all right, evebody, we can and she's really i would s her stuff gets forwarded to me more than just about anything else in the wnglyrom my wife. and it is always profound and in she takes up these same subjects, but from often a different angle than the one that tim might take and their conversation in a certain way could be a left right conversation. but i think it's also going to show that these kinds of issues are not really in any simple way left, right, the two of them. we'll talk for while and then they can draw all of you into to the people in this if you're watching us online, then right next to where you're watching us, you conversation and to where to send an email or tweet. you must and to take part in in the discussion. and so with that, we'll a little something about the book and then we'll hear from tim and go from there. americans are having fewer and fewer kids every year. politicians commentators assume it's just about cost.

but theyonle story we need to take seriously make our way to where wean the feeling thti has good afternoon. welcome to the american gotten harder. enterprise institute. i'm yuva's my these days. parent to s ne pleasure to welcome you to this countercultural if they want to avoid maximum effort parentg.t'y discussion of wonderful and important new book family how our culturee anymore to your kids run around raising kids much harder than it needs to. mostly misguided cultural tim is a senior fellow here at expectation and norms. but also our world is just more aei and a columnist at the washington examiner. hostile to letti kids. his work ilo know he focuses on family and on civilnn for the sanity of today's children and parents, we need to politics. regain mindset. 'hed dely beyond his we neighborhoods and reshape our columns, too, in the new york times, the wall street journal, the washingtosatlantic and else. culture in a way thatents to ler you see on tv a lot. tim's work is unique. kids. go free. he describes broad social trends by beginning from the experience of real people. he thinks from the bottom up, not from the top down. thank you. and for that reason, i think he you've all. thank you, all of you, for has an understanding of how joining me tonight. people thrive and how people this t book has truly been a fail. what holds together, what labor of i want and in that

divides us. that is just deeply humane and regard i want to specifically sympathetic, even as it's thank my wife katie for for coming i was able to write with some knowledge about having six fundamentals. his goal really is torove your kids because of her. grandmother was right. if you want to be happy, you shou g th katie. you have kids, you should go to church. neighbors. reysl clarity you should people well. but he also wants to explore ut modern life that makes it so hard. do what your grandmother told you toto see the value of these things. it's very much what this wonderful book is about. it looks at the variousways thar society has made life harder for but very often not on purpose. and it some ways forward. tonight's conversation is going to take up all of thath event ff a serious we call it the edward forum's. these are public events that are really intended to facilitate conversation about important books on issues that

touc c questions by aei scholars, but also by others. we're ve haery gr sues for their support of these events and of i our format is going to be very simple. after i step down, we're going to watch a quick video about tim' book and then tim is going to step up and talk about the book for a while. andhat he'll be in conversation about with alyssa rosenberg, the wonderful washington post columnist who writes family and culture and a lot of the kinds of questions that tim takes up in his book. she's also just as of the last few days, the cni letters editor is there write e washington post shows she gets to hear from all kinds of very interesting people.

father, i remembethwhen we fird a shocking moment. but i also remember that night of we moved to the labor and delivery room all of the emotions. what i think of as the burden of love that was falling on me. i also remember in the middle of the night when i couldn't sleep and katie was asleep, the baby had been wheeled into sort of makeshift nursery out in the and there we go. that's the first day, makeshift y inhe hallway and.

i walk out there and just staringt erct little face and i'm thinking, what, what? going be a big sister of how many siblings? what's your future going to hold? and that's when nurse tapped me on the shoulder and said, sir, you're your is three bassinets over? you are currently staring at somebody else's child, but reason thathe nursery was in the hallway is because there. we were in an overflow wing, sibley hospital, because 26 saw a uptick in the birth rate. everybody was having babies. everybody famous person you can think of. so brad pitt, angelina jolie had a baby and suri cruise was born there. heidi klum. britney spears, they both had babies around the same time. we did. and then it went up even in 2007, you everybody following bradngelina jolie and,

me and and started having and we had the number of births of any yearn history there was a belief that this could become a real baby boom because the millennials were just hitting their primeing so rising birth rates, the millennials, a largereration turning into their mid-to-late is it going to be a baby wasn't. it was a baby bust almosevthe number babies born in the united states has fallen. and one of the results from, 4.3 million babies down to 3.6 million. and this year lastr, 2023 might end up being lower, even than 2020. here's important measure of the total fertilityeople are famili. 2.1 babies per woman is replacement level, at which a population will remain steady without immigration. we ticked above that again,

