In 204 B.C., the Romans imported a latest foreign cult. When the barge bringing the cult statue to Rome got stuck within the shallow waters of the Tiber, an aristocratic young woman, Claudia Quinta, miraculously pulled the rope to attract it in single-handedly. As her name tells us, she was the fifth daughter in her family.
The reason this story first stood out to me years ago is similar reason it got here to mind while reading journalist Timothy P. Carney’s latest book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be: Fifth kids are rare. Not coincidentally, they’re hard. “Comedian Jim Gaffigan has offered a vivid description of getting a fifth child,” Carney writes. “Imagine you’re drowning. And someone hands you a baby.”
Fifth daughters were rare in ancient Rome for a unique reason than they’re in modern America, where we not have to offer good dowries to contract marriages for every girl (though college tuition is perhaps a comparable expense). Rather, the contemporary US has joined the remainder of the West—and a rising share of the Global South—in an unprecedented, apparently unrelenting baby bust. Not only are fifth kids unusual as of late, even second kids are increasingly rare, and the variety of childless singles and couples is at a record high. Economics are only one factor here. We’re taking a look at a significant cultural shift.
Just how bad are things? “The average thirty-five-year-old American woman in 2020 had just above 1.5 kids, which is the bottom number on record,” Carney notes. This is well below the alternative rate of two.1 children, and it’s bad news for everybody—though many don’t understand it yet. A family-unfriendly society is a miserable society and, in the long term, an economically precarious one too. Just have a look at any country where retirees outnumber the working-age young.
What would a family-friendly society appear like? Well, we could understand it by its fruit and its fruitfulness: more marriages, more marital stability, and more children. Maybe not a number of fifth babies, but definitely more second and third ones. But before we consider Carney’s recommendations for the way to be more family friendly, let’s consider his explanation for a way America became such an unfriendly place for folks and youngsters.
In a move that signals the target market of the book, Carney opens with a polemic against travel sports. For many middle-class families, having children now comes with unrealistic expectations of excellence. Sports and other extracurricular activities aren’t for fun anymore—children are expected to start out occupied with the Olympics (or at the very least college scholarships) by the center of kindergarten.
Does this sound extreme and greater than a bit ridiculous? Of course, but that’s the increasingly common mindset. It’s an arms race. Moms and dads alike spend more time with our children than did our counterparts a generation or two ago, nevertheless it’s not quality time. It’s stressful time, time spent chauffeuring, supervising, and worrying about which college Junior will attend even before potty-training begins. For some, Carney argues, the overwhelming expectations around getting parenting right results in a call to don’t have any children or simply one, who might be given every opportunity, every resource, every parental attention.
And these expectations are only the tip of the iceberg, Carney says. He considers how modern neighborhoods are built for cars, not people. There are fewer sidewalks, reducing or eliminating walkability. Fewer public spaces where families can gather at leisure. Neighbors often don’t know one another; many kids don’t play on the block; and indeed, the mere idea of kids playing unsupervised outside is deemed dangerous—in some states, enough to incur the scrutiny of the law.
Add to this the growing distance between middle-class professionals and their parents and clan, and raising kids involves feel lonely and exhausting, since it is. When parents are this drained, they find yourself having fewer children, often fewer children than they need they might have.
Carney also highlights recent technological shifts, especially smartphones, for his or her role in warping kids’ brains, increasing isolation, and revolutionizing dating in order that achieving marriage becomes tougher. Meanwhile, the technology of the pill has allowed people to postpone childbearing, often in service to the faith of “workism.” The pill (and, as Leah Libresco Sargeant has argued, the pump) allows newer strains of secular feminism that encourage women to decide on careers over children to advertise this vision while denigrating stay-at-home moms and even motherhood itself. The message appears to be sinking in.
It’s a compounding problem too: A society with fewer kids naturally becomes less kid-friendly over time—less willing to accommodate children and families in public spaces, less kind, less joyful, more selfish. And a culture hostile to kids is a culture of sterility, a culture increasingly hostile to people typically. Our view of kids reflects our larger anthropology: People are bad—not within the hyper-Calvinist sense, which at the very least offers hope and salvation in Jesus, but in a humans are a plague on this planetsort of way, which is utterly hopeless. We reside, Carney concludes, in a profound “civilizational sadness.”
Carney’s evaluation is the results of a decade’s value of research and a lifetime’s value of observations of his circle of relatives. I discovered it convincing. But there’s a component I believe plays a bigger role than Carney indicated—and I feel he knows it, because he gives it more emphasis in his previous book, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse. This component is the role of the church in making a family-friendly culture and the corresponding role of dechurching in making a culture that doesn’t have kids.
In Alienated America, Carney argues that the decline of church attendance was a big consider the erosion of our social ties. This shift is upstream from how we construct our neighborhoods and write our tax codes. Healthy theology, robust church life, and communal support for young families are upstream from good policies pertaining to children and fertility too. In one in every of Family Unfriendly’s most poignant theological statements, Carney notes:
Babies aren’t objects. Babies are subjects. Objects—electric cars, homes, coffeemakers—are contingent goods. They are good insofar as they improve the lives of humans. Babies are the alternative of consumer goods. They are that for the sake of which we construct societies, and thus governments, and thus tax codes. A tax code should favor toddlers over terriers or Teslas, because man-made law should favor people over nonpeople. A government needs to be partial toward children, because a government needs to be partial toward humans. Ours is a government for the people, not for the puppies.
This is powerful, and so are the remainder of the solutions for which Carney advocates for creating an America that’s more family friendly: more parental leave, a pro-marriage and pro-child tax code, a built environment that enables kids to roam free, a culture that’s more supportive of homemakers and resists workism, a society wherein we put people first.
These are all good ideas, and I’d like to see them materialize. And yet, I discovered myself pondering, a stronger culture of local church membership would organically resolve most of the problems Carney identifies.
Consider emergencies. Let’s say you’re in labor, to make use of a directly relevant example. What trustworthy friends are you able to call to return watch your kids—nonetheless many there are—at a moment’s notice? If you’re involved at church, you likely have many such people in your life, and you’ll be able to be that person for others. If you’re irreligious or otherwise unchurched, you almost definitely have a much smaller group on whom you’ll be able to call.
For the (very not fun) two weeks that I went over my due date with my third child, a friend from church went in all places with a packed overnight bag in her automotive. If she needed to get to my house quickly, she could. When I finally called her around midnight, she got here instantly. She took care of my older two children that January night, allowing me and Dan to give attention to welcoming our youngest.
No policy could make that sort of emergency support possible. In early parenting, possibly greater than every other season of life, you would like real people—flesh and blood, family and friends, individuals who come because they love you, not because someone is paying them—to be right there, wanting to help. (I’ve semi-joked that I’d have one other baby simply to get one other meal of the lasagna one elder’s wife at our previous church dutifully took to all latest mothers. It was that good.)
More than any possible government program, this sort of network will encourage people to have more babies. And Carney would most definitely agree—indeed, the introduction to his book involves just such an emergency for his circle of relatives. They got here through it relatively easily due to the attractive support of their relatives, colleagues, and, most of all, the church.
The bride of Christ will not be flawless within the here and now. Yet it’s churches which have the capability to create, at the very least in microcosm, a culture that’s family friendly in a world that will not be.
Nadya Williams is the creator of Cultural Christians within the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).
