Raising Kids In America Shouldn’t Be This Hard | Timothy P. Carney

America has always been very driven by subcultures.

We do have that sort of unchosen living necks of people who might not agree with you and might not have all the same interests of you.

That provides that sort of great diversity.

Well, if your subculture is all chosen along common interests and ideology, then that’s really a poverty.

Tim Carney is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the Senior Columnist for the Washington Examiner, and the author of numerous books including his latest, Family Unfriendly, How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be.

Listen in as we discuss the problems facing American families today, and the current political, cultural, and economic structures at the root of those problems.

Benedictine College is transforming culture in America one conversation at a time.

From our studios in Atchison, Kansas, these are The Benedictine Dialogues.

All right.

Mr.

Carney, welcome to The Benedictine Dialogues.

Thanks for having me.

Great to have you here, great to have you on campus, and I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation.

I think we’ve got a lot of mutual interests and some concerns as well.

I know you’ve been writing for quite some time on this issue of a breakdown of community, lowliness epidemic, many people are calling it.

Of course, here at Benedictine College, one of our main principles is to build a community of faith and scholarship, with community being a very specific term.

So I guess to start off the conversation, it’s how bad is it right now?

So the Surgeon General, the United States declared a loneliness epidemic.

And some people rolled their eyes, why is this a Surgeon General’s job?

But I thought it was very important to at least diagnose that problem.

And we see it across all sorts of things.

Marriage rates are dropping, the percentage of people living alone is at record highs.

Birth rates are at record lows.

I mean, they’ve been falling and not just since COVID, and we’ll talk about COVID later, I’m sure.

But since 2008, the Great Recession, people’s marriage and birth rates started dropping.

And then they never rebounded despite the economic bounce back.

People, Robert Putnam diagnosed in 2000 in bowling alone that people just belong to fewer things.

Well, in the last 23 years, it’s just gotten worse from there in general.

And the darkest symptom of this really is what’s been called the deaths of despair, a rise in suicides, an increase in alcohol deaths and drug-related deaths.

And that enough is enough to explain why even before COVID, lifespans in the US were shortening.

So how bad is it?

I think that’s pretty bad.

Yeah, if it’s causing the deaths of people, we’re not talking about just a mental health issue.

It’s certainly that, but it’s leading towards something that it’s our nature, in our nature, to have community.

So it’s something that’s lacking on almost a metaphysical level.

Yeah, I mean, Aristotle said man is a political animal, really sort of social animal.

Man needs to be in community.

And so you’re pulling us out of our habitat if you’re saying, oh, well, you’re going to go through your life alone, as long as you have money, your food, or whatever, you’re fine.

No, pulling people out of social environments, and not just having some friends or seeing other people, but sort of having people rely on you, having people expect you, having things that you belong to, things, an institution that you call us.

That’s always how I think of it.

Like if I think of my children’s school, my parish, my employers, I always say, oh, well, we’re growing, we don’t open until after Labor Day.

If you have lots of things that you call us, and you know that they think of you as being like a family, those aren’t just nice things.

Those of us who have them sometimes, oh, it’s great.

But as you’re saying, it’s absolutely necessary to human thriving.

It seems like it’s pretty obvious that we’re going through a major difficulty as a nation, and it seems like this is actually just the modern West in general.

I’m sure Europe is, I don’t know if it’s further along the way than the US is, or if it’s not, but what are some of the kind of outlying symptoms of the breakdown of community?

What are some of the things that this is causing for us?

So again, the deaths of despair is a big part, retreat from marriage, collapse in the birth rates.

But I also think a lot of people don’t realize, it’s changing our mindset, it’s making people think that this is normal.

So there’s a book called A Quest for Community by Robert Nisbett decades ago, and he used the word alienation, and he said it’s being separated from society, but also not seeing the purpose in society.

So that’s one of the most tragic consequences, symptoms of this isolation and alienation, is people thinking that that’s the way life is supposed to be, or by nature is for humans, is ultimately isolated, or your interactions with other people are all just transactions.

Oh, I give you money, you give me goods.

I give you services, you give me money.

Even to the point of dating relationships through the apps, often it’s just considered to be well, as long as it’s consensual as a transaction, then we’re done and we’re going separate ways.

I’ve had people who have written to me when I write about this, somebody on Twitter will respond when I’m talking about doing stuff in community, they say, well, that doesn’t really exist.