thanks to brad pitt. tom and me. we ticked above that in 27. but have falling almost every year since. and sorry about that y axis not down toward zero, down towards 1.6, 1.7. so one result of this is we now actually have fewer children in america than did at the last census, not as a percentage of the population, but the raw number is lower in this census. this is what's normally called the age pyramid. it's an age onion. i think now you can see the one of the skinniest bars is down there at theat the bottom. so we have a legitimate real baby bust in our lifetime the us population is estimated to ng. well should say in the lifetime of some people in this room but yes. and so a real baby bust, i think it's the most important story of the next 30 years. and americans are just starting

to realize it now. a natural ques is why should we care? why is this bad? some people are creeped out. th handmaid's tale or a thing that g enoughbout. babies. so this isliberal on twitter, la bassett and just said honest question considering overpopulation is literally killing the planet, why does it matter to you why? why do you insist on more births? another liberal to pilhas, she looked at the from brookings university of maryland scholar ing that the economic explanations don't explain the falling birthrate. and she said, surprise younger women might just want more out of children. so, yes, why do we care? i divided into four reasons. one economic reason the dependent ratio how many retirees compared to workers as

grows that reduces economic well-being. two women actually do three the baby boomers reflect, un even if you don't care about there being fewer babies. 's something should care about. it has other root causes and other excuse me, other effects that are not great. and being fewer babies because babies are actually go.so let'st reason. the ecoratio, we now have more amerin tir sixties than. we have children under age ten. along with that, the working age population which used to steadily climb has now flatlined. so we're not getting more potential workers. mean? one easy example is vo as a as a writer, somwork from . right.

and. now the fact that i nohawait tit working from an irish pub is not in itself a problem. a reason to worry about this. but you do other things like that. what abo? the fact that the wait time for one one calls in montgomery county, maryland or in d.c. is getting longer because they're having trouble stacking, filling all e or dispatchers. that's a realroeconomists alan s way. no, neither savings norment penk unless there are enough workers to meet the needs older americans. now it's possible that artificial intelligence is going to solve all of these problems, but it will. and i think that gemini, fixing your leaky pipes might be a little subpar. so that's the the economic story. more important■ó■mson, women actually still want kids. this is gallup always asked kids in a family. the number has actually been going up in difference, by the way, between how women answer

poll and how men answer this poll. and millennials are still way above economist, demographelyone, who came up with a graph. this is sort of the low ball ideal family is using different surveys to kids. but then another question how have the answer to amongend to millennials? there, you have a little bit of gap between the ideal and thand then the actualf babies is a little below 1.7. so are setting our goals lower even meeting those lower goals. and so to get into the nuances for a second, that's the baby bust reflectyou is a reduced der family or a desire for a smaller family. and then the other is a failure. meet what people want. and so if we want more kids, why

aren't we having them? and consider this or the broader i the birthrate falling m■i book. i got to travel all over the world. i got to go to israel. i got to to places where the collapsing. i got to go to where it was fine. utah has a pretty high birthrate. and so i went i walked around salt lake city in a neighborhood that looked like one of the best neighborhoods to raise kids called. the avenues y had trees on the streets. you had nice family houses that little yard.w,ve and one of the things i noticed was i didn't so finally, i run into this couple. their name is isaac nicole, and theyre wsidewalk. and i ask isaac and nicole, i'd say, hey, i'm writing a book and you ta t'm writing about family. and nicole instantly blurts out. we don'nt and so i say, sure. she said, yes, i why not? i said, we can't afford it. i said, what exactly is likeordm

you're facing? and isaac care. but if i'm being honest,y just selfish. then he says, i always sit in a cold. peop are watching teletubbies and cleaning up vomit.margaritas in paris. and then at thatgreeted. and nicole is a double stroller. both the passengers in the double stroller were. so this scene with my mind reeling for all one was this was like a scene out of p.d. james is children of men, too. why? you go to paris to drink. but those reasons, affordability eddie gave are the standard reasons. i don't think hold up. bus has gotten worsehas often gotte.

that's the birth rate, that gray bar was a greats during the recession. they did in 2019 when we had the best economy in years. and that study from melissa kearney that lydia pillar cited saying little evidence to the usual economic explanations for places where rent went up. did nazi were rent went up more birth rate places student loan debt went up did same with rising childcare costs. they didn't predict greater rat. millennials think that they he part they're not really. so lots of economists this is from jeremy hospital all have looked at the actual wealth of across a generation and found that millennials and gen z are about as wealthy as gen x and probably little more wealthy than the baby boomers. yet they have a lot feweres. so this was jeremy who did a e median american male to earnk as much as it the estimated cost

