Morning Wire - Family Unfriendly: Navigating Parenthood in a Changing Culture | Saturday Extra

Episode Date: March 30, 2024

In this insightful conversation with Tim Carney, author of "Family Unfriendly," we explore the declining birth rate among Millennials, the pressures of modern parenting culture and a societal devaluation of traditional family values. Plus Carney offers practical suggestions for fostering a more supportive environment for families. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Since 2008, the birth rate in America has been on the decline, reaching an all-time low in 2019. A variety of factors have been offered to explain millennials' hesitance to embrace parenthood, from economic fears to avocado toast to declining religiosity. Today's guest argues that these common explanations aren't fully supported by the data, and that an unsustainable model of high-pressure parenting is to blame. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Saturday, March 30th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. Joining me to discuss his new book and the real reason millennials are rejecting parenthood is father of six and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and now author of family unfriendly, Tim, thanks for coming on.

Thank you. So you've written a book about why millennials and Gen Zs are avoiding parenthood. A lot of people say it's because kids are so expensive, but you say it's not, primarily economic. What's your hypothesis? So of course affordability has something to do with family and those decisions, but the fact is that millennials are not poorer than Generation X was or than the baby boomers are. Economists go and they look at the wealth and you just for inflation and they find that millennials are just about as wealthy at a given age as Generation X was. Also, it's just not true that wealthier people in America are having more kids. If you go by income quintiles,

you know, from the poorest to the richest, there's not much difference. In fact, the poorest quintile has a few more kids per woman. So it's hard to argue. And also look at 2019 when the economy was the best it's ever been. We were having far fewer babies then than we were during the Great Recession when the baby bust started. So it's just the data does not confirm that. suspicion that it's about affordability or wealth or poverty. So that's why I point to the culture. And just one example out of many that we could talk about has to do with the effort that parents have to put in. So when I was a kid, we used to ride our bikes around the neighborhood and mom and dad would say, come home when the streetlights turn on. Nowadays, you might get child

protective services called on you if you try to do that. Or pay. parents just think, oh, well, they're wasting their time if they're riding their bikes around the neighborhood. They need to be doing enrichment. They need to have, you know, intensive violin lessons. And all these things, they exhaust parents. My wife and I, we have six kids. People say, how the heck do you do it? And the truthful answer is, often we don't do it. We let the kids be free. And guess what? That childhood anxiety, that's an epidemic now, in the Journal of Pediatrics, experts recently wrote an op-ed saying the root cause of that childhood, Anxiety is a lack of independent play. Kids are being watched and bossed around and supervised too much. We need to create a world where it's more normal to set them out and set them free. Now, you talked about a few different styles of parenting in your book. You described helicopter

parenting a bit. You also described something you called the travel team trap. What's that? So the travel team trap is where you fall into this idea of thinking, you need to be a lot of thinking, you to give your kids the best coaches, the most intense training, and you sign them up for a sports team, and next thing you know, you're spending every other weekend at some tournament in Delaware. It's a trap because a lot of parents feel they don't have any other choice. They think, oh, well, if I just let my kid play Little League, he's going to fall behind the others and he'll never make the JV squad.

I actually have heard from JV coaches who say they tell their kids they have to play travel baseball. They have to play year round. And I use sports, but you could talk about Irish dance. You could talk about swimming. You could talk about all sorts of stuff. And one of the things this does is it makes a game less fun because it becomes all about intensive training.

It makes kids specialize, which is not good for their psyche or their bodies. It leads some more injuries. It leads some more depression. It breaks up family culture. I've had lots of dads say to me, I wish that my family's schedule was set by me and my wife rather than by the swim coach. And all of these things, we do much more than our parents did as far as putting kids in these intensive things. And one music teacher said, she gets so upset when she sees parents of a violinist turn what should be beautiful, which is learning to play

music into a job. These are kids. They should have an expansive childhood, not an intensive one. Now, a phrase we hear often, and it's taken a little bit of a new meaning when invoked by politicians, famously Hillary Clinton, is it takes a village to raise a child. So what are your thoughts on that phrase and particularly how it relates to the American culture of raising kids? So I don't know what Hillary Clinton meant when she said it takes a village. Her village might have been the Department of Health and Human Services, but the village that humans actually have relied on forever starts. with extended family. It starts with your mother-in-law coming and helping watch the kids. It starts with your kids having cousins to play with. It starts with you having older siblings who are sort of mentors and role models, younger siblings and younger cousins who are babysitters and then they're