One guy used the term, life is a single player game, like a video game reference.

I just thought about that.

This was from random guy on Twitter, but it just captured so much of what I see.

You see op-eds in the New York Times about how, well, marriage is prison and you can get most of the stuff you want out of marriage, if you just sign a contract with another person.

That’s one of those, you see how it becomes self-reinforcing.

Alienation leads to a lack of a belief in community and belonging, which then is going to lead to more alienation.

Yeah, and I believe Nisbet was also, he pointed to the Athenians after the Peloponnesian War, as far as they lost the nerve of understanding human beings as something that can accomplish great things, that we should seek transcendental goals and fulfill our life through beauty, goodness, and truth.

Instead, it’s like we’re all beaten down, and our head’s been forced to just deal with everyday life in the slug of going through the rat race, if you will.

Yeah, and I like the image you gave there of looking down at your feet, because that’s not looking around at society, it is looking at the day-to-day.

It’s interesting in Christian theology how ultimately, our relationship with God is going to be a one-on-one thing.

Salvation is never like a group of people get saved, it’s always individual, that’s very clear in theology.

We Catholics don’t always like using the phrase of a personal relationship with Christ, but it’s definitely part of our theology.

So why is it that God made us so that we need, that other people are needed to draw our eyes to God?

But that’s clearly what happens, and that’s why Christ had to come in person of a human, and where he said, we’re two or three are gathered in my name, there I am.

God knows, he made us so that we need other people to see him.

So that’s, to me, I don’t have my mind wrapped around it.

That’s about as profound as I can get on it.

That’s kind of weird, but it’s definitely true.

Yes, which could also, I mean, I’d be interested in your take on this is, is that possibly even adding to this rise of atheism that we have right now?

It’s been going on for some time, but the numbers post-COVID especially, especially post shutdown of many churches, it’s kind of skyrocketing.

What I say in alienated America and almost everything is that the causal arrows point in both directions.

Collapse of community leads to collapse in religious belief, and collapse in religious belief leads to collapse in community.

That really is the COVID example drives at home, where people stopped going to church, and they still had their Bibles at home, their ability to pray.

We, for about three months in Maryland, we’re watching our local pastor on YouTube in our living room, and sort of trying to do family mass that way, while dogs are walking among us, wondering why the heck we’re kneeling on the living room floor.

But if it wasn’t for our friends or constant contact, that provided an uplift to people who don’t have that.

If their connection to the mass, to church, whatever, in any denomination is a little weaker, they’re more likely to fall away once they’re not getting revitalized by other people.

So you saw across denominations, across religions, the data show that a lot of people just didn’t go back.

People who were going every week to synagogue, Juma, mass church, then afterwards a significant number of them stopped going.

One of the points I make, and I try to make this point to other journalists who are not religious, who might be more to the left of me, I say, if you care about people’s well-being, you care about them belonging to stuff and having community.

For most of America, the main source of community is their religious congregation.

So when people are losing that, then a lot of them don’t have anything or at least nothing thick and meaningful.

I love that you bring up Nisbet in particular because I actually just reread that book.

One thing that he talks about as well is that we’ve gotten rid of so many intermediary institutions, the softball clubs and the Lions clubs, and all of those attendance is starting to drop majorly.

So to your point, one of the last remaining standing institutions was the church.

It’s your local community where you can go and see your neighbors and worship together.

If that goes, what’s left?

Nisbet’s concern was the state.

Which is exactly what Tocqueville said.

He said, there’s nothing more remarkable about Americans than the fact that they’re constantly uniting and forming organizations ranging from the grand and sublime down to the quotidian and everyday, big to small, local, national, etc.

But he also said that he used his words, the age of equality or love of democracy, that those ideas would create what I think you can, in today’s terminology, you would call a hyperindividualism, and thus people wouldn’t like belonging to things, because belonging to things isn’t just transactional, it’s relational.

Somebody else has a claim on you if you belong to something.

So people turn to the state, in part because they don’t want to think that they owe their neighbor or anything help, but they also don’t want other people to help them, because then they’ll feel in some sort of a debt.

And so a sort of arms-length transaction with the state really does sort of rise up in that place.

And so that, I mean, that was certainly Tocqueville’s argument that, yeah, people turning away from the locals, particularly religious institutions, would turn them towards the state.

