Back in December, a viral video sequence on TikTok celebrated the DINK ( double- money, no kids ) life, glorying in their ability to take European vacations, go mad with large payments at Costco, and purchase on their pets. Although as Federalist Executive Editor Joy Pullmann aided me in understanding that these young British couples were very materialist at first, I initially thought it was a joke. They genuinely believed that the rights they gained without babies were a better way of life than the irrationality that characterizes the lives of us miserable parents.
A glad father of six, artist and American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Timothy P. Carney, views children as an obstacle to human happiness rather than as a means of achieving it, both for individuals and society as a whole. However, he makes a strong argument in Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Many Harder Than It Needs to Be that a large portion of the reason why our country’s birth rates are declining has to do with various changes that discourage people from having some ( or more ) children. And though Carney’s arguments are data- driven and quite convincing, I could n’t help thinking about the popularity of the DINK lifestyle.
Our Baby Bust Is An Unfathomable Riddle
Carney does a fantastic job of exposing the enigmatic conflicts of our country’s connection to our offspring. He points out that Americans are having fewer children than we actually think ( 2. 7 per couple ), which is below the ideal ( 2. 7 per couple ). There’s even this dilemma: When compared to the parents of the 1970s, the fathers of now are far more involved in their children’s lives — but, incredibly, mothers ‘ regular parenting loads since that time have increased by about 50 pct. By observing that wealthy Americans are just as likely as middle-class parents to have few children, Carney also makes an argument that “kids are too expensive.”
The post- 2007 “baby bust” is thus, in Carney’s estimation, not one driven primarily by financial factors, but cultural ones. ” Our culture is increasingly hostile to family formation”, he writes. And this cultural antagonism takes on many forms. Travel sports, which require a lot of parental commitments, are one such phenomenon that discourages more children ( its hyper-specialization is also causing more injuries for young athletes ). Carney refers to the soul-crushing hours parents spend driving their kids from one activity to another as” car hell.” Parenting is also portrayed in social media as awful and challenging ( a la those aforementioned DINK videos ). The design of our communities, meanwhile, makes it difficult for children to independently travel to school or other activities.
The prevalence of helicopter parenting, which exhausts parents, also discourages larger families. Protective parents are so afraid of screwing their kids that they are refusing them the freedom to decide their own lives, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue in The Coddling of the American Mind. Many fears, including the overreaction of the nation to Covid, are incredibly disproportional to the actual threat, as abundant data shows. Nor can we ignore the function of screens in excluding younger generations from daily life and directly undermining human sexuality in the context of a pornographic addiction. Dating apps, alternatively, engender an unattainable perfectionism.
Reversing the Baby Bust
Much to Carney’s credit, Family Unfriendly does not lack recommended solutions to our paucity of progeny. Instead of communities unnavigable for children, he encourages the idea of the “fifteen- minute city”, in which schools, playgrounds, and corner stores are a fifteen- minute walk from home. He demands that the federal government sell off a small portion of its landholdings so developers can construct homes in order to address the housing crisis. He calls for the repeal of the ban on granny flats so that single-family property owners can generate rental income.
Employers should also play their part by ensuring that larger families ‘ health insurance premiums do n’t rise and that employees can take paid parental leave at any time during the child’s first 18 years. They could also offer bonuses to every employee who is expecting or adopting, or, more controversially, purposefully pay breadwinner parents more money.
By repealing the married penalties in the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, the government can support families by rewarding parents with higher Social Security benefits and reforming the tax code to benefit married, child-rearing adults. France, which has a higher birth rate than many other European nations, is a good example of how to subvent mothers ‘ birth rates, in large part due to its use of birth bonuses and monthly allowances, which studies have shown are more effective than daycare subsidies. Additionally, reducing the number of labor laws and regulating occupation licensing laws would enable stay-at-home parents to make extra money for their families.
Even religious institutions have a role to play. According to Carney, synagogues and churches can do more to encourage families to have children by providing free “baby boxes,” such as by offering this. Given that it’s much more likely for churches to attract new members through evangelism efforts than through evangelism efforts, their increased involvement seems to be a win.
The Baby Bust Problem Is Much More Complex.
Demographer Lyman Stone has convincingly demonstrated that even the most aggressive campaigns to encourage more children have had limited, positive, results. Carney is aware of this, and he is aware that a significant cultural shift would be required to overcome our country’s aversion to children. This is so, even if everyone knows that fewer babies translates into fewer workers, which translates into fewer people to pay for all those expensive entitlements ( e. g. Social Security, Medicare, etc. ), which translates into” an economy with higher prices, more scarcity, longer wait times, and ultimately lower quality of life”. A childless future, even our professional class knows, is an economically fraught one.
Unfortunately, among young professionals, children are seen as an obstacle to autonomy and freedom. The normalization of contraception has made it easier to separate sex from children, lessen the barriers between men and women, and protected us from uncertainty. Many people have opined (unstrangely ) that it is unfair to place children in such a dangerous world due to fears of environmental catastrophe. And a growing guilt over America, evidenced in claims that our country since its origins has been systemically racist, misogynist, and colonialist, enervates many Americans ‘ desire to pass on their genes. With such self- hatred over our national history and identity, what’s there to pass on?
Due to this, we experience what Carney refers to as” civilizational sadness,” which is made worse by the catastrophic exodus of young Americans from religious institutions that, for previous generations, had provided citizens with a sense of purpose, comfort, and community. What has filled that void is a therapeutic, narcissistic,” create your own adventure” lifestyle of autonomy, self- exploration, and aversion to pain. And yet, curiously, that same cohort is lonelier and more miserable than any previous generation.
Thus we return to the DINKS. For even the most extensive, evidence- based solutions to our childless crisis ultimately collide with a demographic, growing in number, who reject parenthood not because it is too expensive, nor because their communities are not sufficiently family- friendly, nor because they require more pro- natal benefits, but because they have no interest in kids. It makes no difference that research has shown that married adults who have children are happier than the childless. It does n’t matter that children, in all the sacrifices and suffering they require, will unquestionably make us better people.
In the end, it matters that children were once a given to the vast majority of people and a necessity for those whose lives were defined by an agricultural lifestyle that required more hands. That changed forever thanks to advances in chemical research and effective 1960s marketing. Because of the ubiquity of easily accessible, reasonably affordable contraception, no one needs to worry about having a family, be it large or small. We may give reasons that seem at least reasonably defensible ( e. g. financial insecurity ) or patently risible ( e. g. the “glamorous DINK lifestyle” ). In any case, this poses the most of a challenge for Carney and all those who celebrate and love large families.
One would assume it would be simple to persuade young people to give up” Costco pizza night” and instead pursue an adventure that is both incredibly rewarding and very rewarding. And yet. Either that pizza truly is incredible, or we’re dealing with a culture so morally impoverished, so truly blinkered by self- worship and self- protection, it’s unclear what, if anything, could rouse them from their dogmatic slumber.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a columnist and editor for The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Territories.