the babysitting clientele for your kids years down the line. But then it expands out to the neighborhood to kids running around and somebody else's mom sitting on the front porch and yelling at your kid when he does something dumb and then telling you, which again, a lot of us experience as a kid. But then it goes beyond that, most importantly, to community institutions. This can be and has been strong public schools, though these days increasingly the public schools are at odds with the parents. But it's certainly church communities. It's certainly just a local neighborhood in general, but things that we belong to that help

us raise our kids, that provide mentoring, that provide. examples that provide support. Again, whether it's church that provide sort of aspiration of this is what you should aspire to, is to have a loving family with kids. That's the village. So it's interesting that you say that my cousin group chat just circulated a story from the Atlantic that I think just came out about the decline of cousins because people are having fewer kids. Obviously, that equates to fewer cousins. And you get like an exponential shrinkage of your extended family. Absolutely. But that leads, let me just add, that leads to falling birth rates, cause birth rates to fall even more.

So some of you have heard the word Malthusian, Malthusian. Thomas Malthus was an economist who argued that birth rates were like prices, that they would self-regulate. When people have too many kids, they become poor, so then they're poor, so they have fewer kids, they have fewer kids, so they get richer and yada, yada. But that's not what's happened in the modern world. Countries whose birth rate falls below 2.1, they keep falling. And there's all sorts of reasons. But one reason is just that when you have fewer kids, there's fewer siblings, there's fewer cousins. There's less of that village to help people take care of their children. And then I sometimes think about, I'm in Washington, D.C., Capitol Hill staffers, not only do these, you know, 28-year-old chiefs of staff not have families, they can go all day without seeing a single child. And there they are making the policy for our country with children not on their mind.

And so the less that the world is built around families, the harder it will be for families. Now, are other countries having these same problems? I know most of the Western world is having falling birth rates. Do they also have this helicopter parent culture or is it different reasons in different places? So there's all sorts of different cultural issues why, say, Italy and Spain have a low birth rate versus northern Europe versus South Korea and Japan and the U.S. the helicopter parenting is sort of the unique U.S. problem, I think. But the hyper-ambitious parenting, that's certainly true over in Asia, where there's just massive pressure to be a material success.

And that interferes with family formation. And there's other cultural issues down in southern Europe. There's a lack of a work culture, which is the opposite. We have too much workism. And I have a chapter in family unfriendly on workism. But in Europe, if people aren't willing to sort of build up their lives and launch a career and become grownups in, you know, in Spain and Italy, then they're never going to start a family and have kids. And in Northern Europe, it is the workism.

When they try to subsidize family there, they subsidize daycare, which ends up subsidizing work rather than subsidizing family. Now, I'm not sure if you've followed this trend, but have you heard of the term dink, dual income, no kids? Yes. Okay. So what are your thoughts on that? So I saw some of these videos and, you know, a little bit annoying, you know, making fun of people with kids, but ultimately sad.

They're talking about how they get to go on vacation. I get to go on vacation. I even get to go on vacation with just my wife and leave my kids with my extended family. But I also get to go on vacation with my kids. And that is totally awesome. And that lattes are what they celebrate. They go for a walk to a coffee shop and have a lot of. latte, that that's what they're celebrating now in their early 30s. And so that's why they're so

happy that they don't have kids. And really it just strikes me as a sadness. So you had asked me about the different cultures, Europe, Asia, et cetera. All these different cultures have different maladies that are anti-family, but the one that I think connects them really is a sadness. It really is a belief that, well, we're not that good or life isn't actually that valuable. And when you've adopted that sadness, it's easy to just say, okay, well, then I'm just going to settle for basic pleasures, like going on vacation whenever I want. And you really, they really get addicted to being untethered, unconnected. And that's ultimately a lonely, lonely existence. Well, I think there's also this feeling of those are the choices, you know, that it's being a

helicopter parent where you completely lose yourself in parenting and it becomes this marathon of constant activities and hamster wheel or it's vacations and drinking on a weeknight with your spouse who still has time to go to the gym kind of thing. And when people are given that false choice, it may seem more attractive to have the sort of perpetual youth. No, that's exactly right. That's a great point. I wish I'd put it that way originally. But I mean, this is why what I try to do on Twitter sometimes is post the real fun parts of parenting. I still play basketball against my sons and I can still beat the one who's slightly taller than I am and I demolish the nine-year-old in one-on-one basketball. If I could actually dunk, I'd be dunking on him constantly. And it's tons of

