Newt's WorldNewt talks with bestselling author Timothy Carney about his new book, "Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs To Be". Carney argues that modern American parenting standards are unrealistic and contribute to record rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness in children. He criticizes the culture of over-parenting and suggests that it's time to end this failed experiment. Carney also discusses the impact of technology, the fear of crime, and the pressure to succeed on parenting. He highlights the declining birth rates in the U.S. and globally, attributing it to factors such as career-focused lifestyles, housing costs, and a shift in cultural values. Carney suggests that policy changes, particularly in housing, could help support families and reverse the trend of declining birth rates.
On this episode of News World, the high standards set for modern American parenting are unrealistic and setting parents and our kids up to fail. Our culture tells parents there's one best way to raise kids. Enroll them in a dozen activities, protect them from trauma, get them into the most expensive college you can. If you can't do that, don't bother. And we now see record rates of anxiety, depression, medication, debts, loneliness, and more in America's children. In his new book Family on Friendly, how our culture made raising kids much harder than it needs to be, best selling author Timothy Karney says it's time to end this failed experiment in overparenting. I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Timothy Karney. He is the father of six children, a senior fellow at the American unerpresence' An, a columnist at the Washington Examiner. Tim welcome and thank you for joining.
Me on news World. Thank you for having me.
You and your wife, Katie have six children. In your book, you wrote the quote childhood anxiety is a result of helicopter parenting. What does that mean?
So with helicopter parenting you can mean a couple things, but just the image of the parent hovering literally or figuratively over the child. When I was a kid, we played little league. I rode my bike to the fields. My parents came to a couple of games if the weather was nice, and they thought that that was the nicest thing to do on a Friday night. That's out the window now. It's intensive, expensive travel sports where you're in Delaware for a field hockey tournament every other weekend. It's cracking the whip on homework every night and hiring tutors. It's also when they're little, a constant fear that there's some kidnapper, well trained kidnapper with a getaway car around every corner. And so it's a safetyism. It's an over ambition, a parental anxiety that trickles down into a childhood anxiety, and it involves forgetting that childhood is supposed to involve freedom and fun. And it really started in the upper middle class, this overparenting, but it's trickled down to the middle class and the working class, and so it's driving down birth rates. You know, new we have record low birth rates now less than one point seven babies per woman. And also this epidemic of childhood anxiety. There are economists who like this. Belsaw Hill, who's a friend of mine at the Workings Institution, she praised quality over quantity parenting. But my argument is that it's actually low quality parenting to make childhood into this sort of constant audition for getting into Princeton. That high pressure is not good for anyone.
So how do you think this evolved.
It's got a lot of roots. One of them really has to do with the secularization of our country. Frankly, so in this book, I talked to all sorts of fates. I went out to Mormon Utah and Idaho. I went to Jewish neighborhoods in Maryland, and I went to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I write it from a Catholic perspective. All of these parenting pathologies show up in all of these communities, but a lot less because I think if you view humans as sort of naturally good, then you not as worried about their outcomes. But in a more secular, more materialistic world, I think we'd say, okay, well a I'm going to plan a family super planned postpone it agonized, get married in your thirties, have your kid, in your late thirties know that it's just the right moment. Once you've done that, it becomes so much more pressure to get it exactly right, rather than you grow up, you have kids and you try to teach them well. So that's part of it. But also just the idea that the humans value is in their worldly accomplishments. I think that leads to this added pressure. So I really do think our culture's values have driven this.
And you make the point that this is also a real problem because we have this false sense of how dangerous the world is.
Oh yeah, I mean people really do think that kidnappings happen around every corner every day, and so kids aren't free to wander the neighborhood. There are neighborhoods that are unsafe, and we had a crime wave in twenty twenty. In most of the country it's gone down, but in a lot of places it hasn't. My wife and I we moved out of Montgomery County, Maryland into Fairfax County, Virginia, in part because the government there wasn't taking the crime wave seriously. But in any event, America is much safer today than it was when I was a kid. In the eighties and nineties, just by any measure of crime is way down from them.
And you make a void, which I think is startling that while there are these very high value and greatly paid attention to events with young kids, the fact is to something like one hundred abductions a year in which a stranger grabs a child.
Out of a population of three hundred and thirty million, So that is it seems to happen every day.
