In 204 BC, the Romans imported a new foreign cult. When the barge carrying the cult statue to Rome became stuck in the shallow waters of the Tiber, a young aristocratic woman, Claudia Quinta, miraculously pulled the rope to pull it single-handedly. As her name suggests, she was the fifth daughter in her family.
The reason this story first struck me years ago is the same reason it came to mind while reading journalist Timothy P. Carney’s new book, Family is not family friendly: How our culture has made raising children much harder than it needs to be: Fifth children are rare. It’s no coincidence that they are hard. “Comedian Jim Gaffigan offered a vivid description of having a fifth child,” Carney writes. “Imagine you are drowning. And someone hands you a baby.
Fifth daughters were rare in ancient Rome for a different reason than in modern America, where we no longer need to provide a good dowry to secure marriage for each daughter (even though tuition can be a comparable expense). On the contrary, the contemporary United States has joined the rest of the West – and a growing share of the Global South – in an unprecedented and seemingly incessant baby bust. Not only are fifth children rare these days, but even second children are increasingly rare, and the number of childless singles and couples is at an all-time high. The economy is just one factor. We are witnessing a major cultural shift.
How bad are things? “In 2020, the average thirty-five-year-old American woman had just over 1.5 children, which is the lowest number ever recorded,” Carney notes. That’s well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children, and it’s bad news for everyone, even if many don’t realize it yet. A society that is not family-friendly is a miserable society and, in the long term, also economically precarious. Just look at any country where retirees outnumber young people of working age.
What would a family-friendly society look like? Well, we could recognize it by its fruits and its fruitfulness: more marriages, more marital stability and more children. Maybe not many fifth babies, but definitely more second and third babies. But before we look at Carney’s recommendations for how to be more family-friendly, let’s look at his explanation for how America has become such a hostile place for parents and children.
In a move that signals the book’s target audience, 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 are no longer for fun: Children are supposed to start thinking about the Olympics (or at least college scholarships) by the middle of kindergarten.
Does this seem extreme and beyond ridiculous to you? Of course, but it’s an increasingly common state of mind. It’s an arms race. Moms and dads are spending more time with our kids than our counterparts did a generation or two ago, but it’s not quality time. It’s a stressful time, time spent driving, supervising, and worrying about which college Junior will attend before potty training even begins. For some, Carney argues, overwhelming expectations of good parenting lead to the decision not to have children or to have just one, who will benefit from all the opportunities, all the resources and all the attention parental.
And those expectations are just the tip of the iceberg, Carney says. He thinks about how modern neighborhoods are built for cars and not people. There are fewer sidewalks, which reduces or eliminates the possibility of walking. Fewer public spaces where families can gather at leisure. Neighbors often don’t know each other; many children do not play in the neighborhood; and indeed, the mere idea of children playing outside unsupervised is considered dangerous – in some states, enough has incur THE meticulous examination of the law.
Add to this the growing distance between middle-class professionals and their parents and extended families, and raising children comes to feel lonely and exhausting, as it East. When parents are this tired, they end up having fewer children, often fewer children than they would have liked.
Carney also points to recent technological changes, particularly smartphones, for their role in warping children’s brains, increasing isolation, and revolutionizing dating so that marriage becomes more difficult. Meanwhile, pill technology allowed people to delay pregnancy, often in service of the religion of “workism.” The pill (and, as Leah Libresco Sargeant has argued, the pump) allows new trends in secular feminism that encourage women to choose a career over having children to promote this vision while denigrating stay-at-home mothers or even motherhood itself. The message seems to be well integrated.
It’s also a growing problem: a society with fewer children naturally becomes less friendly over time – less willing to welcome children and families into public spaces, less kind, less joyful, more selfish. And a culture hostile to children is a culture of sterility, a culture increasingly hostile to people in general. Our view of children reflects our broader anthropology: people are bad, not in the hyper-Calvinist sense, which at least offers hope and salvation in Jesus, but in a hyper-Calvinist sense. humans are a scourge on this planetsome kind of way, which is totally hopeless. We live, Carney concludes, in a profound “civilizational sadness.”
Carney’s analysis is the result of a decade of research and a lifetime of observations of his own family. I found it convincing. But there is one element that I suspect plays a more important role than Carney indicates – and I think he knows it, because he puts more emphasis on it in his earlier book: Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse. This component is the role of the Church in creating a family-friendly culture and the corresponding role of the unchurched in creating a child-free culture.
In America alienated, Carney argues that the decline in church attendance has been a significant factor in the erosion of our social bonds. This change is upstream of how we build our neighborhoods and write our tax codes. Sound theology, strong church life, and community support for young families are upstream of good policies regarding children and fertility as well. In one of the Hostile familyCarney notes ‘s most poignant theological statements, notes:
Babies are not objects. Babies are subjects. Objects – electric cars, houses, coffee makers – are contingent goods. They are good to the extent that they improve the lives of humans. Babies are the opposite of consumer goods. They are which is why we build societies, and therefore governments, and therefore tax codes. A tax code should favor toddlers over terriers or Teslas, because man-made laws should favor people over non-persons. A government should be biased towards children, as a government should be biased towards humans. Our government is ours for the peoplenot for puppies.
It’s powerful, as are the other solutions Carney advocates for creating a more family-friendly America: more parental leave, a marriage-friendly, child-friendly tax code, a built environment that allows children to thrive. move freely. , a culture that is more supportive of homemakers and resists workism, a society in which we put people first.
These are all good ideas and I would love to see them come to fruition. And yet, I found myself thinking that a stronger culture of local church membership would organically solve many of the problems Carney identified.
Think about emergencies. Let’s say you’re in labor, to take a directly relevant example. What trusted friends can you call to come watch your children, no matter how many, at any time? If you’re involved in church, you probably have many of these people in your life, and you can be that person for others. If you are irreligious or unchurched, you almost certainly have a much smaller group to whom you can appeal.
During the (very unfun) two weeks that I was past my third child’s due date, a friend from church went everywhere with a stuffed travel bag in her car. If she needed to get to my house quickly, she could. When I finally called her around midnight, she came immediately. She took care of my two older children that January night, allowing me and Dan to focus on welcoming our youngest.
No policy can make this type of emergency support possible. In early parenthood, perhaps more than any other time in life, you need real people – flesh and blood, friends and family, people who come because they love you , not because someone is paying them – who are there, eager to help you. (I half-joked that I would have another baby just to have another meal of lasagna that an elder’s wife from our previous church dutifully brought all the new moms. It was so good. )
More than any possible government program, This This type of network will encourage people to have more babies. And Carney would certainly agree: indeed, the introduction to his book implies just such urgency for his own family. They got through it relatively well thanks to the support of their loved ones, their colleagues and, above all, the Church.
The bride of Christ is not perfect here and now. Yet it is the churches that have the capacity to create, at least in microcosm, a family-friendly culture in a world that is not.
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and the next Mothers, children and the body politic: ancient Christianity and the restoration of human dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).
