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right everybody, welcome to the american enterprise institute. it is my pleasure to welcome you to tim carney's wonderful important new book of family unfriendly. how our culture made raising kids much t harder than it needs to be. the calmness of the washington examiner. his work is a lot of us know focuses on family and community. civil society on religion and american politics. he has been published widely in the "new york times" and wall street journal, russian post, atlantic at l3 seem on tv a lot. tim's work is unique. he describes a broad social trends by beginning from the experience of real people. he thanks in the bottom up not from a top-down pay for that reason he has an understanding of how people thrive and how people fail.

what holds us together. what divides us deeply humane and sympathetic. even as it's always rooted in a moral fundamental. his goal is to prove his grandmother is right. if you want to be happy you should get married you should have kids. you should go to church. he should show up for your neighbors and treat people well. but he also wants to explore what is about modern life that makes it so hard to do it your grandmother told her to do and to see the value of these things. at the very much of the wonderful book is about and the looks of the various confusing complicated ways that our society has made life harder for parents sometimesen on purpose. very often not on purpose that offers some ways forward. tonight's conversation is going to take up all of that. thisis event for us as part of e series we called the edward and helen hines book forms. publicic events that are really intended to facilitate conversation about importantub

books on issues that touch on crucial question books by ai scholars but also others. we are very grateful for the support of these events in ai performance when we very simple. after i stepped down to watch a quick video about tim's book he's going to step up and talk about the book for a while after thatro i'll be in conversation about it with alyssa rosenberg that "washington post" columnist who writes aboutam family and culture and a lot of the kinds ofim questions that tim takes up in his book she is of the last few days the community letters editor is that right? so she gets hear from all kinds of very interesting people. her stuff gets forwarded to me more than just about anything in the "washington post." mostly for my wife. it's always profound and interesting. she takes up the same subjects

butt often different angle than the one tim had taken their conversation and a certain way couldbu be a left/right conversations also going to shows these kinds ofno issues ae not really in any simple white left/right issues the two of them will talk for a while they can draw you into conversation to breath after watching onlinea right next to where you're watching us you can see how to participate how were to send an e-mail or tweet if you must. and how to take part in the discussion. what that will watch will something about the book. then we'll hear from kim and go from there. >> americans are having fewer and fewer kids every year. politicians and commentators assume it just about costs but they do not tell the whole story. we need to take seriously the feeling of parenting has gotten harder. these days parent seem to be countercultural if they want to avoid maximum effort of

parenting. the feeling is not okay and harsh but your kids run around is mostly about misguided cultural expectations and norms. but also our world is more hostile to letting kids wander. for sanity at these children and parents to me too regain that mindset. we build neighborhoods. reshape our culture in a way that makes it easier for parents to let their kids go free. >> thank you all of you for joining me. this book has truly been a labor of love. and in that regard he went to specifically thank my wife katie for coming. i was able to throw some knowledge about having six kids because of her. [applause]

thank you. i remember with crystal clarity some so many moments of my first day as a father. i remember when we first met the baby that was sort of a shocking moment. but i also remember that night we moved to the labor and delivery room is the burden of a love falling on me. i remember in the middle of an eye i could not sleep in katie was asleep. the baby had been wheeled into the makeshift nursery out in the hallway. there we go. makeshiftay nursery in the hally i walked out there i'm thinking what are you going to look like are you going to be a how many siblings and what is your future going to hold? that's an nurse tap me on the shoulder and said sir your

daughter is three bassinets over it you are currently staring at somebody else's child. [laughter] but the reason that nursery was in the hallway was we were in an overflow wing of the hospital. because 2006 saw massive uptick inin the birthrate. everyone was having babies everybody any famous person you can think of. brad pitt, angelina jolie had a baby and heidi clune, brittney spears both had babies right on the same time we did. and then it went up even higher 2007 you had everyone falling brad pitt and angelina jolie and me and people started having in the highest number of births in u.s. history.

and this year, last year, 2023 might have been lower even than 2020 than pandemic year. here is an important measure, the total fertility rate. this is the number most people are familiar with. 2.1 babies per woman a population will remain steady without immigration. we ticked above that. thanks for brad pitt, tom cruise and me. e has been falling ever since then. down 1.6, 1.7. we have fewer children in america than last kens cues.

