American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Timothy P. Carney is set to deliver a lecture at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater. The Washington Examiner columnist and author of Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be plans to discuss what he believes is a culture unfriendly to families and children in the United States, continuing the Week Five theme: “Our Greatest Challenges (That We Can Actually Do Something About).”
Carney said there are two concurrent problems in the United States — the first is that Americans are having fewer children and some are having fewer than they want, and the second is that, in Carney’s opinion, the country is facing an epidemic of childhood anxiety.
“My argument is that ultimately the problem — economics is part of it, but culture is the bigger part — is that we have a family-unfriendly culture,” he said. “Parenting culture is overly intensive; mating and dating culture is broken, so people have trouble getting married in their 20s; and our culture’s values are too individualistic and materialistic. That doesn’t go well with the whole project of getting married and raising kids.”
At AEI, Carney’s work focuses on civil society, family, localism and religion in America, among other topics. In addition to Family Unfriendly — in which he argues the standards for modern parenting are unrealistic and set both parents and children up for failure — he’s the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, which was a Washington Post bestseller, and two other books on economics and government.
The declining birth rate in the United States, Carney said, is the biggest story of the next 30 years.
“It’s going to have effects on our workforce. It’s going to have effects on our neighborhoods, and it really reflects a cultural sickness that’s going to have all sorts of other negative effects,” he said. “I think this is the greatest problem facing the U.S.”
Carney added that he believes there are examples — both domestically and internationally — of cultures that give children more independence and agency without what he views as oversurveillance.
“I think we can do something about our culture, because we see that there are some cultures and some subcultures that are family-friendly,” he said.
He said he hopes to highlight obstacles to parenting and raising children in the current culture of the United States in a way that remains positive and optimistic, and then offer ideas about how to shift this culture to be more family-friendly.
“(These obstacles are some that) people either might not notice, or might have thought it was just them who were experiencing it,” Carney said. “Ultimately, I think a huge part of the problem with our culture is a lack of hope, a lack of optimism, and I’m trying to overcome that. … I would feel like I was a success if people left my lecture feeling actually more optimistic and hopeful about the future.”