That's a staggering number. Unlike everybody else, when one of these things does occur, they can be two weeks of news and it makes you feel like it's around the corner and everyone's at risk, and based on your data, in fact, it's so unlikely that to warp your life around it is almost a psychological problem.
Yeah, your child is as likely to be killed by a lightning strike as is to be abducted. And when something is that rare, you can't really protect so well against it. I mean, at least with a lightning storm you can see the clouds coming, I guess, but it's incredibly rare. It's less than one in a million occurrence, and so you shape your life around that. Now, there are real risks to children, you know, drowning, car accidents, these are the things that the actual accidental, horrible things that happen to children. And I'm hyper aware and on guard around a swimming pool or at the beach with the kids. But the fact is that we were much more likely to get on the beltway and drive with our kids, which is much more dangerous than to let them walk to the park that's three blocks away. And so what that does then is it sets a cultural norm, and the parents who want to let their kids go to the park, some of them feel like they're being judged. And I tell the story from Montgomery County of parents who did let their kids go to the park and the police busted the parents for it, took the kids away for a little bit because they thought it was unsafe, and the parents said, show me one point where they were in day. The only danger was the Child Protective Service is taking the kids away for a few hours. So those threats that parents worry about are based on how a national media, even before social media, just they're being a national media. If it happens, you know, once a week somewhere in America and you hear about it every week, it sounds like it's happening around you all the time. But it's again a one in a million.
So in a sense, you have a kind of fearful parenting. My child won't get into the right college, my child might will be in danger physically, my child won't have the right skills. I need to keep them so busy that they can't do drugs. It's almost like the paranoid parent, if you will.
Yeah, I call it a mantle of fear that we feel we're supposed to wear like. And again, I talk to parents who feel that they should be afraid that when they let go and let their kids wander the neighborhood, they feel guilty about it, and so that it really is a cultural issue. And I try not to make it be an individual thing, but I do. It takes effort to overcome it. It takes community saying, you know, we are going to let our kids wander. I know dads who have done that, who gathered the other dads in the neighborhood and said, Okay, can we all agree our kids can run around the neighborhood. And if somebody else's kids run into your house like kids are allowed to come into my house, I might kick them out, but you know, we're going to let the kids run the neighborhood, and that takes an actual effort these days, when the norm is the paranoid parenting you're talking about.
I think back to my own childhood. There was a very relaxed attitude about my wandering off. I lived in a small town till I was eleven, so that may have been part of it, but there really was no sense. You could just go out and wander around and as long as you got home for dinner, they didn't care.
And so this stuff that we didn't really think about that was kind of the wisdom of our parents. Social science and psychology are actually showing the value of it. In the American Journal of Pediatrics recently, they said there is an epidemic of childhood anxiety, and a primary cause of it is the lack of independent play by children unsupervised by adults. One writer who was this sort of upper middle class liberal writer realize her husband said to her when she was working on a book about parenting, and says, oldest is ten years old. How much time do you think she's spent unsupervised? And the mom said, in her ten years, probably less than an hour in ten years, and that's what they realized that they had because that's what they had absorbed from other parents, and so they had to deliberately intentionally unschedule their kids. My wife and I were similar, where we put our daughter in a valet program that was close by because people said, oh, it's the best, the Maryland Youth Ballet. They produce prima ballerinas. We thought, oh, of course, we want to give our kid the best, and then we realized she was doing three hours a week at age eleven of the best valet and that this is horrible for everybody. And when we pulled there, we were all so much happier. So we had sort of backed in thoughtlessly to this hyper intensive parenting.
How much of that relates also to a underlying fear and if I don't keep you scheduled, you'll end up either doing drugs or in some way getting into trouble.
Well, I will say that the valid thing that parents fear is too much time on social media, the internet and smartphones. So this is a new and Jonathan Hate just came out with a book on this too, called The Anxious Generation. But in Family and Friendly I talk about that's one reason that some parents overschedule their kids, as they say, oh, well, the only other alternative is that they're going to be on Instagram or TikTok for many hours, and I do think that that's harmful for kids.
So I read somewhere that, particularly for teenage females, that social media is a major source of bullying and a major source of anxiety.