It seems to me like there’s just this kind of almost a perfect congruing of all of these kind of various aspects that come together.

And we’ll talk about COVID in a minute of how that kind of like exploded some things.

But you also have, you know, these philosophies of anthropologies of a lack of rootedness or the power of will, going into the hyper individualism, things like that, that again, going back to Niz because that’s just in my mind now.

He was concerned about that in the 50s, even at kind of like the ivory tower philosophers were thinking of these things of rootedlessness and things like that.

But he didn’t necessarily see the concrete evidence of where that was going.

And now we see it, right?

And so how much of the Academy maybe was influencing some of this kind of Gnostic understanding of community and ourselves?

Certainly, there’s, I think it’s always been present in philosophy, going back to the, you know, Socrates’ peers, the real happiness, the real understanding that life was a single player game.

Again, none of the ancient Athenians would have put it that way.

But that was sort of an argument.

And you see it in the Stoics a bit.

I don’t want to pretend to know more about the Stoics than I do.

But again, that idea that the pursuit of virtue, because ultimately, you’re the only person who can really make yourself virtuous, and you extrapolate from that and ignore the fact that really, even if we’re just talking about individual virtue, you need a training ground, you need practice, you need friends.

And so I think it goes back a very long way.

And Rousseau was obviously a guy who sort of argued that you’re not really yourself, as long as you’re influenced by norms and customs and all that.

And the funny thing is, I think that that is the age at which that appeals to people most is probably about 18, right?

That was me as a freshman showing up and reading about Achilles at St.

John’s.

I’ve been like, he’s right, Agamemnon’s wrong.

It’s that simple, right?

That the individual pursuit of virtue and that that was everything.

It’s ultimately selfish and it doesn’t acknowledge our reliance on other people.

But you’re right that modern philosophies also have this atomistic view.

I have one friend who’s a liberal journalist and he laments that his friends sometimes see it that way.

He says that they see the human individual as a disembodied autonomous bundle of rights just floating around like a billiard ball.

That idea, I think, does seep into academia and if your school isn’t dedicated to saying actually what you need to do is find a role to play in institutions and belong to things, and that’s how you make the world better, make yourself better.

That idea that we should be role players, that sounds demeaning.

I was a role player in a baseball team once, where it’s like, you’re going to pinch run and you’re going to play late inning outfield defense.

If you’re saying that that’s all you’re going to do in your life is play roles, people think, oh, well, no, I want to be more, I want to be great, I want to be a leader.

Fine, but you’re going to join institutions and play roles.

Just that idea of serving others, I think that cuts contrary to a lot of the contemporary zeitgeist, I guess.

Yes, and I think that’s what particularly John Paul II was seeing with his concern for the human being and the anthropology that was being proposed all the way back before he became Pope and the Christian humanism that kind of came out of him across the humanist movement as well during that time, seeing that.

So now I want to ask, what did COVID do?

I think everybody knows looking back, lots of mistakes were made, but now we’ve got to deal with ramifications of what was done.

So it made us believe that other people were at least vectors for disease.

I wrote a piece, I ran in the New York Times about how we needed more aggressive school opening, and multiple comments said, I don’t want all those vectors running around my classroom.

I was like, that’s, I mean, there are days that you see your kids and the snot on their face, and you think, okay, there are vectors of disease.

But that people in essence were vectors, if not kind of pathogens themselves.

And so that idea, I think really is a misanthropic idea that got driven home.

And I even saw writers say, well, one of the things I like about masks, it makes it easier to, it keeps my chatty neighbors at bay.

They’re less likely to come up and talk to me if I’m wearing a mask.

And so there were a lot of misanthropic elements that came out and were fostered during that.

Drove people away from church and church attendance definitely went down.

It drove people away from community, it shuttered main streets.

So in all those kind of direct ways, I think you can definitely see the harms in some of the second order effects that I often focus on.

I think a big part of the crime wave that a lot of this country is seeing is from that.

In 2021, the crimes that went up were like assault, murder, carjackings where often the carjacker would then just crash the car.

So these crimes weren’t crimes of need.

It wasn’t somebody breaking into a house and stealing money so they could pay rent.

It wasn’t somebody taking a car and selling it for parts.

They were antisocial crimes.

I don’t mean to imply that some crimes are productive and some are non-productive, but these were the really non-productive crimes.

