Timothy P. Carney delivers his lecture “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs To Be,” based on his book of the same name, Thursday in the Amphitheater.
Timothy P. Carney remembers his and his wife’s first day as parents, of “feeling overwhelmed by the burden of love that we felt.” It was 2006, and the maternity ward was overflowing — the Carneys and their first child were in a makeshift nursery in the hallway, that’s how many babies were being born. This wasn’t just the case in Washington D.C., but all over the country. It seemed like “everybody had a baby in 2006, and then the next year it went even higher.”
“2007 saw the greatest number of births in U.S. history and people were calling it a baby boom,” Carney said Thursday morning in the Amphitheater, the fourth installment of the Week Five Chautauqua Lecture Series theme “Our Greatest Challenges (That We Can Actually Do Something About).”
But after that highwater mark, the number of American babies born has declined “basically every single year … from 4.3 million babies down to fewer than 3.6 million babies,” said Carney, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. He pointed to a chart, with a red line that indicated what demographers call the replacement level — a total fertility rate of 2.1 — which means the population will remain stable.
“We jumped above (2.1 in 2006 and 2007),” Carney said. “We’ve now fallen way below it,” with the U.S. total fertility rate down to 1.62 in the “COVID dip.”
According to the data Carney presented, there are fewer Americans under age 10 than there are Americans in their 60s, which will have real impacts in the coming years.
“But some people get really upset when you start talking about birth rates,” he said. “They think it’s some Handmaid’s Tale thing, or somehow it’s creepy.”
Not everyone is called to parenthood, Carney said, and he supports individuals determining their own lives; still, this isn’t about individual choices — its about why, as a society, these trends are going the way they are.
“If, as a society, the birth rate is falling, I argue this is something we should worry about,” he said, and he gave four reasons.
One: In terms of economics, America’s dependency ratio — the number of retired people over the number of working age people — is becoming more and more skewed; that negatively affects well-being. Two: Surveys indicate women still want to have babies, even more babies than they’re having. Three: Carney believes the current baby bust “reflects something unwell about our culture.” Four: Babies are good.
Think about what a skewed dependency ratio means for the workforce in 20 years, he said.
“There’s going to be fewer people even potentially entering the workforce every year starting in a couple years, at the time the number of retirees — because we are blessed with longer lifespans, with a large baby-boom generation — is hitting a record-high level,” Carney said.
Social Security can continue to pay out benefits, even without enough money coming in, but money isn’t wealth — “wealth is productive capacity. … If there’s nobody to answer the phone when you call the plumber about a leaky pipe, it doesn’t do you any good. You’ll have inflation, longer wait times.”
The longer wait times aren’t just for services like plumbers or restaurants, but ambulance dispatchers and 911. Indeed, this is already the case in some areas.
“All of these aspects of our life, we need workers,” Carney said. “When we have shortage of that, that will hurt us.”
Moving to his second point, Carney noted that “more importantly, on average, American women still want between two and three kids.”
In surveys, the polling firm Gallup has for many years asked “What’s the ideal number of kids for a family, in your opinion?”
When the birth control pill first came onto the market, that answer fell from between three and four, to between two and three. Most recently, the average response from adult women and men was 2.7 children, Carney said, but in reality the birth rate is about 1.6, and demographer Lyman Stone has broken it down even further.
“One, if you ask women of childbearing age how many do you want to have, they say 2.3 is the ideal. How many do you intend to have? They say probably it averages to about 1.9,” Carney said. “So, already that’s a gap right there. … There’s the gap between our ideal and our intention, and then the gap between our intention and what we actually get.”
Those aren’t just simple deficits, but a deficit in “the most important thing.”
“Your family is the most important thing in your life and we have a deficit of connection, a deficit of flesh and blood,” Carney said. “That is really a problem.”
Is it a problem of affordability, or selfishness? Cost — money — matters.
“Specifically, the price of owning a home really matters. But that has become a big issue in the last four years and this baby bust goes back to when homes were more affordable in 2009, 2010,” Carney said.
Economist Melissa S. Kearney studied geographic variations of student loan debt, rent increases, and childcare costs. None of it, she found, predicted falling birth rates in one place compared to another. The one economic predictor that did, however, was home ownership.
Millennials, Carney said, “are not actually poorer than my generation, Gen X, and are probably wealthier than the Baby Boomers,” and quoted numbers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that it costs approximately $300,000 to raise a child from birth to age 18.
Cost matters, and of course, cost is measurable. But, Carney asked, what about something that can’t be measured? What about selfishness? As a species, he said, humans are not more selfish than they used to be.
“But, what have we always done? What civilization is, is largely an effort to turn our selfish interests towards a common good, … towards a long-term good, to make sure we are not just thinking about ourselves but about the whole, about the community,” he said. “I argue we are not doing that. That’s why I say it’s a cultural failure. We are not properly aligning the interests of the whole with the interests of the individual and they’re deviating too much.”
He shared birth rates among the world’s wealthy countries, and pointed to an outlier. Israel, ranked on average among those other countries when it comes to wealth, education, and a social safety net, has a birth rate of 3. Where Israel is exceptional, however, is that “they are the only wealthy country that is built around shared faith.”
If the American baby bust is a failure of American culture, there are subcultures to be examined to figure out why. The first is parenting culture — “helicopter parenting, overambitious parenting, they all cause problems.” Studies show that modern fathers have doubled the amount of their hands-on parenting time from previous generations; mothers, too, have increased parenting input by 50%, Carney said. Fewer children means more time investing in the children you do have, ostensibly.
“The specific forms of parental investment though, in modern America, are not, in fact, high quality,” he said. “I think they’re causing serious problems. We have an epidemic of childhood anxiety and pediatricians increasingly say this is because of a lack of independent play …. independent of direct oversight and control by adults.”