-- census. this is the age pyramid, it's an age onion i think now. you can see the skinniest bars tat bottom. two of the skinniest bars are at the bottom. we have a legitimate baby bust. in the lifetime of some people in the room, yes, and so it's a real baby bust. most important story of the next 30 years and americans are just starting to realize it. now, a natural question is, why should we care. why is this bad? some people are creeped out. so this is a feminist liberal laura, shet said honest questio, considering overpopulation is

literally killing the planet, why does it matter to you? why do you insist on more births? surprise, younger women might want more out of life than just children. yes, why do we care? i divide it into four reasons, one, economic reason, the dependence ratio, how many retirees there are compared to workers as that grows that reduces economic well-being. two, women actually do still want babies, 3. the baby bust reflects something unwell about our culture even if you don'ton care about there beg fewer babies, what is causing it is something that you should care about. it has other root causes and other -- excuse me, other

effects that are not great. and, four, you should mind there being fewer babies because babies are good. let's start with the first reason, the economic. the dependency ratio. we now have more americans in their 60'ses than we have childn under age 10 potential workers. what does this mean? one easy example is favorite restaurants used to be open for lunch. as a as a writer, sometimes you get the benefit of getting to work from an irish pub. right. and. now the fact that i now have to wait till 4 p.m. to start 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 about? 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 the jobs for dispatchers. that's a real problem.

economists alan cole put it this way. no, neither savings nor government pension schemes work 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 at take a while. and i think that gemini, fixing your leaky pipes might be a little subpar. so that's the the economic story. more important reason, women actually still want kids. this is gallup always asked what, is the ideal number of kids in a family. the number has actually been going up in recent years to 2.7. there's no difference, by the way, between how women answer poll and how men answer this poll. and millennials are still way above two. there's a great economist, demographer lyman stone, who came up with a graph. this is sort of the low ball estimate of what the ideal family is using different surveys to point kids. but then another question how ma children do you intend to

have the answer to among millennials? was 1.9. so right there, you have a little bit of gap between the ideal and the intended. and then the actual number of babies is a little below 1.7. so are setting our goals lower than our ideals and we're not even meeting those lower goals. and so to get into the nuances for a second, that's the baby bust reflects you see two different gaps. one is a reduced desire for family or a desire for a smaller family. and then the other is a failure. meet what people want want. and so if we want more kids, why aren't we having them? so i'm going to take a break from those four reasons for now and consider this or the broader question why is the birthrate falling so quick story from my book. i got to travel all over the world. i got to go to israel. i got to to places where the birthrate was 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 you had trees on the streets. you had nice family houses that were you know, everyone had a little yard. and one of the things i noticed was i didn't run into any families at all. so finally, i run into this couple. their name is isaac nicole, and they're walking down the sidewalk. and i ask isaac and nicole, i'd say, hey, i'm writing a book and you talk to me. i'm writing about family. and nicole instantly blurts out. we don't want kids. and so i say, sure. she said, yes, i why not? i said, we can't afford it. i said, what exactly is like the main affordability. the main affordability problem you're facing? and isaac says everything. health care. but if i'm being honest, really just selfish. then he says, i always sit in a cold. other people are watching teletubbies and cleaning up

vomit. and we're going to be drinking margaritas in paris. and then at that moment, woman came down with a stroller, greeted. and nicole is a double stroller. both the passengers in the double stroller were. so i walked away from this scene with my mind reeling for all sorts reasons. 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 and selfish. eddie gave are the standard reasons. i don't think hold up. so for one thing, the baby bus has gotten worse as the economy has often gotten better. that's the birth rate, that gray bar was a great recession. people have a lot more babies 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

did see a greater decrease in birth rate places student loan debt went up did not see a greater decrease. same with rising childcare costs. they didn't predict greater in the birth rate. millennials think that they poorer and for the most 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 fewer babies. so this was jeremy who did a study of how many weeks of work does it take? the median american male to earn as much as it the estimated cost of raising a child. so the estimated cost of raising a child goes up the the median income goes up. guess what the median income is going up higher. the estimated cost of raising a child. since 2010 while the birthrate has been falling that right bar the 12.2 weeks. that means takes less time to pay for for a male to pay for