of raising a child. so the estimated cost of raising income goes up. guess what the median income is going up higher. the estimated cost of raising a child. since 2010 wleirthrate has been falling that right bar the 12.2 weeks. that for for a male to pay for the raising a kid than it did in 2010. so the other estimate other causes the baby bus. surely it's there. but you can't blame selfishness for falling birthrates any more than boeing could blame gravity for fallin airplanes. selfishness is always there. if i hadarfor this one, it would start at zero. and then adam and eve, the apple,go to 100 and then it's flat. after that. but what does change over across places is the the ability of society

offset that selfishness. that's what the jobless society and civilization and culture is, is to steer people self-interest rds common good. so that, to me suggests what we failure of culture. that gap between the attained family and the desired family and the gap between the desired. those are failures of our ci failures to give people, you know, massive houses with wraparound porches. we're falling short. our culture is falling on helping people achieve something incredibly important, which is family. it's a deficit of flesh, blood. and that's something that we really should care about. again, another piece of evidence that culture is a prlehose are e countries in the oecd, what their birth rate is. the average is just above 1.5. there's one outlier there. it's israel. israel is not richer or poorer than the average country. it's about in the middle, in the

oecd, its education levels a little above average. its welfare state is in the countries.all of those its birth rate is about twice average. israel differs from the other countries, mostly in its culture. we can get more into that. but this again points to the problem. something unwell in our culture, our is not delivering what should which is the support of families. parents don't just the appeal the decision the ability to have children isn't just an ■ñin between two people. it's something that requires surrounding institutions neighbors to do a wise woman put it well once when she said it takes a village to raise a child. yeah. if our village is failing, that's problematic. even you don't care about the lack of the children. so how is our culture broken? one parenting culture is broken. my video pointed towards that. so i'll race that. but parents spend a lotore

time now. mothers spend a more time now than our grandmothers did. or mother said back in the 5670s. even though dads doubled their dating time, which is very. women have increased to work outside the home which is very good. would get a break compared to her mom or grandma. but no, this is a you survey that's ours solely. so not counting coing, not counting any family activities. it's it's watching them making sure they do their homework. so that's parenting culture gone haywire. some people think that's good. i keep quoting melissa carney at brookings. she said smaller families among higher income people could a quantity quality tradeoff. i hate that phrase not just because it implies that my wife and i chose the quantity half of that because we have six children. but but be■?use i think it's

false. but isabel sawhill, excellent holar at brookings, she puts it this way with fewer children support, parents and society can both invest more in each child. and that's supposed to help children. i don't think it does. i think that the rise in childhood anxiety that is a sister problem of the falling birthrates. the journal pediatrics, a lot of saw they said that a primary of the rise in mental disorders in young children is the loss of freedom to play without being supervised by parents. that loss of freedom, high quality, high intensive has bad outcomes not just for parents, but for kids. one instance of that is how youth gets replaced by travel sp. the idea that sport, baseball is good in and of itself, that fors gets replaced by relentless desire for achievement excellence, beating the next. the demand for helicopters here.

i quote katie a little more free range d she is. and en do something that she thinks t boundaries he repeatedly would say i'm not afraid of kidnapers our kids i'm afra of cps, ilprotective services thatspringhere they wes free range paren repeatedly got in trouble for letting their kids walk thpark and in one of our near one of our old neighborhoods, there was an attempt to put in a sidewalk near an elementary school. and one of the womenho idewalk, well, little kids like this shouldn't our culture is anti is family unfriendly. specifically this way that they don't want kids be free. so this is one of the chapter titles in my book if you want fecundity in the sheets you need walkability in theeets. we don't have walkable communities a lot fewer kids walk to school than they used to. more importantly, a lot fewer kids just run around and are told ride, your bike, wherever

you want, just come home. when the streetlights turn on. this leads to stressed parents, kids and i think fewer kids. our culture is also broken because our culture of dating is totally dysfunctional. and it's dysfunctional. going to dwell on this a little bit because it's it's dysfunctional in a way that i think is telling. so dating apps, kate julian, who's a writer, she told ato th. there's one guy who's on this coed volleyball team. he wanted to ask out this girl and he decided it would be boorish or incredibly awkward to ask the girl out in person because played volleyball together and somehow that was abusing the the rights of the volleyball team. when i talk about this the college kids i say or young adult i say if you're on a coed volleyball the point of that is to the opposite sex. okay not it's not to play volleyball. you're. not. but again, a deeper problem here