Anxiety, so social compare Who's the term I learned while working on my book that you look at it, you see the party that you miss. You look at this filtered and perfectly posed picture, and you're envious of the other girls. For boys, the danger is porn. It's like an unending supply of it. And when I talk to young women now, they say, you're writing a book about how people are getting married and having kids. Well, half the men my age are addicted to porn. And so these are real dangers. And the answer to both overscheduling and to the online dangers, a lot of it is let your kids be bored, let them roam, let them play pick up basketball. And obviously it's not possible to protect your kids from every harm. One of the middle chapters in the book, though, is about the tech and about how the dating apps delay marriage and they don't actually accelerate it, but how social media sort of rewires our mind and it uproots us from community who are on social media all day what they're doing. If you think about it, you were wandering your small town, you were in some ways becoming more rooted in where you were from. In social media, you're becoming uprooted, uprooted from your family, from your community, from your faith. And that ends up being really bad for kids. And so this is another problem, is that we have weaker communities in weaker extended families. That's bad. That again contributes to childhood anxiety, and it contributes to lower birth rates. I think.
You talk about the baby bust, and you trace it all the way back to two thousand and eight. What is it and why did it start.
So in two thousand and six. In two thousand and seven, my wife and I we had our first kid. In two thousand and six. There was a lot of babies born. Four point three million babies in two thousand and seven. There were more babies born than even at the peak of the baby boom. The total fertility rate, which is the most common birth rate you hear was at two point one, which is the replacement level, that's what would keep a population stable over time. Since then, it's dropped every year, down from four point three million babies down to three point six million babies, from two point one birth rate down to below one point seven birth rate, basically every single year. When it first started, people said, oh, it's a great reception. People can't afford to have kids. But then the economy started to improve and the birth rate kept falling. In twenty nineteen, before the pandemic, we had the best economy in my life and the lowest birth rate in my life. And so it's hard to pinatus on the economy. We talked about tech. The iPhone came out in two thousand and seven and the baby bus started the next year. That might be a coincidence, it might not. Obviously it's a problem too. Not everybody believes it's the problem. And in my book I talk about the economic problems the socials, and how it reflects the sort of failure of our society to support families. We sort of think, okay, have kids, but they're all your own, you know, don't bug the rest of us. Don't let them make noise at the restaurant and don't bring them on the airplane, and don't expect us to accommodate parents. I think there's a lot of reasons to be upset about the baby busts.
And do you think it's likely to continue?
Yes, because it's all self reinforcing. When people have fewer kids, that results in people having fewer kids. This is true for a lot of reasons. One you look in a place like South Korea, which has the lowest birth rate in the world. A lot of recent articles in major newspapers here talked about how there's an increasing push to ban children from more places in South Korea. Once you're not used to kids, then the world gets less built for kids and less built for families. Just think about neighborhoods that have a lot of kids. Once there's a lot of kids, they're like, Okay, let's put up a new playground, Let's make sure the sidewalks are a little wider. There's family restaurants and that sort of thing. Those don't happen in places where they're fewer kids. And then you think about Capitol Hill. You remember the Capitol Hill staff. These are mostly young childless people these days, they're the people making our policies, some of them never see a kid all day long, and so they're shaping our world without children in mind. So I do think that the baby bus causes more baby bus and so right now we've fallen from two point one to one point sixty five in about fifteen years. I expect that to keep going down less of course, everybody reads my book and we get a baby boom starting in nine months.
You cite what I think is one of the most fascinating examples of this change, and that's South Korea. I mean, despite all the talk about China's one child policy, it's actually South Korea, which as a free country, suddenly shifted years and became the lowest birth rate in the world. How do you analyze them.
It's tricky, but I've been reading everything i can on this and comparing it to other cultures. They have always had a very workest careerist policy for the men there, and it was just sort of established that working career are the highest callings. I don't think there was a lot of respect given to mothers, who were largely expected to stay at home. I argue one of the chapters of my book that we need more stay at home moms, but they need to be celebrated and vaunted and recognized and accommodated. And so in a culture that set its ideals as about career success, well, once there was more equality, the women wanted that career success. And then once a lot of the men were competing against a lot of the women, it became harder and a lot of men dropped out of the labor force. So now what you have is is women who want more career success, men who don't necessarily want to bother the hustle in the workforce, so they are not attractive as husbands, obviously, especially to women who can make their own money. And so a lot of those cultural shifts happened. Again, it's also rapidly secularized. It's a very secular country, and so we can talk about values, but I think a lot of it has to do with mood. It's an increasingly sad place where if you're just focused on your career, if you are a man who doesn't think you have high career prospects, if you're a woman who thinks, well, i'd like to marry but there's not that many men out there, And now you're shrinking because of the baby bus theres and that exacerbates the sense of sadness. It seems like a dying culture that's just about putting your nose to the grindstone. The last chapter of my book is called civilizational sadness, because I think that's what ties South Korea, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, the United States all together. It's in different ways. We do not see sort of the human race as a good thing.
