The War On Ordinary Families - American Reformer

A Review of Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be

In 2013, when my wife was pregnant with our sixth child, we decided it was time to retire the hand-me-down minivan we had been driving for almost a decade and get a more roadworthy family vehicle. So one sunny day I drove onto the lot of a major dealership near my campus and got out to browse. When the smiling salesman walked up and asked if he could help me find something, I told him I needed a vehicle that would seat eight. He paused, frowned, and confessed, “I don’t think we have anything on the lot that will seat eight.” Just like that, I became another casualty in America’s War on Large Families (WoLF). (We ultimately ended up with a 15-passenger van.)

The WoLF takes its toll on families like mine—God ultimately blessed us with seven children—in numerous ways. Occupancy restrictions, car seat regulations, and similar governmental measures function effectively as a tax on children. Even more pernicious are the anti-family norms promoted by media and the corporate world: “childfree” public spaces, handwringing about the alleged irresponsibility of having children in the midst of “the climate catastrophe,” and the readiness of “concerned citizens” to call the cops on the parents of children playing unsupervised.

Tim Carney, a Roman Catholic father of six, is familiar with all of this. But in Family Unfriendly, he has upped the ante by making the case that American culture is hostile to any ordinary family with children, not just large families—not just a WoLF, but a WoOF. Over 14 chapters spanning 368 pages, Carney poses a wide-ranging critique of American life, ranging from travel ball and walkable neighborhoods to transhumanism and radical feminism. By the time you reach the end of the book, you might conclude that it’s providential anyone at all is still having children in this country.

Carney devotes his first two chapters to different manifestations of “helicopter parenting.” Recalling his own childhood experience of simple pick-up games with friends, he laments the more recent advent of the “Travel Team Trap,” over-organized and over-scheduled youth sports leagues that require families to travel extensively to games. For Carney, these groups are representative of all the ways in which parents have been conditioned to try to turn their children into high-achievers at very young ages. Parents who sink excessive amounts of time and energy into such activities often reason that they could not possibly have more than one or two children, if that’s what being a good parent means. Carney concludes that, as a culture, we simply must convince everyone “to have lower ambitions for their children.” A corollary to this prescription is that parents (and the rest of society) need to get more comfortable with allowing children to have more unstructured play.

The problem of “Car Hell” extends beyond the Travel Team Trap because a large percentage of families live in places where every trip for any purpose must be made by car. The built environment in most American municipalities effectively prevents functional or recreational trips by foot or bike. When families lack this kind of access to parks, libraries, and other community amenities, both parents and children are less socially engaged and prone to obesity and other health problems. Carney calls for governments to favor “kid walkability” as a policy goal as well as making “starter homes” legal again through regulatory relief that can bring down the price of construction and, indirectly, commute times as families can afford housing closer to their jobs. He also urges employers to adopt policies that send a “pro-family, pro-natal” signal to young couples.

Carney points out that the Baby Bust we have experienced since 2008 cannot simply be pinned on the oft-named culprits of affordability and selfishness. A deeper cultural shift has taken place. The perceived time commitment for child-rearing has increased dramatically, and the relentless climate catastrophism pumped into the last two generations has helped make childbearing seem downright irresponsible. But Carney argues persuasively that we cannot afford a Baby Bust. It’s not just bad economically, leading to labor shortages and perverse incentives for immigration policy. It’s also bad for us psychologically and spiritually. Contrary to the steady drumbeat from the corporate press, parents on average are happier than non-parents, and most women want more children than they think they can afford. And as nearly every parent can attest, being a parent makes you less self-centered and more receptive to habituation in a number of virtues.

Carney seems willing to take the risk of stepping on different sets of toes in different chapters. Good examples pop up in Chapters 11 and 12. The first of these is titled “We Need a Family-Friendly Feminism.” Although the chapter seeks to blow up the “Feminist Fecundity” argument—the idea that greater gender equality will lead to a higher birthrate—the call for a “family-friendly feminism” that adapts work to serve family goals will probably seem off-putting to the social conservatives who would prefer to jettison the concept of feminism altogether. But then Carney titles the next chapter “You Should Quit Your Job” and argues that we need many more stay-at-home parents, which in practice means disproportionately more stay-at-home moms since for more women wish to stay home with the kids than men do. This argument draws fire from “policymakers, journalists, and economists [who] take it for granted that both parents should be in the workplace, and that getting mothers into full-time work is an unmitigated good.” Social conservatives, by contrast, will cheer this chapter.

One of Family Unfriendly’s highlights is Chapter 9, “Posthuman: How Our Tech Has Changed Us.” Carney argues that “our smartphones and apps seem like prime suspects behind our demographic decline.” On one hand, social-media “momfluencers” project a fantastical, idealized standard of parenthood. On the other hand, the “parenting-is-hell” genre of social media make the ordinary life of a dad or mom seem impossibly difficult or not worth the effort. Even beyond the confines of social media, the attention-monopolizing technology of the screen has contributed to a collapse in mental health among the younger generations. Pornography offers a quick, cheap dopamine hit that lures millions of young people away from the pursuit of real relationships, but internet usage in general also leads to less marriage. The giant dating apps like Tinder are a well-documented disaster that push people into adopting unrealistic standards for potential mates: “everyone is toxic.” Carney urges youth organizations to stop requiring their members to have smartphones to participate in activities, and goes on to call for an outright ban on smartphones for kids “wherever possible.”

But perhaps the best chapter of the book is the final one, titled “Civilizational Sadness.” Here Carney compares the United States to low-birth-rate countries (like Germany) that have lost their self-confidence and suggests that Americans have stopped having children because they think our civilization is not worth perpetuating. Indeed, this message has been promoted for decades by climate alarmists and the proponents of critical race theory. It makes sense that people on the political left, who drink more deeply from these wells, have fewer children than those on the right. Carney points out that the “mathematically straightforward” explanation for the Birth Dearth of the past two decades is that young women have trended more and more to the left. And these days, “being a young liberal woman means being sad and afraid.” The forces of pessimism have always been present, but Christianity has provided antibodies against them. Now that the younger generations are turning away from the faith in greater numbers, they are more vulnerable than ever to civilizational sadness.Family Unfriendly contains no stirring final chapter with a ten-point plan to fix everything. But Carney’s analysis invites the reader to draw some obvious conclusions. Ending the WoOF requires re-embracing the Christian faith and living with hope for both our children and our civilization. It also requires recovering (or establishing for the first time) a healthy relationship with our technology—not just our screens, but our built environment as well. Public policy must remove the current incentives against family formation. And, don’t forget, get rid of Travel Ball.

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