There’s an end to some of these others.

It was just acting out an antisocial impulse.

I think that was definitely fostered.

Where I live in the DC area, the carjacking rises entirely among high school age or middle school age kids.

So again, kids who were kept out of school, whose basketball leagues were canceled, who were driven off of the soccer field in those early months, that they lost their sociability and became antisocial, would commit crimes against their neighbors for no reason.

What’s your take on the argument that a lot of what we’ve seen post-COVID was already at the boiling point and COVID gave everybody an excuse?

Especially the atheism thing.

Yeah.

Falling away from church, if you didn’t come back, and so I was a Sunday school teacher when we lived in Maryland, and certainly the families that stuck around through COVID were very devout families who took religious education seriously.

I noted that I repeatedly got corrected by my second grade, first communion students.

I would make an offhand comment.

I’d be like, Mr.

Carney, there were no 10 commandments by the time the flood came.

I was like, you know what I mean.

They were just these top tier students, and it became easier for us to teach.

But then you realize the sadness of it is we had nine kids instead of 25.

Those 16 families we lost, part of what you’re doing in a church, part of what you’re evangelizing to are the parents of the kids who show up so they can get the pictures in the white dress, and when we lose those, that’s a lot.

So yes, they were not firmly attached to the church, but I think it’s really uncharitable to say, well, they weren’t really Christians.

So that’s shown by the fact that they got driven away.

I think all of us always require somebody pulling us back in, whether it’s to our faith or our job or our family, or just having our life together.

But I do think about how we were so ready to adopt the social distancing, all that stuff in March of 2020 when they said, stay away from everybody, do this.

That to me suggests that there was already in our minds this idea of humans and biology are bad, and distance and chemistry are safe.

Interesting.

Then to add to, again, the all these converging things going up to where we are now, a big one I would imagine that you’ve looked into is social media and what that’s done to us.

The promise was that we’d be more connected than ever, but it seems like the stats are going a different direction.

So it’s interesting.

When Alienated America came out, I first said online community is better than no community, but it’s not as good as in-person community.

I’m not so sure about the first part of that anymore.

I do think it really does displace real in-person community.

If we think we’re getting our community from, you know, our Snapchats, our group texts, our Facebook and Twitter, and etc., and it just, when you look at teenagers now, they’re less likely to hang out with their friends.

And some of them maybe are playing the video games with the headphones on, and so they’re hanging out with their friends remotely, which again is better than nothing, I would say.

But it might be that the video games make them feel like they don’t have to hang out with their friends in person.

And so, yeah, I do think that technology, I think there’s a deeper aspect to it too.

Social media, if you think about, again, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, you’re scrolling through for hours, you’re seeing all these people, often it’s a solo performance.

And so you are connecting with these people who you’re not connected with, but you’re also starting to see yourself that way.

You’re like, okay, imagine there’s a camera following me.

And so you turn inwards and you think about your life, not in relation to other people, but in relation to the whole of Internet and social media.

So I do think it corrupts, it changes how we see ourselves in a real negative way.

It also creates masks as well.

We put a certain portrait of who we are out there.

And amongst the real community of people being in the same place at the same time, you can’t put those masks up.

People will see that in authenticity very quickly, I think.

I mean, obviously, people have been putting on masks, a public face, etc.

But it’s a lot easier to maintain a very well-crafted fiction online.

And one of my favorite details I realized, there’s this woman who’s getting her PhD in momfluencers.

So influencers in the mama sphere, which I care about a lot in family.

And she made a point, there are no neighbors in the mama sphere.

So these moms who have the perfectly dressed kids, who like all the same hue of different colors, and they’re in the house and everything looks like it took no effort and all of that.

There’s never like a neighbor kid in the yard.

Like if they’re all like running through the sprinklers, it’s only your own kids.

If they’re playing wiffle ball, if you’re sitting on the bench, every moment is a family portrait.

And like nobody, so it gives us impression, oh, I’m raising my kids without the help of neighbors.

And that is a massive fiction that that’s possible.

And that plants that head in the minds of the 22, 24, 26-year-old either newlywed or wants to be a mom.

It’s like, that looks too hard.

I can’t pull off what that woman’s pulling off.

And I want to be like, she’s not pulling it off either.

Exactly.

It’s a photo op.

