Video from American Enterprise Institute
Family-Unfriendly: A Book Event with Timothy P. Carney
"Birth rates have been falling for 15 years and hit record lows even before the pandemic. Parents and children are more anxious than ever before. What are the causes of this baby bust and anxiety boom, and what are the solutions?
In Family-Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, AEI’s Timothy P. Carney tackles the economic and social factors that have set unreasonable standards for parents, diminished the value of family, and popularized a pessimistic outlook for humanity’s future. Please join AEI for a discussion between Mr. Carney and the Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg on the changes in policy and culture that are required to restore belief in the goodness of parenting and, by extension, ourselves." from the video introduction
Resist Pelagian Parenting
Review: ‘Family-Unfriendly’ by Timothy P. Carney
"What if parenthood was a means of sanctification and could accelerate our progress toward something higher than self-satisfaction and hedonism? How would that change the way we view obstacles to parenting in our culture?
This is the ground Timothy Carney surveys in Family-Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, a rare work that combines rigorous social science and cultural analysis with Roman Catholic wisdom and wit. The book moves from the practical (“have lower ambitions for your kids”) to the political (chapters on urban planning and pro-family policy) to the civilizational and spiritual—all while sustaining an underlying sense of humor.
Guided by Carney—a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior columnist at the Washington Examiner—we learn the difference culture can make. “Pregnancy,” Carney observes, “is contagious” (164). Catholics, already renowned for their large families, have even larger families when they’re enmeshed with Latter-day Saints in Utah. In Israel, surrounded by Orthodox Jewish families with five or more children, even secular families are larger than the norm in the United States or Europe. Clearly, something more than individual beliefs and preferences is driving these outcomes.
However, culture isn’t always benevolent. While parenthood is (and always will be) challenging, modern culture makes it uniquely brutal in two important ways: loneliness and perfectionism.." from the article: Resist Pelagian Parenting
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