all right, everybody, we can

make our way to where we want be. good afternoon. welcome to the american enterprise institute. i'm yuval levin v, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this discussion of timken this wonderful and important new book family how our culture made raising kids much harder than it needs to. tim is a senior fellow here at aei and a columnist at the washington examiner. his work is a lot of us know he focuses on family and on civil society, on religion, american politics. he's published widely beyond his columns, too, in the new york times, the wall street journal, the washington post, the atlantic and elsewhere. you see on tv a lot. tim's work is unique. he describes broad social trends by beginning from the experience of real people. he thinks from the bottom up, not from the top down. and for that reason, i think he has an understanding of how people thrive and how people

fail. what holds together, what divides us. that is just deeply humane and sympathetic, even as it's always rooted in some moral fundamentals. his goal really is to prove your grandmother was right. if you want to be happy, you should get married. you have kids, you should go to church. you should show up for your neighbors. you should people well. but he also wants to explore what it is about modern life that makes it so hard. do what your grandmother told you to do and to see the value of these things. it's very much what this wonderful book is about. it looks at the various confused and complicated ways that our society has made life harder for parents, sometimes on purpose, but very often not on purpose. and it some ways forward. tonight's conversation is going to take up all of that. this event for us today, part of a serious we call it the edward and helen haynes book forum's. these are public events that are really intended to facilitate some conversation about

important books on issues that touch on crucial public questions by aei scholars, but also by others. we're very grateful to the hans 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's book and then tim is going to step up and talk about the book for a while. and after that 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 community and letters editor is there write letters and community editor at the washington post shows she gets to hear from all kinds of very interesting people. and she's really i would say her stuff gets forwarded to me more than just about anything else in the washington post, mostly from my wife. and it is always profound and interesting. 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 room. if you're watching us online, then right next to where you're watching us, you can how to participate in that 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 and commentators assume it's just about cost. but they don't tell the whole story we need to take seriously the feeling that parenting has gotten harder. these days. parents need to be countercultural if they want to

avoid maximum effort parenting. the feeling that it's not okay anymore to your kids run around is mostly misguided cultural expectation and norms. but also our world is just more hostile to letting kids. for the sanity of today's children and parents, we need to regain mindset. we neighborhoods and reshape our culture in a way that makes easier for parents to let their kids. go free. thank you. you've all. thank you, all of you, for joining me tonight. this this book has truly been a labor of i want and in that regard i want to specifically thank my wife katie for for coming i was able to write with some knowledge about having six kids because of her.

thank you, katie. i remember with crystal clarity so of the moments of my first day as a father, i remember that when we first met the baby and that was sort of 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 nursery in the hallway and. i walk out there and just staring at this perfect little face and i'm thinking, what, what? what you going to look like as a toddler? are you 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 that the 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 brad pitt, angelina jolie and, me and and started having and we had the number of births of any year in history there was a belief that this could become a real baby boom because the millennials were just hitting their prime childbearing so rising birth rates, the

millennials, a larger generation turning into their mid-to-late is it going to be a baby boom? obviously it wasn't. it was a baby bust almost every year for the past 15 years, the 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 last year, 2023 might end up being lower, even than 2020. the pandemic year. here's important measure of the total fertility rate is a number most people are familiar with. 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, but 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 the bottom but two of the skinnier bars are down there at the bottom. so we have a legitimate real baby bust in our lifetime the us population is estimated to beginning to begin shrinking. 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 question is why should we care? why is this bad? some people are creeped out. they think it's like a handmaid's tale or a thing that i care about. other people not having enough babies. so this is a friendly feminist, liberal on twitter, laura 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 journalist i regard highly lidia to pilhas, she looked at the data by a study a study from brookings university of maryland scholar melissa showing that the economic explanations don't really explain the falling birthrate. and she said, surprise younger women might just want more out of life than just 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 still want babies. three the baby boomers reflect, something unwell about our culture, even if you don't care about there being fewer babies. what's causing it is something should care about. it has other root causes and

other excuse me, other effects that are not great. and for you should mine there being fewer babies because babies are actually good. so let's start with that first reason. the economic the dependency ratio, we now have more americans in their sixties than. we have children under age ten. so along with that, the working age population which used to steadily climb has now flatlined. so we're not getting more 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 many 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 culture isroken. 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 range and sh is. and when io mething that she thinks the bouaries he repeatedly would say i'm not afraid of kidnapers our kids i'm afraidf cps, child ottive services that we lived in silver spring where they were famous free range parents reptedly