Also, I think what the Internet in general has created is an opportunity for community amongst all of these subcultures.

We don’t really have this mainstream culture anymore.

So if you think about the 50s or Fulton Sheen being one of the main figures that most people would have known the name and would have seen him on TV.

We don’t have that anymore.

That’s broken down in a big way, especially if you think about film and the things that create culture.

Instead, we’ve got all these subcultures and people can say, I’m part of that community, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the community is in their backyard.

Well, that’s the thing.

America has always been very driven by subcultures, because we’re massive, because we’re diverse, because we have immigrants, because we have religious pluralism.

But the subculture used to mean like, I live in Fishtown, the area of Philadelphia.

It was not a chosen subculture.

And so, the diversity of viewpoints, and in some cases, you had, well, back then more, you had more socioeconomic diversity in a local place.

In the 1960s compared to today, rich people, poor people, middle-class people are more likely to live in the same neighborhood.

We don’t have a great history of these local subcultures having racial diversity.

That’s one of the huge crimes of American history.

But you do have that sort of unchosen living necks of people who might not agree with you and might not have all the same interests of you.

That provides that sort of great diversity.

Well, if your subculture is all chosen along common interests in ideology, then that’s really a poverty.

Again, it cuts against the modern thinking.

If it’s the things we don’t choose that enrich us.

Well, we think, technology allows us to choose to spend our time only on the things and with the people that we choose.

I think you agree, we end up poorer because of that.

Yes.

It reminds me of Chesterton’s whole understanding of the family as a formation of citizens because you have to deal with people that you don’t agree with.

You still have to love them regardless of how much you might fight, all that stuff.

When you get sent out as a citizen, whatever ideological side you’re on, I can still get along with you.

This, by the way, is the next book I’m working on is on family and the collapse in the birth rates and how we have an anti-family culture.

But one of the aspects is that unchosen, that we don’t accept the unchosen.

It’s my life, my choice, and so everything’s going to be consensual.

I was describing in that book the moment when our oldest daughter was born.

We were totally ready for it.

We had the nursery, had little white letters with her name up on the wall.

We had chosen the name the second we found out she was a girl.

We had sung to her in utero, and then she comes, who are you?

I have never seen you in my whole life.

Now you’re my roommate for at least 18 years.

Who does that?

We chose to bring in a stranger to our house for 18 years is what parenting is.

That’s one of the reasons I think, again, neighbors are to some extent unchosen.

Well, I didn’t even sign up to have this guy as my neighbor.

He just happened to live.

I didn’t have any say over that.

That’s one of the declines in neighborliness, I think, because again, the idea that nothing should be thrust on us unless we chose it.

A very modern mindset is anti-community.

Yeah, and it’s led to another epidemic, if you will, that we have is a childlessness epidemic, and in large part because they’re seen as burdens.

They’re seen as things that just cost a lot of money and maybe can’t handle what it takes.

One of your more recent articles that I read was talking about this spike in binge drinking, especially amongst, I think you said, 35 to 50.

I’d love to have you extrapolate a little bit about your findings there, and what was it that’s kind of maybe causing some of that?

Yeah.

So there was this big study on, it’s a regular study on alcohol use in the United States.

And that was sort of the surprising thing, was how much binge drinking, having more than five drinks in a row had just gone up.

How much have you done this in the last two weeks?

The number saying yes had absolutely skyrocket, particularly among age 35 to 50, old millennials, young Gen X.

And one of the possibilities, and we need to study this more, but that’s precisely the people who are, the 35 to 40 year olds are the people who are much less likely to have children than was a generation ago.

Especially you take in the delay in marriage until you’re about 30, and then COVID hits three years.

The people who thought, oh, well, I’ll have kids in my early 30s.

They didn’t get married or because of the combination of COVID and the cultural delay in marriage and family formation.

So it’s definitely, there’s a high statistical correlation between binge drinking or negative correlation between binge drinking and parenthood.

Even marriage drives down a man’s likeliness to binge drink and women as well.

People who have kids and it goes beyond drinking and drug use to other crime.

Sometimes I think, well, it’s maybe because you just don’t have time to do all that.

But also for a lot of these studies point out that a few months before the first baby is born.

So upon realizing that you’re having a kid, people’s behavior rights, they’re less likely to do things that are harmful to others, but I think much less likely to do things that are harmful to themselves.

