Would you guess that compared to the 20th century, dads in the 21st century spend more time with their kids? You probably know moms work more hours outside the home. But do you know that moms still spend more time with children than before, even though they work more and family size has shrunk?
Timothy Carney is right: Something is wrong. In his new book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be (Harper), he writes, “Somehow Mom and Dad have become full-time chauffeurs, Secret Service agents, and playmates—while both parents work full-time jobs.”
He wants us to know that today’s maximum-effort, high-anxiety, low-trust parenting hasn’t produced high-quality parenting. He writes, “Our culture expects a person more and more to handle life on his own, stripped of the support, guidance, expectations, and meaning traditionally provided by religion, community, and extended family. This supposedly ‘liberating’ modernity makes life a lot harder.”
Carney is a father of six children, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and columnist at the Washington Examiner. He wants to show us a “way of life that makes family easier, makes parents less anxious, and makes kids happier.” Who doesn’t want that?
But first, we need to see why American civil society has collapsed in the past two generations. We did just that in this episode of Gospelbound.
The Gospel Coalition