find – I mean, I'm highlighting the difficulty rather than answering your question, Sean.

But you go and you find just the right church community. You can't afford to live there. And so then to hang out with those kids, you need to drive your kids. And that car stuff, car problem, that's, I mean, that's right there in chapter three of my book. That's huge. If kids can't get there themselves, it makes life more stressful and exhausting for parents and less fun for kids. So it really is a struggle to find that because you do just, I mean, the American dream is letting your kids run out, they find the pickup football game or the front ports to sit on, and you not have to micromanage them and pick the optimal team. And similarly, that pressure now for parents, especially a lot more family-oriented, traditional, conservative parents.

In the Catholic Church, you're kind of supposed to go to your local parish, but people are like, no, I don't want to go to the one with the guitars. I want to go to the one with a bunch of kids and the more conservative priests. But that has its own negative effects. So I absolutely agree. It's a lot harder these days. Well, I think that what you're getting at is that we have to be much more intentional. And so that means like, for example, we had to make a move from Wisconsin to New Jersey. Now, if I had to do it over again, and it's hard to say because I love our neighbors and we actually have like the idyllic neighbor situation where our neighbors have five kids and then we have a bunch of kids and they're back and forth between each other's houses and they ride bikes and they just pop in for dinner at each other's places. And it's just like, it's amazing.

However, from their school, my kids are kind of far from their school. And the right way to look at it is to pick your church and your school and then pick your house. And I think a lot of people fall in love with the house and then it becomes harder to build this community part. And I think that was sort of an eye opener. It was actually a conversation that Pete Hegseth, Sean and I had once where it was like, oh, I get it. We did that backwards. Like pick your school and your church. And hopefully, you know, if you're Catholic, the school is the church, right? And then you pick your house, and then you're nearby, and then all the activities become easier. That has become a bit harder for us because of where we live. But I do think that for a lot of people, they're moving out of blue cities because

they're conservative and they don't like, you know, the way the blue states are and they're moving to red states. This is a chance for a lot of families who are thinking about moving or in the process of moving out into communities that meet their values to get the order straight, you know, find the church, find the school, then find the house. get the order straight you know find the church find the school then find the house learn learn from people who did it wrong yeah like us it was shocking when pete hegseth was like i found the school first and then i went and looked for my house and we were like oh that makes a lot of sense pete and and that's what he did and it's gone really well for him in this in this move um tim can i ask you about do you talk about technology at all

we talk about technology and kids a lot on the show what's what's your take on technology and its impact on family and kids today i i mean i absolutely i compare social media to like an invasive species to kudzu vine that just you know you may have planted your garden but then in comes this invasive species another place that uh culture is important is in resisting giving the smartphone and the social media to your child too young. Oh, well, that's the way all my friends communicate is by Instagram Messenger. At that point, it's such an uphill fight for parents. That's what we hear. That's the way they communicate now.

It's all on social media. I need it. I'm like, ah. So we kind of conspire with our friend our kids friends parents and send them to schools that don't allow them you know that's they don't ban the students from owning them they ban them from taking them out of the backpack at all uh during the day some require you to hand it in so that just sets the tone and you know the headmaster ah, I don't think you should give your kid the right age to get a smartphone is, you know, when they're out of the house and done with high school. And, and so we, you know, we get together

with the sixth grade parents or even before, and we say, we're not giving our kids a smartphone. You might regret it if you do, but don't let your kids tell you everyone has it. And the, when we met with parents, were their sixth grader, was their oldest, there was this relief because they felt they were just going to have to do it even though they didn't want to. Yeah, we had this great discussion on our podcast not long ago where, you know, there are some parents who say, well, I'm afraid that my kid, first of all, they lie, right? They say everyone has it. And it turns out not every kid has it. There are sensible parents

who have figured it out. And for us, we gave our older kids too soon. And we've been, you know, stricter. The more kids we have, the more we're correcting mistakes we made with the earlier ones. But, you know, not everyone has it. But also there's this feeling like, well, I want my kid to fit in. And maybe that's not our role. Maybe it's okay to be that kid. I was always that kid with the very strict Catholic parents who weren't allowed to go to the parties and got picked up right after school and couldn't go do a lot of stuff that other people did and you know there's something good about especially nowadays you know allowing kids to