Ability to believe in your self-worth, if you don’t have, even somebody who starts intellectually understanding, the Christian understanding of the self, nothing makes it easier to think, actually, I have value than raising kids and being married, right?

There are people who literally won’t eat if you’re too hungover to make them breakfast, and that burden of being relied on, of having that work is important.

We need it.

Thank you for listening to The Benedictine Dialogues.

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And now, back to the show.

So it seems to me then that there’s a, when we talk about this givenness, these things that we don’t choose, there’s an aspect of purpose and meaning that’s given or at least formed in us of the communities we’re raised in, the families, but especially whenever you’re dealing with the next generation or your spouse.

I mean, if you become selfish and try to live as a good husband and father, it’s just simply not going to work.

If you want to be a good husband and father, you have to become selfless in a lot of ways.

So you get purpose through that.

I always say the first selfless things I did were after getting married.

I think the graces with the sacrament of marriage made it easier to do something and be happy to do something for another person.

And then parenthood is that times 10.

So I’ve had friends who just on their own went out and like fed homeless people or just were always volunteering.

And my nature is uglier.

I never did that.

But Jesus said, actually, you have to do these things.

You have to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.

Well, guess what?

I wake up, there’s hungry naked people in my house.

They’re right there.

I don’t have to go find them.

It’s made easy for you when you have a family.

And I mean, it’s sort of a joke, but I really believe that’s one of the big virtues.

A couple of years ago, I was in a modern Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Maryland.

And a couple of the people I met, these Jewish dads, they pointed out that be fruitful and multiply was God’s first commandment.

And I said, do you have like a theological explanation or just like, is there just a practical reason that he needed more people or like, was there a reason why that’s first?

And one of the dads said, well, I think that that’s the simplest way to push us towards virtue, towards maturity, towards thinking about being responsible, not harming ourselves, but not putting ourselves first.

And I really do believe that parenthood is.

And when St.

Paul said, you know, I think ideally maybe everybody is celibate, but most people can’t handle that.

I think part of it was not just about sort of sexual temptation, but just about serving other people.

It becomes much easier when you have kids.

And then there’s a lot of study, the people surrounded by kids, even non-parents, that they behave more virtuously when they’re thinking about or seeing kids.

And studies can say different things, but that’s one that I do not have any trouble believing.

And you mentioned the sort of birth dirt that happened after 2008, that hasn’t risen back up.

And we talk about that here at the college, sometimes how that’s going to affect, especially in 2026 when you’re going to start to see that affects student body numbers and the like.

Where is the silver lining of all of that?

Or is there one?

I mean, it’s pretty low.

So the positive thing is that people actually are seeing it.

The New York Times, who I think on culture, on marriage, often is pushing in the wrong direction.

They have like an anti-marriage, pro-divorce op-ed every other week.

But they have noted repeatedly to the consternation of many of their readers that there is a baby bust in the US in almost every wealthy country, and that it has bad effects.

So they had stories that shows these villages in Japan, where the government has to show up and there are six old ladies.

It’s like, you ladies have to leave because we’re cutting off the sewerage and the electricity.

Connecting that to the birth rates that have been falling for 16 years, 15 years in the United States, that’s the New York Times sticking its neck out, and they’ve done that repeatedly.

So that’s the silver lining is that the overpopulation scare from about the time that you and I were little is mostly gone.

A lot of the public still believes that, which is why one of the reasons I’m writing a book about it, why I’m glad the New York Times writes about it, and you still have Paul Ehrlich who wrote the 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Which Predicts Masks, Global Starvation Within Five Years, the opposite happened.

He still gets on 60 Minutes.

But in general, I think the myth of overpopulation is being punctured because it’s impossible to avoid the fact that a aging population, and then in a lot of places, a shrinking population is really harmful.

I always just start with the fact that the United States has fewer children, that’s people under 17, than now than it did a decade ago.

Not percentage of the population.

There’s actually fewer kids.

Like if you take all our high school, the public schools that lose population, it’s not just because they closed down during COVID, it’s that there are fewer school-age kids.

And it’s really hit elementary schools years ago, middle schools, high schools are just starting to face it.

As you’re mentioning, colleges who don’t necessarily have the ability to rely on government to bail them out, they’re very worried about this population bust.

I say the baby bust in 2026 will turn 18, and you’ll have fewer college graduates, fewer high school graduates every year from then on out.