It's not just a Western civilization plus Japan and career. I mean, you make the point. Mexico has collapsed in birth rates, Brazil, Malaysia, Vietnam now now below replacement fertility race, and even Nigeria is rapidly declining in number of children. There's something going on worldwide in the civilization that is sending a signal that having children is less important and maybe for women, having a career is more important. I don't know what it is, but it is apparently a worldwide phenomenon.
Yep. I think that again, the idea is the modern idea of the individual, disconnected from the community and from past generations. In future generations, it's a very modern, overly individualistic mindset and the places that have the most babies are place which is not just a well, yes at our religious but also that have robust religious communities. And I think a robust, sort of less religious community could play some of this role. But the more that we are just sort of floating about as individuals, or if you get married it's just a couple and you're alone, the less you're going to think about the past and the future, the less support you're going to think that you have. And I think that that, again is sort of part of modernity. Some of it is technology, some of it is just again the sort of Tookville talks about this in democracy in America, like the spirit of equality and democracy, two great things. If they become all consuming, well, then it does disconnect us from one another. A wise woman once said, it takes a village to raise a child. Now Hillary might have meant the Department of Health and Human Services, but historically it was the extended family, the neighborhood, the church, the school.
Well, and you made a boy, which I frankly not thought about that. It's not a function of cost, because a lot of people think, gee, if we could change the income equation, but in fact, wealthier people are less likely to have children than poorer people.
And it's not really more expensive to raise kids. So I cite lots of economists and actually the cost of raising kids hasn't really gone up unless you insist on doing all the travel, sports and the private tutoring. The exception to that, though, is housing. Housing costs in the last three years have gone up, and more expensive housing does deter family formation. That doesn't explain the baby bus because that's been going on for fifteen years. That's where I would focus policy, because we have the discussion about the child tax credits, the Biden administration monts to subsidized childcare. What I would focus on at the governmental level, are there obstacles to building more housing, more family friendly housing. Are there federal policies regulations that make it totally unprofitable to build a starter home? Where our part of Northern Virginia, New McLain, Virginia, every house that's less than four thousand square feet gets torn down and replaced by this massive mansion where people have two kids and I don't know what they do with all their six thousand square feet. But those smaller houses, that was what a family could afford and buy and you ask a builder now, they say it would make no sense, and not just in McLain where the land's really expensive, but almost anywhere. It make no sense for me to build a house that somebody could buy for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars because just the permits are going to cost me two hundred thousand dollars. So housing is a one place where I really say policy ought to say what can we do to make it more affordable for families? But outside of housing, you're.
Right, does that almost become a big fight over localism. A lot of these regulations and a lot of these fees are deliberate.
Yes, there are people who want to keep down the housing suck. And then an unhelpful kind of yimbie response is that we should build massive apartment buildings in every neighborhood. I think the next thing I want to study at AI with housing people with family folks is what is the actual pro family housing policy because it's not big apartment buildings, so those are not family friendly, but it's certainly not no new development because high housing prices. One of the most valuable things you can do as a parent is live close to your own parents. Now I say, the optimal distance is just far enough that they can't hear you screaming at your own kids. A block away from Grandma is one of the best things to do. And this is one of the things that makes Israel unique. Most parents live within twenty minutes of their own parents, and that's really hard in sort of the large metropolitan areas in the United States because of the costs of housing and so anything that can increase density but in a family friendly way. That's a really complicated thing. But it's not being studied right now because Americas just started to pay attention to the baby bus. Europe has been paying attention to it for fifteen years. But here, my agent was surprised to learn that birthrate through low and falling three years ago. It's just really hitting our radar screen.
