Three of my most recent writing projects have covered some diverse ground: reviewing a book on how we can create a more pro-family society, reviewing another book that examines the harmful aspects of the therapy industry particularly for children, and imploring Republicans not to begin cheerleading for contraception as a plank of their reelection platforms.
For the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty, I reviewed Tim Carney’s new book Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. I think the book will be of particular interest to readers in the midst of raising children—much of the book has to do with how to raise flourishing kids without making parenting as overly taxing as we currently tend to make it—but it’s also a fascinating read for anyone curious about the reality of falling birth rates and what we can do about it.
Family Unfriendly offers a lot of robust ideas in the way of policy, urban planning, and cultural support for families. But what I liked best is how Carney gets to the real root of our society’s fear of children and of the sacrifices required to have larger-than-average families. From my review:
A common thread runs throughout the book, an argument that appears either implicitly or explicitly on nearly every page: building a world friendly to families will require a renewed belief in the beauty and goodness of every human life. In his final chapter, Carney quotes a woman he met at a bar, who echoes a sentiment present in many of the book’s interviews and statistics: “In general, do I think people are good? No, I don’t. I think we’re the cancer of the Earth.”
Though the book offers a compelling rebuttal of this perspective, Carney clearly understands it well and realizes that it’s a common and popular explanation for the choice to have only a couple of kids or to have no kids at all. At root, Carney argues, this worldview stems from the fear, increasingly entrenched in our culture, that people aren’t good. “Achievements, success, brilliance, speed, strength, nimbleness, and beauty are all good things, wonderful to behold and worthy of celebration,” he writes in the first chapter. “But in our modern age, we confuse these good things with the Good. We wrongly believe that the good things about other people are the things that make them good.”
In contrast, Family Unfriendly presents a case for the inherent value of human beings, “a value independent of their accomplishments and instead rooted in their very nature.” And, as he puts it at one point, “kids fertilize our world,” opening us up to the fulfillment we can find in a life full of unpredictability, imagination, flexibility, serendipity, and even surrender, so often miscast as a killer of joy.
The book would make a great Mother’s Day or Father’s Day gift for any readers in your life.
For Public Discourse, I had a chance to read and review Abigail Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. Shrier’s book from a few years back, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, totally transformed my understanding of the debate over gender ideology (I highly recommend that one) so I was excited to read her latest. She does something fairly similar here, examining a growing trend—in this case, the massive, seemingly coincident rise in mental-health diagnoses and use of therapy among American children—and proposing an outside-the-box explanation for what we’re seeing:
Even as we’ve dedicated greater resources to the mental health of young people—most notably by increasing access to therapists both in and out of school—the overall well-being of Gen Z Americans seems to have declined by a number of important markers. “With unprecedented help from mental health experts,” Shrier writes, “we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record. Why?”
The simplest version of Shrier’s answer might be found in this line: “Recasting personality variation as a chiaroscuro of dysfunction, the mental health experts trained kids to regard themselves as disordered.” In other words, parents’ fixation on their kids’ mental health has produced a set of perverse incentives, most notably because it has led to regular interaction with psychology professionals, and to overreliance on school officials who see mental health trouble lurking around every corner. It seems we have molded a generation of kids more inclined to experience psychological problems than if they had been left to their own devices more often than not.
I have a few quibbles with some of the ways Shrier presents her argument, which you can read about in my review, but in general the book does an important service. She’s clearly identified a real issue here, and the research and interviews she presents to undergird her case are revealing and helpful for understanding the problem in greater depth. In my view, the most important contribution the book makes is in trying to reassure nervous parents that, by and large, their kids will profit most from receiving support from them rather than from therapists.
The final article I have to share is certainly the most controversial; I find that my writing about contraception often provokes more angry Internet strangers than my writing about abortion. In a piece for National Review magazine, I argue that following the advice of some Republican lobbyists and incorporating pro-contraception messaging into the GOP’s pro-life strategy would be a significant mistake for a host of reasons. From the article:
To adopt this strategy would be a significant unforced error, in terms of both policy and electoral politics. Even its premise is something of a mirage. Contraception is already widely accessible, and the idea that Republicans intend to prohibit its use is a fabrication of disingenuous Democrats. Statistics indicate that almost no one has any difficulty obtaining birth control, and there isn’t a significant political effort anywhere in the country to ban it.
This proposed rhetorical shift for pro-life Republicans, then, is less about confronting political reality than it is about convincing GOP lawmakers to sidestep the abortion debate in favor of what some in the party believe will be an easy crowd-pleaser. But it would also be a mistake to think that gesturing vaguely at contraception will do anything to win over new voters or, crucially, to counter the Democratic Party’s abortion messaging. . . .
A half-hearted nod to the importance of accessible contraception — hardly an urgent political matter — will do nothing to repudiate [Democratic] lies or expose progressive extremism on abortion. What Republicans need is a cogent and compassionate articulation of their party’s pro-life stance, and this precludes cheerleading for contraception.
Read on for an explanation of why this would be a failure of a strategy—and there will be more to come in future pieces thinking through what that real, successful, proactive pro-life strategy would look like for reelection-minded Republicans. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, I’d be grateful if you’d share this or other recent posts with friends who might be interested, too. Until next time.