This also affects the labor force.

So if there’s a silver lining, it’s that unemployment is going to be low for the foreseeable future.

But that means that when you and I retire, maybe we have big 401Ks.

Doesn’t do us any good if there’s nobody we can hire to fix our plumbing.

Right.

Yeah, it’s interesting too, how much this conversation is in the water right now, especially, I mean, it was only a year or two ago that Elon Musk was talking about this as a major concern economically.

I’m hopeful that the conversation goes beyond pure economics, that it’s part of us as human beings.

The fact that we’re not having children shows what we think about human beings, and the hopelessness that we have.

That’s right.

If you just limit it to the economics, so I came here from Southwest Iowa, where I first started to notice this, these small towns that are getting smaller.

One guy says, well, if you want to know why nobody has kids, come look at my tractor.

It has so much ability, and the genetically engineered seeds have so much more yield.

Says, when I was a kid, my dad needed me and my eight brothers, and now I need my tractor.

Then you think, okay, were we only raising kids as a race because we needed them to shuck the corn?

I appreciate the free labor.

Sometimes I’m so lazy, if I want to drink from the fridge, I’m like, wait, my kids aren’t home, I have to get it myself?

But again, that’s not the Christian view of children.

Maybe it was easier two generations ago to tell people to have kids.

Now, you actually have to somehow persuade them.

Now, actually, the kids you have are good.

They are and not good because you’re good, because you’re going to raise them well.

No, they’re good.

I tell a story of, we had this preschool teacher who taught five of our children, and then she told us at the last minute that she wasn’t going to be there the last day.

So we didn’t have time to get her a gift for the last day of school.

We owe her the best last day of school gift ever, because she’s preschool for one of the reasons we moved to the parish we ended up in.

So on her last day, Kate was like, what are we going to do?

I said, we’re going to bring her a gift.

So we brought her all five kids, including the 12-year-old who was towering over her, and she just broke down in tears.

So you make fun of people who think that they or their kids are God’s gift to the world.

But I was like, you know what?

No, I brought my kids, and that was a gift.

That’s awesome.

You show up at a neighborhood cookout or something, and the organizers are worried, are enough people going to show up, and boom.

You and I, we both have six kids.

We show up, it’s an instant quarrel.

You’ve seen that look on somebody’s face where they’re like, yes, people are here.

We’ve got a full basketball game going on already, and a football team.

So that idea that if you have children and you bring them places, you’re bringing a gift with you every time.

Yeah.

Part of the interesting thing about this conversation as well is, there’s also a re-examination of our use of birth control for so long, especially the chemicals getting into our systems and all of that kind of stuff.

And our fish ending up sterile.

There’s actually a lot of truth behind what they call a conspiracy theory for a while.

But then also the transactional use of another human being.

Even at levels of Hollywood, people are talking about this now of like, using another person for my own end is not a good thing.

And so then when it comes to children, if your idea is used, like it’s a pretty one-sided game for most of the child’s life.

The input really exceeds the return for a very long time.

Even after they’re able to make you coffee or make you scrambled eggs.

But I also think the contraceptive mindset affects us so much more than we think.

It obviously affects our attitude towards sexuality and family.

But I think that our readiness in 2020 to be afraid of other people and to hate biology, was partly inculcated through the contraceptive mindset.

Every girl starting from 14 is getting put on the pill no matter what.

That’s the idea that the modern life and happiness is about overcoming biology.

That was actually a term I just encountered.

Warren Hearn, a late-term abortionist from Colorado, he wrote a piece in 1971, titled Biological Tyranny, and it was how the main thing we need to do is help people defeat the tyranny of their own biology.

That idea, I really think has affected us in far broader ways that we’re not going to understand.

Maybe 100, 200 years from now, people will look back at the second half of the 20th century and then the next 50 years and say, well, this was the contraceptive age.

This was the age when people thought, well, biology is bad and chemistry is the solution.

But on parenting, I think it’s done another thing, which is made it seem like every child is a choice.

If you make a choice to get a child, well, then it’s your problem.

It’s like if you’ve got a boat and it’s constantly causing you headaches, like I might help you if you’re like, Tim, I really need your help, just come and bring your tools.

But eventually, I’m like, dude, you bought the boat.

Maybe you shouldn’t have bought the boat, and that’s the way our society thinks about children.