and it involves the fact that the dating apps give double secret consent and that's how it's supposed to be. okay, because even somebody out could be an affront. and the deeper route. here's a quick excerpt from. the book i don'do jesse bartender in greenville, south carolina. jesse brags that he has risen above his, quote, ultra conservative southern baptist upbringing witnalist mores. i'm a feminist, explains. these are all connected for jesse and his romantic life, which mostly flows from the apps tinder and bumble or from his clientele at the college bar, he explains. i'm honest. i don't really do dating. there a lot of women who are into tha been possessive relationships, possessive. all is theppose of liberating. the sexual revolution was fought as millennial author christine ember puts it on the belief quote to achieve ideal the ideal sexual world that we desire, we

just need to realize freedom more completely by freedom. we mean more privacy, more space, less connection, and less constraint. today's culture writes feminist, author and activist louise perry, prefers atomized individuals, all looking out for number one and up for a good time. you can see why this liberateunh to sex dating and m the ninetien for guys like jesse. so how's it working out for everybody else? i don't think it's working out well. i think there's a real sadness that you see in all these stories. the delay in, marriage, the aversion to dating, the fear of yourself at risk that's involved necessarily in asking somebody out or going on a date. but it's also an aversion to connecti and commitment. and this, again, points to our cultural autonomy and consent. are the dominant values almost

only values of our day. and in such a culture, kids don't fit because you can't just grant kids autonomy capable of g to much. but also they're just kids become just one more lifestyle choice or consumption item. stephanie murray has a great quote, and it shows up in family unfriendly multiple times. children are a personal choice and therefore personal problem. many people seem to believe have as many as you wan make sure they don't bother the rest of us. a republican senator, ron johnson, put it in, in his own words when opposing a tax for families, parents decide to have families. people decide have families and become parents. the cost is something they need to consider when they make that choice. i'society's to take care of othr people's children. think there's a good debate to about tax credits for families and hopefully talk about it later busociety's to help people their children.

this is this sad is really behind the problem. again, the christine end. byline by freedom, we mean more privacy, more space, less connection and less constraint. and if this sounds sad, it's because it is sad. and i think that sadness is the root. so this is miley cyrus and i'll try to race for the miley cyrus of this talk, too. wanted sort of build the book around, miley cyrus, but my editor's against that. but she said the earth can't handle we that we're getting a piece of -- planet and she refuses to hand that down to her child. that's why she speaking for all millennials, is not going to have a child. hear all the time, overpopulation. where do they hear from? thiss a newspaper article from when i was a kid. new york times. no problem facing the earth looms larger than the growth of the reproductive rate of the human species. virtually human suffering can be

attributed to the crushing effect of a population too numerous now i always like e illustration on this because we all breeding like rabbits. if you get it, those are bunny rabbits and they arethe earth, d of cabbage. the point of this op ed was not just that babies a bad, but that we need to tell children that babies are bad schoolchildren. and the writer was a principal at an elementary school, a public elementary school. the john pettibone school in new milford, connecticut, as side note, the john pettibone school will close down in 2014 due to low and falling. but that overpopulation an idea is is running rampant. pessimism about the future is massive increase. he says at fear that our planet's on is really just a cover story for. guilt. especially in the in the rich world. i step i think the climate

guilt that he's talking about is really a totem for a deeper guilt for a deeper sadness. again the earth can't handle it. miles, eris says she means the earth can't handle us. the earth can't handle humans. it's a deeply sad idea and civilizational sadness, i believe, is causing the baby bust. i met a woman named amanda. she was on my trivia team one night andhen i said i have six kids, she says, oh, that sounds. and so i asked her if she had a good job. she was married, said she doesn't want to have kids. and as we were■; going eventual, i asked her her opinion of the no, i think we're the cancer of the earth. i think that's telling. not always explicitly expressed is behind the civilizational sadness causing the anxiety and the lack of babies that pope francis has said the opposite. i mean, the premise. but he said birthrates, a

happiness present in a society. so i think what we're seeing■p w is how little happiness is present in our society. and i think the baby boom, it was not a make up for the babies that weren't born during the war. this was an unprecedented generation long, totally number of babies. why? think about it. are men got off the boat and landed on the dock. just having defeated hitler in the japanese empire and the women iting there. just having kept the economy going for four years. so they meet on the pier. they smooch, they go back, get married in the chapel and. they have a bunch of kids because they knew we were good. because never before o to americans. we're good. we need more of us. the flip of the thank you. f that is what happened. the axis countries. it was about ten years ago that i noticed that japan and italy

were three of the lowest birthrates the country. they couldn't say we are good. so my final argument, though, is that in fact we are good and babies are good, but so too, just with humans in general, number of humans who are living above the poverty l so and the rest is below. so you see at first the percentage of humans living fall. and then the begins to fall. so who is pulling human÷s out of poverty? maybe climate change. maybe it's space aliens. maybe it's google gemini pulling us out of poverty. more likely it's humans. that is, some humans do bad, but most of the good done by humans outweighs the bad by. a lot of my friends here are economists who i put in economic term. the the expected value of each human is positive. so i just want to end here with a couple more ways to try to