the raising a kid than it did in 2010. so the other estimate other explanation is that selfishness 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 falling airplanes. selfishness is always there. if i had made a chart for this one, it would start at zero. and then adam and eve, the apple, it goes up to 100 and then it's flat. after that. but what does change over time across places is the the ability of society of civilization to offset that selfishness. that's what the jobless society and civilization and culture is, is to steer people self-interest towards common good. so that, to me suggests what we have is a failure of culture. that gap between the attained family and the desired family and the gap between the desired

family and the ideal family. those are failures of our society. and they're not just 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 problem. those are those are the 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 middle of all of those countries. 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 individual 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 cuure is broken. my video pointed towards that. so i'll race that. but parents spend a lot more 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. so you would think that mom would get a break compared to her mom or grandma. but no, this is a you survey

that's ours solely. so not counting cooking, not counting any family activities. it's driving kids an event. 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 because i think it's false. but isabel sawhill, excellent scholar 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 you 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 sports. the idea that sport, baseball is good in and of itself, that sports is for building virtues gets replaced by relentless desire for achievement excellence, beating the next. the demand for helicopters here. i quote katie a little more free ngand she is. anwh i do something that she thinkshe boundaries he repeatedly would say i'm not afraid of kidnapers our kids i'm afid of cpschd protective services that we lived in silver spri where they were famous free range parts repeatedly got in trouble for letting their kids walk the park 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 women who objected to the sidewalk, well, little kids like this shouldn't be walking to school by themselves. 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 the streets. 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 a story about one effect dating apps happen to have that. 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 meet of 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't do relationships, explains jesse

bartender in greenville, south carolina. jesse brags that he has risen above his, quote, ultra conservative southern baptist upbringing with its traditionalist 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 that because they've been possessive relationships, possessive. all is the opposite 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 to people as freewheeling, atomized individuals, all looking out for number one and up for a good

time. you can see why this liberated, unconstrained, modern approach to sex dating and marriage known as a hookup culture. since the nineties, would be fun 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 connection 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 and kids are not really capable of consenting 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 want. 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've never really felt it was society's to take care of other people's children. i think there's a good debate to about tax credits for families and hopefully talk about it later but that it's not society's to help people raise their children. this is this sad mindset i think 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. i 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. this is something you hear all the time, overpopulation. where do they hear from? th is 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 numero. now i always lik illustration on this because we all breeding like rabbits. if you get it, those are bunny rabbits and they are devouring the rth, which is a large head of cabbage. the point of this op ed was not just that baesre 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 increasing. that's in just eight years. massive increase. so ezra klein, the new york times, has a good explanation of it. 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 go a 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 and she when 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 eventually, i asked her her opinion of the human race and she said in general. do i think people are good? no, i think we're the cancer of the earth. i think that's telling. think that that mindset 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 welcoming attitude, reveal how much happiness present in a society. so i think what we're seeing now 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 unpredicted increase in the 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 waiting 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 or, since has it been so clear to americans. we're good. we need more of us. the flip of the thank you. the side of 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, that green part there that the number of humans who are living above the poverty level.

so and the rest is below. so you see at first the percentage of humans living below the poverty level begins to fall. and then the begins to fall. so who is pulling humans 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 bucket, a more important one is this the first two thirds of family unfriendly are arguing how to be more family so parenting can be easier. but anyone who's done it knows

that raising children is the hardest thing you're ever going to do, but it's the easiest path. if your goal where you're trying to get is anywhere valuable. 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 feed hungry, clothe the 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. she 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. so for her final day. the second to last day of

school. that's where my excerpt begins. we owed mrs. anna stacey the greatest all last day of school teacher presence with her early start to summer vacation. we 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 the gift of eve. sean and meg, brendan and 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 imperfections. but children, in their innocence reflect mankind's innate goodness.

back to us in one of charles dickens. charles dickens, his stories about human wretchedness, the protagonist is a kind and 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, and 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. thank you very much. i don't know how many of you in this room have been lucky enough to get early glimpse at tim's 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 better. 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 is a book about

what you learned in the process of parenting, but you write about politics. you live in the public world. how did parenting change political views? i think 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 know, a lot of things are very simple. 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 dealing with with children. so that's the main way. i don't know if it made me i don't want to say it made me more liberal. it made me bleeding heart and it also made more understanding of people who are struggling.

