Seventy-five years ago, America was in the midst of a baby boom thanks to World War II vets who'd returned home heroes, eager to settle down and make more Americans. And 25 years ago, we still had admirably high birth rates relative to other developed nations.
But today, our birth rate is well below replacement level, never having recovered from the 2008 recession. We’re some of the most fortunate people ever to have graced the surface of this planet, yet we feel harried, overburdened, and financially unable to have as many kids as we’d like. We’ve also lost our 20th-century confidence: Why create more people who’ll just pollute the planet, anyway?
Family Unfriendly, the latest book from Washington Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney, proposes a full-court press to fight these trends—involving changes in individual behavior, institutional priorities, public policy, and, perhaps most dauntingly of all, culture. It’s an impressive combination of traditional shoe-leather reporting, empirically-driven policy analysis, and first-person anecdotes derived from Carney’s experiences as a father of six. And we’d all be better off if we followed his advice.
One of Carney's biggest points is that we’ve simply chosen to make parenting a lot harder than it needs to be—an argument he drives home with cheeky chapter titles and subheads such as “Have Lower Ambitions for Your Kids” and “Lose Your Kids.” Parents don’t actually have to helicopter their children at every waking moment or fall into the “travel team trap” of constantly chauffeuring kids to faraway sporting events.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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