argue that humans are good. one study i looked at found that people give more money to charity when children are like throwing money in the bucke more important one is this the first two thirds of family unfriendly are arguing how to be easier. but anyone who's done it knows that raisi children is the hardest thing you're ever going to do, but it's the easiest get. if you want to a man or a woman, a virtue. i think that parenting is the easiest. it's not the only road. obviously, as a catholic, many great saints never had kids. but for those of us who are not at the level of the average, the average well-known saint in the catholic church, we might need some help. for instance, the bible says ed naked. i wake up in the morning, there are hungry, naked people right there in my house. they're waiting for me.

so just to end with one excerpt from the end, the book, it's about mrs. anastasia. she was a preschool teacher who taught five of our kids. zsh actually bring us into the parish where we spent so many years. she sent out an email and we found out too late was not going to be there for the final day. the second to last day ofxcerpt. we owed mrs. anna stacey the greatest all last day of school teacher presence with her early didn't time to get anything. and so on the next morning, her last day teaching a carny kid i brought her the only thing i could. my kids, mrs. anastasia, opened the door. 735 to tifsean and meg, brendand charlie all beaming. she and hugged my crew. her all of whom she had taught. it's common to mock parents believing their child is god's gift to the world, but very

children. sorry very literally. children are god's gift to us. my children are gifts to others, not because my children special, but because my children are our children. humans are good. that truth is obscured at times by own self-absorption or others t children, in their innocence reflect mankind's innate goodness. back to us in one of charles dickens. charles dickens, his stories protagonist is a kind and e generous child named nell. the narrator, an old man who wanders london alone, runs into nell when she is lost and in need of help. this guileless cherub gives him her trust and friendship, and so instantly cheers and inspires the old man in a way almost any reader would instantly understand. i love these little people, the narrator says, a it is not a slight thing when they who so fresh from god, love us, as i had felt pleased at first by her confidence. i determined to deserve it. i still get that feeling even

after 17 years. and even when again and again i failed to deserve it. so it's easy to these days that we're not good. but the love of a little one reminds us that we good, that you are good. could you be better? could i be better? yes. but nothing will inspire you to be better. more than taking your back. that burden of love. k much. i don't know how many of get eat book, which i think i was one of the first people to read and which i just adored. i only have two kids to your six, but it was. and i know it's just me asking you questions, not just you, but it is a that if you are a parent will make you want to be a

and if you think about family will make you want do more for families it's a and important book and i everyone here goes out and buys it as soon as possible because i don't want to have that pleasure delayed. it's just terrific to start off. i to ask you a personal question because this ia book about what you learned in the you wrie about politics. you live in the public wor chane political views? i thin the main way was in teaching me showing how complicated everything was. so you imagine sort of i been a libertarian and like a lot of my friends like a randian in high and then i came out as a conservative and i sort of thought, you kw, are very simpl. and then you have kids. and i think that becomes less simple. i think i quote mike tyson saying, everyone has a plan

until they get punched in the face. similarly, everyone can have a simple ideology until they're deing with with children. so that's the main way. don't want to say it made me more liberal. it made me bleeding heart and it also made more understanding of but mostly it made me realize that things mu more complicated than would have thought and it's interesting because i feel like i've had some of that experience as well. i mean, know i have been a journalist for almost 20 years. i, you know, i grew up in second wave feminism. my mom actually worked for bella abzug and has hilarious stories about what she was like as i think my mom volunteered for she bella abzug in parenting the two great unifying but, you know, i think parenting has a way of making politics unpredictable all. and, you know, some of your

presentations may be a little , but i think both of us see potential good■9ew sphere iu know, in larger culture. i you know, i think one of the things that we'veys seen as peoe have come to realize how family unfriendly the country is something that was really illustrated for a lot of families by the shutdowns and upheavals the covid 19 pandemic. i we've seen a lot more unity b5around. the idea that our political system needs to doing more for american families. yes. and i'm curious, you think if anything change on the right to up a conversation about expanding child tax credit about you know, moving a conversation on paidk as a liberal part of wt i see is some on the right towards policies have been priorilong time. i'm curious what, if anythingyoe