so but mostly it made me realize that things much 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 bella abzug. you know, she bella abzug in parenting the two great unifying experiences. 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 gloomy, but i think both of us see potential good news in the political sphere if not, you know, in larger culture. i you know, i think one of the things that we've seen as people 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 around. 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 paid leave forward, because i think as a liberal part of what i see is some on the right towards policies have been priorities on the left for a long time. i'm curious what, if anything, you think changed to shake loose some of those conversations. i think there's a 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 have an obligation to to, you know, stimulate the economy as much as possible, free markets are great, etc. but also that that some people need extra accommodate. 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 to how i felt after i had my shoulder surgery. and the idea that we need to give everybody equal opportunity, sort of a it's a old conservative idea, but 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 libertarianism, but 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. working 40 hours a week. i don't think that's a worthwhile goal to dedicate a amount of your your gdp to in the us. when i talk to biden administration 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 motherhood 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 think that some of this sort of 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 policy more complicated. right? because it's one thing to say we're gonna open a bunch of daycare 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 salary 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 you do it? and i 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 through the floor and 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 consensus and this should be something that's easier to do is just smash all marriage penalties and federal policy. yes. let's. the earned income tax credit has marriage. there's there's lots lots of those. yeah. and i mean, a lot of welfare for poorer families as well. but i mean it's interesting i think that, you know, giving autonomy also requires accepting that that will make not just accepting that parents will make not just different choices but choices that some people really objectionable or incomprehensible.

the post came in and wrote about how they spent it and in some cases they spent it on practical and immediate things and in some cases it was a chance to give a family vacation that they would never have otherwise and, you know, i think that one area that is interesting to try to square circle on for conservatives and liberals working together is how do we create more tolerance of other people's choices and sometimes that's going to mean somebody wants to stay home, h sometimes that means that someone is going to want to blow it up on trip to disney world, and how do you, you know, foster that trust and to a certain extent which i don't think it's always been a forthcoming. >> people think if you're getting tax dollars, i get a say. you're spending tax dollars on

gambling or drugs or just 30 backs of miller lights people are saying i'm not sure i'm giving you this money. but i like to think that if you're too from a conservative perspective, if your choices are get people some money and hope that they spend it well or increase government and bureaucracy and get more involved in everybody's life and if i'm giving those two choices i'm going to choose give them some money hope they spend it well. >> i also want to ask about, i think, a risk of the framing that you've taken in this presentation, in this book. you know, i think one clear driver, more family friendly on the right has been the rise of pronatallism. we need to convince people to have more kids, what happens if

we do this and the birthrate doesn't increase, do we need to be makingak a case that we shoud do things that make life easier for parents because they are inherently good and support children because that's intenterly d good thing to do. >> so we are in a public policy think tank here, so my first reaction was to say, well, if we can reduce childhood anxiety if a measurable way then that's also good and you phrased it kids and parents happier, that's good. it's one of the tricky things about talking about culture in general, we always want to have the measurable outcomes, but what actually matters in the end is not always measurable, that sometimes when you say, well, i'm explaining my culture, you will see autonomous roll their eyes because to them it means i don't have an explanation for it. i don't think you can raise the

birthrate without changing the culture specifically changingci the culture to make people who are parents or would be parents feel more supported and that's not 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 a mormon community. you can't snap your fingers and become the community my wife and i raised kids in, catholic, irish, you see somebody else's kids with no shoes on, you're not surprised. you can't just do that and you can't directly through that through policy. which policies can change and move in the right direction. >> i think culture also overlaps with sort of branding here, right, i think there's a certain reaction on the left to pronatalist framing because i

think people react perhaps rightly against the idea that we should all follow xi jinping and -- but, how do we rebrand parenting. this is something that i've thought about a lot. >> you should hire mckenzie to come up with a new name. evenen parenting. parenting wasn't really a verb. >> yes. >> 50 years ago. maybe you introduced to this idea. it was kind of what you did. that was part of the problem, is that for conservative i see the idea that, you know, now again we give it a name, success sequence. you marry a girl, you kids and if you don't want to do that that's still fine but that's 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 quote i use, once it became an individual choice, part of intentional living, youa 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 it kind ofec became, a, more presse that you to it right and, b, your own problem as murray put it.is that's part of it. i don't know if i could rebrand it as much as just sort of establish, hey, anybody who doesn't feel their call, don't have kids. but if you are -- if we just have it as a norm, yeah, most people, you try to get married and when you get married you have kids. it becomes less of a big deal and then we can kind of rebrand it as sort of an easier more fun thing to do. parenting in my experience is trading out happy hours for