experience not always fitting in and because basically to be a good christian to be a good catholic you have to be able to be okay being countercultural, right? Exactly. Be not conformed to this age. That's what St. Paul wrote in, I think, the letter to the Romans. But actually, it's from one of my Jewish friends where he drives his home a lot. He's like, there's always this tension where I want my kid to be obedient, but I want him to be the one who will also stand up and say, this is wrong. And he thinks about the Germans who knew it was wrong, what they were seeing in the 1930s, and not enough of them stood up against the tide.

So that lesson from my friend Phil Klein, he's at National Review. That's what he said when his child was just getting old enough. Every little streak of disobedience, he said, okay, maybe that's a good countercultural streak coming out. And that's absolutely, if you're going to be a Christian in this world, it's not our world. We don't set all the rules. You're going to have to learn how to be the kid who stands up. And so everybody thinks about this. You tell your kid, wait a second, if there's a kid being picked on, stand up for that kid. And I remember that when I moved out of New York City to the suburbs, and there was one kid who just stuck his neck out. And he's like, stop messing with Carney. And I will never forget that moment. And I always aspired to be that guy. I didn't always live up to it, but that idea.

And so being that one is like, no, my mom doesn't let me have a smartphone or whatever you're saying, who just sticks out a little. No kid is going to like that. I hated the fact that I didn't have Reeboks as a kid, but that will help them build character. Yeah. Exactly. You know, Tim, obviously, it seems like you run a pretty good family, good Catholic guy, six kids. You decide to write this book, Family Unfriendly, probably a book that you had a lot

of knowledge about, a lot of thoughts on. But as you did the research for the book, did you have any aha moments of like, I didn't think about families this way, or this thing that was impacting families that way? Did you have any aha moments as you wrote the book? Do you learn anything when you wrote the book? Yeah, certainly when I saw the studies on how specializers had a low, kids who played just one sport, how they had a lower self-opinion, my first thought was, wait a second, but isn't failure good? And that's when I realized, oh, we are teaching our kids what their identity and value is. Like, of course, you think about that in the background. As a Christian, I taught Sunday school, you say it out loud. But then I thought, no, it's through our actions and our priorities, not through the lecture. And I give really good lectures at the dinner table, but they don't

convince the kids of anything. It's our actions and our priorities that teach the kids what their value is. And that's where I tied it in eventually to the childhood anxiety, even the falling birth rates, is that parents are receiving and passing on a kind of a sadder message, a message that your goodness is your human accomplishments. And so that's where I was able to sort of see this bigger picture of where secularized world is going. Like we got rid of all the Catholic guilt, the Jewish guilt, the Christian guilt, and instead there's this deeper guilt. Wait, I don't think I'm good. Because you lose the idea of loving your neighbor and that you're loved by God. And you start to just think of, oh, wait, I'm going to be judged by what I do. And for a lot of us, you know, for

all of us, we're all fallen. That's not great. And so to see the little mistakes on the family level multiply themselves out to the societal level, that was sort of the eye-opening thing for me. You know, I get asked a lot because I have nine kids. A lot of people say, well, you know, what's your best parenting advice? And I've really synthesized it. And actually, when I've given this advice, Tim, I've had a lot of people come back and go, oh, my God, that was the best advice ever. Because as I hear about, you know, as you're describing all these these parents who feel and by the way, all these parents are really most for the most part are really good. Well-intentioned.

