Make America Family-Friendly Again

Seventy-five years ago, America was in the midst of a baby boom thanks to World War II vets who'd returned home heroes, eager to settle down and make more Americans. And 25 years ago, we still had admirably high birth rates relative to other developed nations.

But today, our birth rate is well below replacement level, never having recovered from the 2008 recession. We’re some of the most fortunate people ever to have graced the surface of this planet, yet we feel harried, overburdened, and financially unable to have as many kids as we’d like. We’ve also lost our 20th-century confidence: Why create more people who’ll just pollute the planet, anyway?

Family Unfriendly, the latest book from Washington Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney, proposes a full-court press to fight these trends—involving changes in individual behavior, institutional priorities, public policy, and, perhaps most dauntingly of all, culture. It’s an impressive combination of traditional shoe-leather reporting, empirically-driven policy analysis, and first-person anecdotes derived from Carney’s experiences as a father of six. And we’d all be better off if we followed his advice.

One of Carney's biggest points is that we’ve simply chosen to make parenting a lot harder than it needs to be—an argument he drives home with cheeky chapter titles and subheads such as “Have Lower Ambitions for Your Kids” and “Lose Your Kids.” Parents don’t actually have to helicopter their children at every waking moment or fall into the “travel team trap” of constantly chauffeuring kids to faraway sporting events.

To a large extent, individual families can simply choose not to do that: Accept that parents don’t have as much control over how kids turn out as we’d like to think; treat sports and music as chances for kids to explore and appreciate these hobbies rather than to develop professional-level skills (Carney subhead: “Your Daughter Is Not Serena Williams”); give kids more freedom to run around with their friends with less adult involvement.

But of course, it’s easier for individual families to make these decisions when the broader society supports them, too. This is where Family Unfriendly becomes much more than a self-help book, offering a vision for reordering much of American life to better support families with kids.

Organizations and institutions such as churches can do a lot to help, from providing events where parents can hang out while their kids run around lightly supervised, to getting new parents started with the basic necessities, to offering babysitting. 

But government policy is key as well.

Housing is a great example. Carney envisions a family-friendly urbanism, in which cities would be designed for people rather than cars, with kids able to get from place to place by bike or foot. As I found last year by analyzing a trove of data on American metro areas, parents strongly gravitate toward metros with lower cost of living, which also tends to mean less density and walkability. To a large extent, that’s likely because families want bigger homes and yards and are willing to accept the tradeoff of driving everywhere. Nonetheless, there’s a major opportunity here for dense, expensive, housing-starved cities to keep families around by building family-friendly, affordable homes—and for suburbs to create kid-friendly streets and sidewalks, make it easier to build “starter homes,” and get rid of regulations that prevent, for example, building “granny flats” for extended family to live nearby.

Carney also advocates giving bigger Social Security payouts to people with more kids—as those kids are the folks who fund the system—and would like to see an effort to help more parents quit their jobs, favorably discussing France’s benefit for stay-at-home parents. Regarding the latter, I would caution that U.S. tax and entitlement policy is already quite favorable to breadwinner households—who generally receive a “marriage bonus” from the income-tax system and extra Social Security benefits to support the non-working spouse—and further reforms should bear these existing features in mind.

Ultimately, however, if individual families are limited in how much they can change without the support of institutions and public policy, institutions and public policy are also limited in what they can do without changes in culture. As Carney details, while subsidizing families can help them and modestly increase birth rates, it’s not going to solve all our problems. 

Carney profiles some high-fertility cultures, such as Israel and the Mormon church, mixing statistics on their success with in-person, on-the-ground reporting. A common trait of high-fertility cultures is religion, of course, but even Catholics in Utah have more kids than Catholics elsewhere, and irreligious Israelis are pretty fecund as well. Beyond the commands of religion, people have lots of kids when the people around them have lots of kids, when they feel supported in that choice, and when their community is built around the assumption that there will be lots of kids around.

How does one change a whole culture? It’s a daunting task. But one can start by writing a book explaining what needs to change and why, and Carney has done that in Family Unfriendly.

Robert VerBruggen is a Manhattan Institute fellow and IFS research fellow.