some of those conversations. i think there'■ ton of things. but one moment that struck that jumped out at me when rick santorum was for president in 2012. and in response to the line, a rising tide lifts all boats, which is true. it's very true that an improved economy can address a lot of these things, he said. not the boats that have holes in. and that was his moment of realize saying that, okay, we a to to, you know, stimulate the economy as much as possib, etc. but also t that some people need extra ate. and so he was talking about people who were suffering term unemployment or disability. and in a way parents kind of software disability. i mean, if you've ever carried your kid your chest while you're trying to like push a shopping cart around or open a door, it's similar toelt after i had my shoulder surgery. and the idea that we need to give everybody equal

opportunity, sort of a it's a old then the idea that actually some people need to be accommodated, that that's true. and the more that you face reality, the more that you see it. and i think that might be part of part of the shift. i mean, i could talk about donald trump, sort of shuck conservatives out of some of their libertariani,ut think the philosophical approach is more interesting? i think we'd rather be unified by the experience of parenting by donald trump. no. to anyone in this room. but you do you see the left evolving on family policy in any ways that surprised you. so one interesting thing is if you look at canada they're trying sort of national childcare program and they are the government is very clear that the point of national is more women in the workforce more. i don't think that's a worthwhile goal to dedicate a amount of your your gdp to in

the us. when inistration people and they said yeah there's a debate here between whether our goal should be more women in the workforce supporting families that i think is a tack from some you know 1990s era feminism and more of an embrace of the idea that okay we should be supporting women wherever they are and not trying to push this idea of moth is a patriarchal thing. and so you hear ideas all the time, sort of anti-marriage, anti stay at home mom that's more in the magazines when i look at democrats who are involved in governing the u.s., especially compared to canada and they seem to be more interested in helping women regardless of path they're choosing. it's interesting because, i cultural coming together around the idea that families ought to be able to make a range of different choices that people will have a range of different preferences. and that's makes tailoring

pocated. right? because it's one thing to say we're gonna ope centers. it's more politically to say, you know, the easiest way to accommodate all of these different preferences childcare would be to give■] everybody $10,000 a child that they could use, either to pay for a center based care, a nanny or to, you know, as a saly for a stay at home parent. i'm off work. build a granny flat for mom or whatever. yes. and so and so one of the things i get into in family unfriendly is debate over if you're going spend money to help kids, how effective is it and how should really think that subsidizing childcare is a horrible way to do it because that money is just better spent giving to parents. childcare subsidies are basically work. subsidies. there's lots of data, i think, from northern europe where they start subsidizing childcare, they get a little uptick in the

birth rate and then it drops polls them becoming more valuing work, more than family over those years. and so also the other conclusion i came to, so when i went into this, i wanted to have a big, bold conclusion where i was going to either come out for like a massive child tax credit or no child tax credit, something that would go viral. and instead, i came up with, we should slightly increase the child tax credit because if you do it too much, i think has negative effects of discouraging marriage, for one thing. and if you if you don't have it where it is now a little bit bigger, then you're basically discriminating families. well, and i certainly think that one area of consens and this should be something that's easier to do is just smash all marriage penalties and federal poli. ye let's. the earned income tax credit has marriage. those.s there' yeah. and i mean, a lot of welfare for poorer families as well. but i mean it'sow, giving autonomy also requires accepting

that that will make not just different but choices some people find really objectionable or find incomprehensible. i an, do you see did a recent pilot where give pretty large, no strings sums of money to you know to parents d.c. and then the post came in wrote about how th spent it and in some cases they spent it on really practical, immediate things. in some cases was a chance to give a family vacation that they would never have otherwise. and, you know, i think that. one area that sort of interesting to try to square the circle on for and liberals working together is, you know, how do we te more of other people's choices? and sometimes that's to mean somebody wants to stay home. sometimes that means that someone is going to want to blow it all. on a trip to disney world. and how do you know foster that

trust and to a certain extent that respect for other people's family choices which you know around money at least which i think has not always been forthcoming. no i mean people think if you're getting tax dollars, then get to have a say. and i should make sure not spending the tax dolrs to harm yourself if you're spending the tax dollars on gambling or drugs or just throw tax on miller high life, then people are going to say, i'm not sure that we be giving this money. and so the comes in when the money comes in, which is again, another reason to not make it too large. but i like to think that if you're to that from a conservative perspective, if you're your choices are give people some money and hope that they spend it well or increase governnt and get more involved in everybody's life. and if i'm given those two choices, i'm going to choose them some money, hope them help, spend it. well, i, i also want to ask