backyard barbecues with a lot more friends running around. >> yeah, i mean, you know, to critique my own side of theth aisle i think that there has been a real trend and you see this in publishing in particular recently of, you know, reckoning with motherhood by talking about how horrible it is and i read books, mom rage or, you know, good moms, bad choices, to be honest don't recognize my own experience in that because having children was options. i can't spend the entire month in la and utah. by the way, that's the reason to go to sundance, it's not the movies. i can't do that with kids but the constraint choosing the constraint was one of the most liberating things i ever did

because all of a sudden i had a rubric where i knew what was important and i knew what the priority was. you know, i had a hard apathy at the end of the day. >> i do. >> you know, i wonder if the pendulum needs to be yanked back and more of the conversation of the joys of having a kid. i mean, i sort of joked, do we need to bring back the family sitcom. >> one of the problems that social media, you know, replaced tv and social media, the only two kinds of mom content i've seen are the sort of perfect momfluencers what i noticed andt put in the book that they always have an effect of ease, the

3-year-old boy wearing socks outdoors and somehow they all live in farmhouses which means that they have like exposed joist and rafters and that makes it look much more natural. >> natural light. >> natural light. that is intimidating. it makes the social comparison thatat either mothers or would-e mothers, i can't pull that off. i'm not a ball orna that can make my own cereal from vapor >> it's not contextual, you don't see the whole picture. you don't have timend to absorb

and consider or even reject the information before your onto the next thing. >> if we could somehow get a lot of momnuencer who are like hey, i had this one god moment today, it is here, this made all the rest of it worth it or it's going say, i made this cake, this is what i wanted to look like, this is what it looked like, all the kids ate it. that would be the momfluencers that we need. >> also dadfluencer is s. >> it's mostly democrats but when crenshaw was having first kid, he's like it's great, but it's hard. more images of dadding, defeat

andrew tate. >> one more dad point, some of the best news i came across here was the increase amount of time doing parenting that dad have done compared to the past, i was at the hearing on capitol hill the other day where one woman said how can we involve men in n more equitable way in caregiving. by not talking about it that way. equitable caregiving is not attractive. how can we tell dads that they should be dads and it's awesome to be dads. one of ther this thing i was a posting on twitter me defeating all of my sons in basketball. some of it is awesome because one of my sons is arguably

taller than i am and the other is more awesome, when he's 7 i just swap the heck out of the ball. being a dadad is totally awesom. you should be andrew tate and moms, that's not appealing to normal dudes. i don't think katie likes to destroy her -- she doesn't get as much pleasure as destroying her children in sports as i do. so anyway. >> i feel that's been one of the big discoveries from my husbands, you get to play with alll of the construction toys. it's awesome. i have to talk to tim forever, i could have lived in the book forever and i'm sure many of you have questions. leah. >> i also had the pleasure of reading the book already. it's excellent. one question i like to ask is a topic, you make a number ofst

suggestions that employers should subsidize new rentals for parents robotic basinets that rock the baby to sleep in a kind of creepy way. >> i don't want computers watching my kids. >> anyway, it was historically the employers might pay family rage where someone gets a raise for having a kid rather than for merit and steer parents toward family friendly schedule more flex worm, so i'm curious do you think a family friendly economy requires to overhaul employment andd antidiscrimination law? >> i certainly -- i certainly worry about that. i'm not a lawyer.kn i know there's some lawyers in theut room but so giving a guy a raise because he hasas a kid,

giving a women a raise because she has a kid theoretically could be illegal. the story i tell in the book is of imagine that you are a high school english teacher at a high school you love and part of what you get compensated is that you're getting paid to read books and talk about it. that's notit a valuable once you have kidre number 3 and you say, yes,ul honey, stella can use a w pair of sneakers. you need to get paid more, that school might actually pay that guy more and would that by legal as bread-winner bump, i don't know. but i certainly think that the idea, so guiding somebody who wants to be a stay at home parent towards, stay at home job, so if you have a reporter who is a beat reporter, tell him or her, become an editor, we will start working with you now and by the time you leave and then come back from your

maternity leave you'll be adding to outside contributors and then imagine schools, imagine schools teaching people and this would be tricky because it would be mostly women, mostly girls that want to be stay at home moms. some lines of work allow for this, whether it's a stay at home job or nursing which you can dial down to zero and snap your fingers and have as many hours as you want and then dial down. there's some lines of work that are more fit,. >> family-friendly jobs. i don't see anybody guiding young people towards that. so all of these things are fraught in that they crash with our culture both sort of symmetrical equality culture, our workism culture and they might clash with our laws as well. >> i think bringing up thed question of sort of work and tieing family benefits to employment is a debate on the left right now.