You know. It's interesting. When I was Speaker of the House, we did a lot of work with Jimmy Carter and Habitat for Humanity, And when the Republicans decided to have their convention in nineteen ninety six in San Diego, we thought, that's terrific. We will go out and we will build a Habitat for Humanity house. Well, the cost of the permits in San Diego was greater than the total cost of the house in Georgia, and that was for a habitat for humanity house. There was no one like charitable exams or poor people exemption. It was unbelievable how much they charged and have never gotten over two other things that are fascinating that you bring up one and I did not know this. Will you make the assertion that there's been a gap in child bearing between conservatives and liberals, at least since the early nineteen eighties.
Yeah, so some of that gap is due to the fact that conservatives are more religious, but even controlling for religion, I'd say most of it is due to religion, but there's even some leftover. Even if you control for religion, there's even some conservatives outbreeding the Libs, as you could say, And some of the baby bus is suited the fact that young women are more likely to be liberal today than they were fifteen years ago and thirty years ago. Why would that be one. I think that conservative people are just more likely to be rooted in a place to live near grandma, to be raising their kids in a small town. Liberal Americans are often more likely to be trying to get above their backwards upbringing or whatever they think. Also, a lot of liberalism in the last thirty years has been sort of dark and brooding about the future, whether it's climate change or the racial settler colonial guilt of an American. But I don't want you to think that this means that the future everybody's going to be conservative, because we have the public schools out there whose job it is to turn conservative kids into liberals.
I used to teach environmental studies and taught in the Second Earth Day back in nineteen seventy one, and in that period, the catastrophism which still exists, for example, in climate was in part focused on population. And you had Paul Erlick, who has been amazingly wrong about every single thing he's written, but remains a tenured professor of Stanford with great prestige on the left. And he wrote a book called The Population Bomb, and what she said basically that by the year two thousand, Britain would be starving to death. It's the last great stand of Malthusian economics. And yet everything they said about the population boom, it's very hard for them to switch gears and realize we're now worldwide seeing a declining rate of population, not a rising rate. And I assume that the next generation Paul Early will write a best selling book called the Population Bust and how it threatens us or something. But are you surprised at how totally Aerlic was wrong?
Yes? What's the first line of the book. The race to feed humanity is over and we've lost. Humans are better nourished now by a million miles than they were when Erlick wrote that book, and the population is much larger. So to me, that's the most telling detail. In fact, we've reached about twenty years ago peak agricultural land. The human species uses up less land every year because again farming efficiency, grazing efficiency, that sort of thing. So we're taking up less of the planet, and the rural population will in the life span of my children start to shrink unless something changes. What was interesting and telling about Erlich and so I use his quotes in the last two chapters, isn't my book? Because he said, tell a woman she can have as many kids as she wants is like telling someone that they can throw as much trash in their neighbor's y ared as they want. And that to me was so telling. That idea that children are an externality, a negative externality, and that children are kind of like trash. That was reflective. And he tells the moment that he came to fear over population was in a cab ride through Delhi in India and just the filth he saw, all the people. He said, the people talking, people, visiting, people, eating, people, people, people. He actually says people, people, people, people as like his image of Hell, and I just thought that is so telling. There's that saying Hell is other people. And I think that's what Erlik believes. And that's why again I come back to the civilizational sadness. I think that it's trickled into the spirit of our age, especially among a lot of our elites, that people, people, people are the problem, that what we need is sort of a more sterile, clean life, and that misanthropy of Erlick. I think, even though he was wrong on everything, I think that has sunk into the spirit of the day.
There's a certain sense on the left that Gaya, Mother Earth is offended by all of these human beings, and instead of seeing us as part of nature, they see us as a parasite, risking the destruction of nature. It's a very interesting phenomena. I think your work is fascinating. I wish you well at looking at housing policy next and we want you to come back and educate us when you're ready to on that topic. I'm really delighted that you wrote Family on Friendly How our culture made raising kids much harder than it needs to be. It's available on Amazon and bookstores everywhere, and I think folks ought to read it and understand that we really have gone down a cultural road that is ultimately destructive and we need to rethink where we are and how we're dealing with it. And Tim, I want to thank you for joining me. This is a very very interesting conversation.
Thank you, my pleasure.
Thank you to my guest, Timothy Carney. You can get a link to buy his new book Family on Friendly on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Game of three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producers Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley Special Things. Thanks to the team at GINGRIDGH three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld. I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of news World can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at gangwischthree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm new Gingrich. This is newts World