about think a risk of the framing that you've taken in this presentation in thisyou knr driver of some more family friendly policy on the right has been of the rise of prenatal ism,hebabies, we need to convine people to have more kids. what happens if we do all things and the birth rate doesn't increase? does the support for these policies disappear or or do we need to be making a case we should do that make life easier for parents because they're inherelyuld do things support children because that's an inherentlo's right. and even i mean, so we're in a a public policy think tank here and. so my first reaction was to say, well if we can reduce childhood anxiety a measurable way, then that's also good and then you've phrased it better. if you make kids and parents happier, good. and so it'one of the tricky things about talking about about culture in general is that we always want to h measurable outcomes but what

actually matters in the end is not always measurable. that's somti i'm it by culture'l see economists roll their eyes because to them that means don't really have an explanation of it. but so that's why i i'm skeptical of a lot of the things that just involve spending money. i think you can raise the birthrate without changing the culture specific, only changing the culture to make people who are parents or would parents feel more supported? and that's not an easy thing to do, right? you can't snap your fingers and become israel. obviously, that's an exceptional circumstance. and so that's why for the book, i went out to utah you can't snap your fingers and become mormon community. you can't snap your fingers becomeq the sort of communities my wife and i raise our kids in sort of catholic, big family, irish. you let your kids run around, you see somebody else's kids. they don't have shoes on. you're not surprised that that's not you can't just■%that and you certainly can't directly do that to policy which policies

can change and, move and nudge the culture in the right. well, i mean, i think culture also overlaps with of the area of branding here right. i mean, i think there's a certain reaction on the left to sort of the prenatal list framing because i think people react the idea. we should all, you know, follow xi jinping thought and march off and have a lot of babies for the glory of the united states and. but, you know how do we rebel parenting this is you and i havt i've thought about a lot you know, i should hire mckinsey to come up with a new name. we should we should, you know, but even parenting. so this was a point. and i forget the first author i read did it. parenting wasn'really a verb? ae one who introduced me to this idea that. it was kind of what you did. and so that's part of the problem is that for conserver of

i see the idea that, you know, now again we give it a name the success sequence, but you finish, you got a job, you a girl, you have kids and. if you don't want to do that, that's kind of the normal course of events. i think there's a lot of value in that being the normal course of events and the stephanie murray i use that once it became an individual choice. it was it was, you know part of intentional living you intentionally chose now is the right time for me to have a kid among all the other choices this is the one i choose. then kind of became a more pressure. you do it right and. be your own problem as murray in the ron johnson quote put it. so that is is part of it so don't know if i could rebranded as as just sort of establish hey anybody who doesn't feel they're called have kids don't have kids i'm a catholic all my favorite priests don't have kids but if but if are if if we just have it

as a norm that yeah most people you try to get married and then you get married. you have kids. if it becomes more in of a big d then we can kind of rebranded as of an easier more thing to do parenting in my experience is trading out happy hours for backyard barbecues with a lot more friends running around. yeah, no. i mean, you know, it's sort of critiquing own side of the aisle. i think that there has been real trd in conversation and you see this in publishing in of you know reckoning with motherhood by talking how horrible it is and, you know, i read books like menadue bins mom rage or, you know, good moms, bad choices. and to don't recognize my own experience in because, you know, having children did limit my options. you know, i can't an entire

month in l.aantics association tour and the nce is, really the highwhich by west bourbon. it's not the movies. i can't do that with, but the constraint choosing, the constraint was, one of the most liberating things i ever did, because all of a sudden i had rubric where i knew what was important. i knew what the priority was. you know, i had a heart out at the end of the day, the washington post letter to the editor and box never rests,and . i wonder if that pendulum needs to be yanked back, if there needs to be more of a public conversation, the joys of parenting, the joys of having a kid. i mean, i sort of joke. it's like we nd ring back the family sitcom. yeah. i mean, one of the problems is that social media, you know, replace tv and the social media,

the only two kinds of m the sorm who, as what i notice and i put the book, was that they always an affect of ease it always looks like, oh, we were just running and we snapped this family photo. so they kept the the boy, the three year old boy be wearing his socks outdoors. and somehow they're all they l live in farmhouse as well, which means that they have like exposed and rafters and that just makes it look even that much more natural a state of natural light, of natural. and so it makes the comparison that either mothers or would be mothers have is i can't pull that off. i'm not arina who can make my own, you know cereal from mvscratch or whatever. but the other half social media is theial media that i think it's an effort to like to give them the benefit of doubt

and effort to sort of like make other feel seen but social media a magazine, a tv show or a blog. it just pounds the algorithm, just pounds more and more it into your head. and it's not contextual right. picture not considered. you don't have time to sort of you sort of consider or even reject theyeah, if we ca lot of mom influencers who are like, hey, i had this one good moment today here. it is. and this made all rest of it worth it or is going to say, i made this cake. this is what i wanted to look like. this isguess what? all the kids ate it like that would. be the sort of mom pointers need. yeah well and also doubtful answers, right? i mean, i was sort of heartened by the congressional dads caucus and, you know's mostly democrats. but jimmy gomez founded it after spending most of kevin