he's very concerned that we are going to follow the same path with child care benefits that we followed with health insurance and i think there are, you know, some interesting real risks there. i have, you know, i think we al see, you know, family-friendly policies like encouraging egg freezing that are really fertility delay policies. i mean, as an employer is offering you egg or embryo freezing but not child care benefits, on-site child care i question whether that's family policy or whether that is we would really, really like you to wait until you take maternity leave policy. >> in the back. >> noting that single adults or at least adults without children

tend to perceive the world in a very different way, do you think that maybe the rise in radical ideologies or mental health crisis among younger adult is as a result of childbearing and what comes with it? >> when you become a parent, you desperately need to belong to something more than you did when you were a free agent and so parents are more likely to go to church, parents are more likely to show up at story hour at the library, t mommy and me, yoga or anything like that and so more likely to be connected and i think that connection and belonging are key inoculations against extremism and that your ability to sort of hold on as i was saying earlier, radical

simplistic ideas, that really gets dampen by getting married and having kids. >> you raised an interesting question. not everyone is call today have children, not everyone can have children. one of the things that wee see culturally that's unfortunate is polarization of single childless people or childless by choice people against families with children.. how dare you bring your baby on the airplane? there's an interesting question to be asked, how do we knit together people who don't choose not to have children. my husband and i have childless friends that play incredible important roles in our kids lives. we live in between, you know, two divorce women in their 60's who are incredible figures in our children's life. how do we build a community where their parents or not

values children, values family and gets some meaning about being in community together as well as support for all the family-friendly policies that we would like to spend money on. >> that has aal historical precedence. the uncle who never got married, the aunt that never got married, that they are part of the kid's life is certainly a great tradition throughout recent history going back and so it's not a radical idea to say that. and, in fact, i had a margaret quote in there of all people, depriving people of the ability, ofe the opportunity to interact with kids is really cruel, in fact. >> yeah. >> you know, i think that children also really benefit from having adults in their life who see them as people who aren't related by blood, who aren'tte necessarily obligate today them but find them interesting. >> you arere constantly telling them to clean up.

>> who canm, be curious about tm and be a sounding board about their parents and help them understand their parents a little better. i think that'ss important. >> certainly my kids are always shocked when their cousins or their friends are like, your parents are cool because my kids don't get to experience that as much. time for one more question. >> over in the back. david. >> great discussion and excited to read the book. tim, i'm really grateful for your voice because i think you're one of the most outspoken social conservatives for housing reform when the issue is risk tipping in the culture space. can you talk about how you see the role of housing as part of helping the families grow? >> i'm glad that you asked that. when i say cost can't explain the 15-year baby bust, the cost of housing does traditionally

really explain downticks in birthrates and marriage rates. and that's what's happened in the last 3 years in most of the u.s., deterrence of family formation and so some people think the way to make it just to subsidize flanked, that, of course, would drive up the cost and so my argument would be to increase the supply as much as possible. the arthriticky thing is that the yes in my backyard as opposed to -- they are always posting massive apartment towers that are ugly. a family-friendly ambism would be a different thing from conservatism, i don't want more houses in my town because, you know, the wrong kind of people move inn or too many, it'll clog

up the parking lot, et cetera, but that's tricky because again i'm talking sort of discrimination here. i'm saying local government should say actually send us more families and the truth is they are often doing the opposite. i quote in the book a local leader in illinois saying families are a cost, businesses are an asset but if you bring in families, i haveha to build more schools, i have to build more playground, so that's my prodevelopment urbanism, would be explicitly a family-friendly one. >> we could stay here all night. i don't think we are not allowed to stay here all night. thank you for your beautiful book. thank you all of you for joining us. [applause] >> if you're enjoying book tv then sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on the screen to receive the scheduled upcoming program, author

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