They want to give the best to their kids. They want their kids to have the most opportunity they want their kids to fit in they want their kids to go to college they want to give their kids all these things but i think when god is not at the center um things become what you want to give your kids as opposed to um something bigger and so the advice I always give is, you know, my job is not to get you into Harvard, it's to get you into heaven. And I think that when we simplify parenthood to that, then like the fact that you just don't have the bandwidth to get, you know, to let your kid be on the travel sports team, or you don't have the money to sign them up for tennis, even though, you know, they really want it. Um, you know, there's, there's different things that we can't, we just really can't provide. Or if we do, I've, by the way,

I've seen single moms, um, with no money sacrifice what they shouldn't have to get their kid into a summer camp. Um, and, and, and she and the family is suffering because she wants her kid so bad to feel like he's like everybody else. I've seen this, you know, it's heartbreaking. So I just think simplifying it, saying what is it that I really, what's the ultimate goal? The ultimate goal is you want your kid to get to heaven so you can all be together in eternal life. And I think it just takes some of the guilt away and take some of it just simplifies the way. That's why I love the title so much, how we're making it so much harder. And I think that your advice, this book is phenomenal.

And I think it touches on something that we just don't talk enough about. And family is the most important thing. And if we're making this harder than it has to be, no wonder people aren't having kids. Thank you. I think that's right. It's behind the childhood anxiety, behind the falling birth rates.

And, you know, I'm in Washington, D.C., so everybody says, okay, well, what's the policy fix? There's little things that will hibble around the edges. I don't think we should outlaw travel sports, but the culture is what's going to have to change. We talked earlier about a parent. So when you do whatever community you land in, then don't just think, what can I get out of this? You realize you have to put into it. You have to coach T-ball. You have to teach Sunday school. You have to volunteer. You have to, you know, as you do, give advice to the younger mom of two kids who thinks, I can't handle three. How does Rachel

handle nine? You have to be that person who's giving. And then you'll find you get so much more back from belonging to that community and that your family, if that they will benefit as well from that. And that the more that you live that in the, in the exterior world, being pro family, leading that way, being visibly that way, that's what your kids will see. And that's what they'll want in the next generation to say, I kind of want to have the life mom and dad have. And that, that to me would be a great sign of worldly success, which then hopefully tease up the, you know, the supernatural eternal success you were talking about.

Yeah, that's the legacy. You're right. And again, I think that was a really important point. We don't want to ban travel sports. No one wants to ban travel sports. about their lives and their kids and the choices that they're making and the impacts they're having on the kids and the family is, I think, the mission of your book and the mission of this conversation and this podcast. Finding balance. Finding balance. And sometimes you have to be challenged to find that balance because what's being promoted in culture is we want to get our

kids on the travel team. We have to play baseball year-round. And again, there's another way to think about this. And we used to, again, we're going back. We try to oftentimes go back to the 80s because we think it was a bit of a better time, whether we're dating or raising kids. The 80s were pretty good. And we can learn something from that. And so, listen, Tim, I want to-

Going back to the bad news bears days. Yes, that's right. That's right. So Tim, listen, we appreciate you joining us on our podcast for writing such a wonderful book that can be instructive for families. It's the right book at the right time.

It's the right book at the right time. So thank you for being with us at the kitchen table. And I'll tell your brother that you said hi the next time I see him. Thanks. So listen, Rachel, great to have Tim on the podcast.

Again, it was fascinating when we saw his book and he talked about sports. Again, it was a topic that you and I think about and talk about and debate all the time. Again, our own family life, but what's happening in culture. And he kind of laid it out in such a wonderful way. I thought it was fantastic. And then bringing in the other components of what's happening in culture, what's happening in families and how it's unfriendly to build in that strong, faithful family, which is a legacy for the parents. Yeah, I just think that sports is a component, right? right it's part of for young kids like and said i i think it's really important not to underestimate how great some of the virtues are that come from and character that comes from sports and the camaraderie and the friendship and the leadership opportunities all that but it's just a small part and i think the problem is that it's taken over it's metastasized to a point where it's the center of of family life as opposed to a part of it

and i think a lot of parents have sort of relinquished their control and their leadership and they're sort of as being the captains of their family and they're sort of allowing the sports schedule um and the sports calendar to run the family as opposed to the two parents being in charge. I think it's just an inversion. And I think what's really suffered the very most in all of this is family dinner. And I think if people understood just how important a family dinner is to the stability and the mental health of the child, they would rethink the way they're ordering things in their family life. So the studies, as I mentioned to Tim, are clear. Higher grades, less likely to smoke or drink or do drugs or get

pregnant. I mean, you can just go through everything that you want your child to do or don't want them to do. They're accomplished at the family dinner setting. And there's a reason that having that comfort, having that ability to, that expectation that we're going to get together, catching up with one. It's really hard to catch up. I know some, a lot of moms are like, well, I talk to them while I'm driving. And there is some great stuff that can happen, conversations that can happen while you're driving.