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? this 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 numerous. now i always like the illustration on this because we all breeding like rabbits. if you get it, those are bunny rabbits and they are devouring the earth, wch is a large head of cabbage. the point of this op ed was not just that babies are 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 different but choices some people find really objectionable or find incomprehensible. i mean, 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 they 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 create some 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 dollars 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 government bureaucracy 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 this book. you know, i think one clear driver of some more family friendly policy on the right has been of the rise of prenatal ism, the idea that we need more babies, we need to convince 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 inherently good and we should do things support children because that's an inherently good thing to do. i think that'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's one of the tricky things about talking about about culture in general is that we always want to have these measurable outcomes but what actually matters in the end is not always measurable. that's some times when you say, well, i'm it by culture, you'll 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 become 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 do that and you certainly can't directly do that to policy and. but you can ask 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 perhaps rightly against 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 something that you and i have talked about that 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't really a verb? yeah. 50 years ago, maybe you were the 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 still fine. but 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 could be open to me. 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 i think it becomes less of a big deal and 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 trend in feminist conversation and you see this in publishing in particular recently 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 be honest, 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.a. and utah going to the television critics association tour and the sundance film festival which by the way, the best reason to go to sundance is, really the high 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 a 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, but i do. and you know, i. 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 need to bring back the family sitcom. yeah. i mean, so one of the problems is that social media, you know, replace tv and the social media, the only two kinds of mom i've seen are the sort of perfect mom who, as what i notice and i put in 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 all 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 that is intimidating. it makes the comparison that either mothers or would be mothers have is i can't pull that off. i'm not a ballerina who can make my own, you know cereal from scratch or whatever. but the other half social media is the parenting. just how the social 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 works differently than you know 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. you don't see sort of the whole

picture not considered. you don't have time to sort of absorb and you sort of consider or even reject the information you're on to the next thing. yeah, if we could somehow get a 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 is what looked like. guess 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 rise of the congressional dads caucus and, you know, it'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 out to 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 done over the last few generations compared to the 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 not attractive. how can we like tell dads that they should be dads and that 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 be andrew tate or dads should just basically be moms, then that's not going to be appealing to 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 big discoveries for my husband. 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 much, which is about 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 pay a family wage where someone gets raise for having a kid rather than for merit and that employers might proactively steer parents towards family friendly schedule 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 the room, but so i'm giving a

guy a raise. he has a kid or giving a woman a raise because she has a kid. theoretically, it could be illegal. the other hand, the way the economy works, the story i tell in the book 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 you're 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 conversation we had about hawthorne in the teacher's lounge today? you need get paid more so that school might actually pay that 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 if you 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 contributors 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 to be 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 more fit, are more family 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 the sort 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, who has written a lot about care, is 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 risks there. i of you know, i think we also see, you know, 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 embryo freezing but not a child care onsite child care, i question to a certain extent 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 at

least adults without children tend to perceive the world in a very different way. do you think that maybe the in radical ideology is and in the mental health among younger adults is due to the relative 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 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 at, you know, story hour at the library, mommy and me, yoga or like that. and so more likely to be connected. and i think that connection and belonging are key innocuous actions against extreme ism and that your ability to sort hold

on to as i was saying earlier radical simplistic ideas that really gets dampened by getting married and having kids. but i also think you raise a really question. you know, not everyone is called to have children and not everyone is able to have children. and one thing i think we see culturally that's really is sort of a polarization even of single childless people or childless by choice people against families, children. i mean, the sort of classic example of this is like, how dare you bring your baby on an airplane? but there is i think there is a really interesting question to be asked is how do we knit together? who don't choose, have children, people who can't have children and people who do have families? because, you know, my husband and i have childless friends who play an incredibly important in our kids lives. you know, the we live in between you know to divorce women in their sixties who are incredible figures in our children's lives. how do we build a community

everyone whether their parents or values, children, values family and gets some meaning about out of being in a community together as well as support for all the family family friendly policies that we'd like to spend money on that has a historical precedent, which is, you know, the the uncle who never got married, the aunt who never got married that they are part a 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 mead quote in of all people where i said depriving people of the of the opportunity to interact kids is is really cruel. in fact. yes and you know, i think that children also really benefit from adults in their lives who see them as people who aren't related to them by blood, who aren't necessarily obligated to them, but find them interesting, who are in constantly telling them to clean up their yes, who

can who can be indulgent, who can be curious about them, who, you know, can be a sounding board for them about their parents and help them understand their parents in the adult world better. i think that's really important certainly my kids are always shocked when either they're their cousins or their friends are like, your parents are cool, like because my kids don't get to experience that as much. so i think we have time for one more one more question over in the back, david, great discussion. excited to read the book. tim i'm really grateful for your voice because i think you're one of the most outspoken social making the case for yimby ism and housing reform at a time when that issue is risking tipping, warns the culture war space. so can you talk about how you see role of housing reform as part of this agenda to help families grow? or so? i'm really glad you asked that because when i say that cost can explain the 15 year baby bust in the cost of housing.

does traditional lee really explain downtick in birthrates and in marriage rates? so that's and so what's happened in the last three years in most of the u.s. has been a deterrence to family formation. and so some people think the way make it affordable is just to subsidize demand. that of course, will just drive up the costs. and so my argument would be to increase the supply as much as possible. the tricky thing is that the nimbys are yes. in my backyards as opposed to the nimbys. i follow a lot of them on twitter and they're always posting massive apartment towers that also are ugly. like you don't to subscribe to an ugly brutalism esthetic to believe there should be more houses but a family friendly yimby ism would be a different thing from either conservative like i don't want any more houses in my town because you

know the wrong kind of to move in are too many. it'll clog up the parking lot, etc. but so that's tricky because again, i'm talking of about discrimination here. i'm saying local government should say actually send us more families. and the truth is often doing the opposite. i in the book a local in illinois saying families are cost businesses are an asset. but if you bring in families i have to build more schools. i have to build more playgrounds. so that's my approach. development urbanism nimbyism would be explicitly a friendly one. we could stay all night. i think we're not allowed to stay here all night. thank you for your beautiful book. thank you, all of you, for joining us. and