mccarthy's adventuresome rise to speaker where in his son, hodge said know. he went and reached outo dan crenshaw. when crenshaw was having his first kid, it was like, this is great, it's hard, but it's fun and i think more those images of dating too you know we need the vast normie army to defeat andrew tate. well we should field some questions. does make one more money one more dad point it really it's some of the best news i came across here was increased amount time doing parenting that dads have donevenerations compared te past. and one of the i was at this on capitol hill the other day where. one woman said how can we involve men in a more equitable way in caregiving? and i thought by not talking it that way, but equitable caregiving is notqe attractive. how can we like tell dads that

they should be dads and th■ it's awesome to be dads? one of the things i was doing, the week was posting on twitter me defeating all of my sons in basketball and. some of it is awesome because one of my sons is arguably taller than i am and can certainly jump higher than i am and. then the other one is even more awesome because he's seven and when he shoots i just swat heck out of the ball. being a dad is totally awesome and if in a society that either says, you know, you should shout basically be moms, then that' ao normal dudes. i don't think katy likes to, you know, destroy well, she doesn't get as much pleasure as destroying her children in sports as i so anyway. yeah that's a i feel like that's been one of the bigusband. it's like you get to play with all of the construction, you get to do train sets again. it's awesome i could talk to him

forever. i could have lived in the world of this book. but i know i'm sure many of you have so the. i also had the pleasure of reading the book already. it's excellent. one question i'd like to ask you is about a topic that come up so family friendly policies in the workplace. you make a number of suggestions that employers should subsidize new rentals for for parents these are robotic that your baby to sleep in a kind of creepy way they're not creepy they're amazing life saver i don't want computers watching my kids anyway that it was historically the case employers paywage where for having a kid rather than for merit and that employers might proactively steer parenttowardse with more flex looser. and most of these for this new

rental are illegal as far as i know. so i'm curious, do think a family friendly economy us to overhaul employment anti-discrimination law. i certainly i certainly worry about that and i'm not a lawyer. i know there are some lawyers in them, but so i'm giving a guy a raise. he has a kid or giving a woman a raise because she has a kid. theoretilly, icoillegal. the other hand, the way the economy works, the story i tell in is of imagine that you are a high school english teacher at a at a high school, you love and part of what you get compensated in is that getting paid to read books and talk about it and that it's not as valuable once you have kid number three and you say, yes honey, i know stella could use a pair of sneakers, but can i tell you instead about the cosa teacher's lounge today? you need get paid more so that school guy more and that be illegal as a breadwinner bump. i don't know, but i certainly

think that the idea so guiding somebody who wants to a stay at home parent towards a stay at home job so ifou have reporter who's a beat reporter tell or her hey become an editor we'll start working with you now and by the time you leave then come back from your maternity leave you'll be editing outside coributo that hours and then imagine schools imagine schools teaching people and now this would be tricky because it mostly be women mostly girls who think they want b stay home moms but imagine school saying hey some lines of work allow for this whether it's a stay at home job or something like nursing, which you can dial down to zero and then snap your fingers and have as many as you want and then dial back down or be the nurse at your kid's school there are some lines of work that are y friendly jobs? i don't see anybody guiding young people towards that. and so all of these things are fraught in that they clash with our culture, both theort of

symmetry, symmetrical equality culture, also our work ism culture and might clash with our laws as well. and i think bringing up the question of sort of work ism and tying family benefits to employment is, a really live debate on the left right now. i mean, elliot haspel, about cas really pushing into the idea that, you know, he's very concerned that we're going to follow the same path with child care benefits. we've followed with health insurance. and i think there are, you know, some real risk there. i of you know, i think we also seou ostensibly family friendly policies like encouraging egg freezing that are really sort of fertility delay policies. i mean, i think if an employer is offering you egg or embreezie onsite child care, i question to whether that's family policy or whether that we

would really, really, really like you to wait until you take maternity leave policy policy and back. noting that single adult or ■pat least adults withouthildreno pea very different way. do you think that maybe ideologe mental health among younger adults is due to threlative decline in child rearing and the lack of perspective that comes with it? i think that's a great point and i think it's probably true if only acting through the interview area of alienation from community, which is to say when you become a parent, you desperately need to belong to a free agent. than you did when and so parents are more likely

to go to chu show at, you know, story hour at the library, mom a or like that. and so more likely to be connected. and i think that connection and belonging are key innocuous actions