There’s also the phenomenon of what Carney, in his book, calls the “Travel Team Trap,” in which local Little League teams are less and less popular than “expensive, intensive travel sports. You end up in the field hockey tournament in Delaware every other weekend and, no offense to Delawarians here, but it detracts from family culture and … confuses what the point of youth activities are. … It ignores that kids need to have fun and that sport is about building virtues.”
Carney described a debate in his family’s previous neighborhood in Montgomery County, Maryland, over sidewalks and young children walking to school (this was also the same county of the infamous “free range” parents investigated for neglect in the mid-2010s because of how far they let their young children walk on their own). But walkability does matter, Carney said — for kids to walk to school, to roam freely and, importantly, safely. And that “shouldn’t be a luxury good.”
That’s partly what makes Chautauqua “magical,” he said. “You’re not worried your kids are going to be run over by somebody going 50 miles an hour down the road.”
Add to that the sheer struggle of what Carney calls “car hell” — getting a toddler strapped into a car seat — the challenges of raising a family in a car-dependent society are steep. One solution is to “build towns for people, not cars.” Another is to address the rising cost of owning a home — starting with increasing the supply to meet the demand, specifically for affordable starter homes.
“Starter homes don’t get built anymore because of the costs of doing it,” he said. “The economics aren’t there. It’s got to do with regulation and the costs, the basic economics. We need to fix that. We need to build more homes.”
Policies and tax credits are one thing, but solutions need to be bigger than that, he said. The best, and most, solutions should come from community institutions, rather than the government. Every church and every town should be hosting mixers, summer concerts — like the big band concerts in the 1950s, but for people in their 20s, Carney said — in order to encourage meeting, dating, and marrying (the marriage rate in America, in addition to the birth rate, is also falling). Once people do become parents, they too must be supported; in Europe, some governments send “baby boxes” to new parents, filled with onesies, diapers, formula. Even the cardboard box itself turns into a bassinet. Local governments in America should be doing this, he said, as should every church.
“This isn’t just to satisfy material need,” Carney said. “It also says, ‘Welcome; let the little ones come to me.’ ” It sends a message that children are wanted in a shared space.
“The saying is: If it’s not crying, your congregation is dying,” he said. “We need to welcome kids everywhere. Welcome them in restaurants. Welcome them on airplanes.”
But in addition to a welcoming space for their children, what parents need more than anybody else, Carney said, is a support system of people they can lean on in their community. Increasingly, he said, drawing on his previous book, Alienated America, “we don’t know our neighbors. Strengthening community, neighborhood ties is absolutely going to be a solution to the fact that people aren’t having the number of children they want to have.”
The birth rate is down, marriage rates are down, and Carney thinks dating apps are part of the problem. In some ways, it “breaks young people’s brains.” The courting that used to transpire in person now is mediated by an algorithm, consent baked into the act of using the app itself and “that creeps into day-to-day life.”
“What I see is that people think, if I haven’t already gotten the consent to approach her, I can’t approach her; or, more specifically, … since dating apps are set up specifically for dating, anything not set up specifically for dating (means) it’s inappropriate to ask out, to flirt, to do anything,” Carney said.
This is a “disordered elevation” of individual autonomy — which is a good thing, he said, but always at odds with connecting. It also lends itself to the thinking that parenting is a “personal choice, and therefore a personal problem,” he said. Basically: Have as many kids as you want; “just make sure they don’t bother the rest of us.” That thinking is “unnatural and it’s inhumane.”
“I’ve never really felt it was society’s responsibility to take care of other people’s children; I think it always has been society’s responsibility to help parents raise their children, and it always has been,” he said. “We’ve lost that.”
All of this, Carney said, reflects “something deeply sad,” and that sadness is at the heart of the baby bust. He pointed to the idea of overpopulation and climate change, and the argument of “the world’s going to be on fire; why would I have kids?” But the thinking that the world “won’t be inhabitable (is) a gross overstatement,” he said.
“(When someone says) we don’t want to reproduce because we know that the earth can’t handle it, what is the ‘it’ there?” Carney asked. “The ‘it’ is another human being. The ‘it’ is us. The ‘it’ is me. The attitude that humans are bad really reflects a personal sadness, a lack of belief in our own goodness.”
Carney calls this “civilizational sadness,” and it’s what is causing the baby bust. America right now is an unhappy society, “reduced to a group of individuals defending what they have at all costs.”
What is the opposite of civilizational sadness? What is the opposite of a baby bust?
A baby boom, like what America experienced post-World War II, when society was experiencing what Carney called “the opposite of civilizational sadness.”
“Our men came home from saving the world from two evil empires,” he said. “They got off the boat, and waiting for them were the women who had kept the economy going for four years. They smooched on the pier, got married, and had a bunch of kids — because then, more than ever before and ever since, we were sure we were good.”
In contrast, Japan and war-ravaged Europe — particularly Germany and Italy — didn’t get a baby boom. Their birth rates declined and, Carney said, “they had trouble saying they were good.” That mindset has now crept into the West, into the United States. But humans are good; humans have made life better for other humans. Using an economic term, the “expected value of each human is positive. The good done by humans outweighs the harm done by humans — and this is just a material way of measuring longer, wealthier and healthier lives by other humans.”
Babies are good, Carney said, because they remind us that humans are good — “that truth is obscured at times by our own self-absorption or by others’ imperfections,” he said, “but children in their innocence reflect mankind’s innate goodness back to us.”
In closing, Carney asked the Amp audience: Could I be better? Could you be better?
“Yes,” he said. “But can you think of anything that will do a better job of making you better than taking on your back this burden of love?”