There is nothing like face-to-face dinner conversations. Very civilizing, by the way, too. By the way, if you don't have family dinners and you start, it's going to be a little messy. It's going to be a little complicated. And there's going to be a lot of things happening that might not make it amazing at the start. It's kind of like working out the first time you work out. But the kids aren't very well behaved when you first start doing these things. But give it, you know, three weeks or a month of making

everyone sit down and have these family dinners. And you'll find your kids actually love the time they spend with you and the meals that are prepared for that family dinner. It's something and sit down and have these family dinners and you'll find your kids actually love the time they spend with you and the meals that are prepared for that family dinner it's something that's important and you might have to say no to something you might have to say you know even if you can't do it every single day maybe you're saying every saturday or every sunday and that will mean that there might be a track meet that your kid can't go to because, or there might be a, or all their friends are going to the movie and they're like, sorry, we do family dinner. And like, they know that every Sunday, if that's your day,

we have a family dinner together. So that's, that's important. And you can invite your, their friends over and maybe they want to be part of that. But if you don't stick to your date and, and, and sticking to that date and making everything revolve around that dinner tells, it sends a message to your kids, dinner with the family matters. Because our family matters. One last thing on the sports. It does seem like in American culture, we overdo things. So whether you go to McDonald's and now they want us to supersize our fries and our Cokes, bigger fries and bigger Cokes. Or you go used to get a scoop of ice cream.

Now we get four scoops of ice cream. Like we do everything to such an extent that it actually ruins what was good about the thing we started with. And so sports, again, they're great. A lot of others. I love the memories of the teams I played on, but it wasn't what so many kids are having to go through today. And again, to Tim's point and your point, it doesn't make happier, healthier kids oftentimes. You can actually do a disservice to the child by putting them in such an aggressive, competitive sports program

where at eight years old, that's all they do is school and sports. And there's no time to just chill and relax and be a kid, which is what they so need. Or be a family. And so you only get, it's funny, like we have a son who's now going to go into his senior year. We were talking about him and what you know some of our our thoughts and and hopes and aspirations you know that he has that we have for him and it was like well we only have one more year of really having that you know kind of impact on his life

and it's just the you realize how quickly this time goes and you know do you want do you want that memory to be of you know one game after another after another after another or do you want those memories to be about a family that did do these things but really it's about a family and the only people who can take control of that are the parents and um and i think i think again this is a case of the sport driving the schedule as a tail wagging the dog yes if you will instead of the parent saying this is our family this is our schedule where does that fit into our life um and maybe it doesn't and being really you know discerning and and judicious and wise about how the family time is spent.

Because ultimately, time is the most precious commodity that we have as a family. So don't make your family fit into sports. Make sports fit into your family. That's the takeaway from this podcast. I think you just gave a great title for this podcast. Maybe I did. Listen, once in a while I have pearls of wisdom. Not very often, but on occasion. So listen, thank you all for joining great title for this podcast. Maybe I did. Listen, once in a while I have pearls of wisdom. Not very often, but on occasion.

So listen, thank you all for joining us at the Kitchen Table. Great conversation with Tim Carney. We've wanted on for a long time, wanted to do this topic for a long time. He did not disappoint. If you like our podcast, you can always rate, review, subscribe. Wherever you get your podcasts, you can always find us at foxnewspodcast.com. If you want the video version and you subscribe to Fox Nation, you can find us there want the video version and you subscribe to Fox Nation, you can

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