fun. And then we let them run the neighborhood. While my wife and I do sit and have a cup of coffee or have a cocktail in the evening or go for long walks and we replace, you know, we don't do happy hour that much, but guess what? We have big backyard barbecues where the parents all kind of sit near the grill while the kids run the neighborhood. And I find that a lot more fun at this point in my life. If I was still going to the same happy hours, I was when I was 22, I'd be a little depressed. Now, let's talk about religiosity. On this show, we've covered the decline of church attendance and the rise of religious non-affiliation. How big of a factor is that in the declining birth rate? It's absolutely true that religiosity is correlated with and I think causally connected with

birth rates and family size. Americans who go to church, synagogue or mosque, at least once a week, are well above replacement level, 2.3, 2.4 babies or something like that. Americans who don't are well below. So that's one of the top predictors of it. So the secularization of America is a core cause of our falling birth rate in all sorts of ways. It's important enough. I spend more than more than a chapter on it. But I also, for writing family unfriendly, I visited neighborhoods that were more tightly-knit communities that really supported families, and these were religious neighborhoods. Whether it's Kemp Mill, a sort of neighborhood anchored by two modern Orthodox synagogues in Maryland, or going out to BYU, Idaho, a Mormon school, or just other sort of Latter-day Saints places in Utah. In all of these places, they talked about family, but not just we are told by the. scripture and by our clergy to have children.

In all of these places, they spoke about the sort of very concrete day-to-day ways that families were supported. And Israel, one guy said to me, the bus drivers have a real affection for little kids, all these little things. It's normal to bring your kids out to dinner. The ski slopes in Utah, basically, you buy a family package for, and your kids ski for free all winter and the support for homeschoolers that they do. Utah. All of these very practical, pragmatic supports for families, they trickle down from a culture

that is really infused with religion. And that's the story in Israel. That's a story in Utah. That's a story in some of these neighborhoods. And so religion causes people to create these subcultures where they say, basically, send us your kids. We'll help you take care of them. Now, what about regional differences within the U.S.? Just anecdotally, I currently live in Tennessee and just by virtue of the circle that I'm in, I do feel like I'm surrounded by young people who are more open to having bigger families. Rarely do I hear people talk about the financial cost of each additional child. But I'm from Massachusetts. And when I go home, I often hear people say, I'd love to have more kids, but realistically, they can only afford

to have one or two. And they're sort of carefully budgeting those precious one or two kids. what does the data say about regional differences in birth rates and parenting culture? So, yes, and some of it is economic where land is more expensive. People are less likely to be able to build up families because I argue in the book that we need more housing and we need more density, but big apartment buildings are not good for community and so they're not good for family. And so I would predict that if you could explain the regional differences by looking at religiosity and housing prices and that those two things would make the big difference.

And one of the things is that people are more likely to do what's normal. And in some places, having three to six kids is normal. The way I put it in family unfriendly is I say, pregnancy is contagious. It spreads almost like an airborne virus, that the more people around you that are doing it, the more likely you are to catch the bug and have a third or fourth kid. That's funny.

We have a lot of people pregnant right now. that work on our show. So they're obviously not wearing masks in the workplace, otherwise they'd be immune. Yeah. All right. So what concrete actions can parents and or community members take to create a more family-friendly culture? So a lot of this is going to be individual decisions that then parents become leaders on.

So I always say don't give your kids smartphones, don't give them social media, and then also get together with the other parents and say, hey, can we conspire on this? Also, do let your kids run the neighborhood and conspire with other parents on that too. You know, if it's a summer day, finish your chores, boom. You're on your own, you know, be back by dinner. And that works better when you have other adults who are on the same page. But that all points to the most important things to embed yourself in a good community, whether it's a church community, whether you have a good public school,

or just a local little league and join the board of, on it and volunteer like crazy. Plugging yourself into a community institution that is oriented towards family, that's going to give you the village that you need to raise your kids. And at the same time, you will be supporting everybody else who maybe is a little more hesitant about being free range or about having a second, third, or fourth kid. All right. Well, Tim, thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you. That was Tim Carney, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist at the Washington Examiner. His new book, Family Unfriendly, is out now. And this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.