So parents end up taking on so much more of the burden than they should, because the broader community thinks, well, if you made the decision to have children, it’s your duty to take care of them in all ways.

Obviously, it’s your primary duty.

Obviously, you shouldn’t just leave your children and say, okay, everybody else feed them.

But the idea that it’s just a lifestyle choice and it doesn’t deserve any special accommodation, I think that’s a primary effect of contraception on the Western mind.

Yes.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a grocery store with all of my children and my wife, and we get stares from everyone because they’re like, what in the world is this tribe of people that’s walking through the grocery store?

I’m like, I’m not even that big of a family compared to people I know.

But there’s this mindset, and even it happens on airplanes where a baby comes in and everybody’s like, oh, shoot, a dog comes in and they’re like, oh, I want to pet it.

It’s because we think of these things as just straight burdens.

Burdens to societies when people see the big families are like, oh gosh, look at all the resources you’re sucking out of, whatever.

And then, you know, the, I don’t know, the lack of seeing people, human persons as gifts.

And this is strange.

And this is not, it’s not narrowed to any political persuasion.

I remember there was a Wall Street Journal op-ed objecting to the existence of a child tax credit.

And it said, why don’t we have a puppy tax credit?

And I just thought the tax code is for people because we write it.

If the puppy’s got to write the tax code, maybe it would be different.

But we write it.

And so, I mean, a tax code without a child tax credit at all, if it doesn’t have, because we, we scrap the dependent exemption before they increase the child tax credit.

So basically, they’re saying that a household of six should get taxed the same with a certain amount of income as a household of two, which is an insane amount of thing because the money is valuable per person.

And so, they’re literally saying, children don’t count as humans, they count as consumption items.

And again, that’s, I see that repeatedly from sort of conservative writers or free market writers who object to a tax code that acknowledges the humanity of babies.

So we’ve talked a lot about sort of the shadowy or dark side of all this.

Where are some of the areas you’re seeing glimmers of hope and where we’re going?

So the idea that, what I argued in Alienated American 2019 was what is causing a lot of the suffering, the retreat from the labor force, the retreat from marriage, the deaths of despair.

It wasn’t just economic, it was cultural, it was about a lack of belonging.

And when I went around on my sort of book tour, which included a stop here, I met with a lot of groups that I had very little in common with ideologically.

They’d be basically kind of left-wing social worker organizations.

And they all said they were starting to see, one woman put it, programs don’t help people.

She helps widows, single moms, orphans, etc.

Programs don’t help people, relationships help people.

And so she saw her job, if she could get a bunch of single moms to be friends and meet up every week, not with people who could hire them, not with people who could provide material support or anything, just with one another, that that helped them out.

And so that perception that I saw, because I’m a writer, I’ll talk to people who are suffering.

I’m not that great at solutions.

That’s not my strong point.

But the people who are, who dedicate their lives to solutions, I saw again and again the growing number.

And a lot of them had to do it on a hyper local level, because you can’t have a national department of local community cohesion.

But to see on the local level, so many people in a city like Charlotte, in a city like St.

Louis, I’ve met these people who were working and saying, I work on these four blocks in St.

Louis.

And the main thing is to get the pastor to know everybody in the neighborhood, to get everybody in the neighborhood to know the pastor, to get somebody to give their house to just be a place to come and hang out, and play board games or video games.

And I’ve been exposed to that and how that’s sort of blossoming and spreading 10,000 different small solutions instead of one big solution.

So that’s my glimmer of hope is getting exposed to people who are trying to help others by putting them just in community, helping them belong.

And for those who desire to help heal some of these fractures, to help heal the bonds of culture, seems to me like the ones that are aware of that need to be really comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Get out there, do things that you don’t normally do.

Introduce yourself to people you don’t normally introduce yourself to.

Don’t ask about politics right away.

Just hang out.

Just be friends.

It’s a strange solution, but just be friends.

Yeah.

And again, Pope Francis, when he first wrote about the poor, he wrote about the inclusion of the poor.

And it struck me that I think a lot of people think that if they just, donate or if they just happily pay their taxes and support a bigger welfare state, that that’s taking care of their duty to the poor.

And so the uncomfortable thing then is, are you willing to include them?

Like, are you willing to set up a table where you sit down with them?

One of the things I talked to a few pastors about was during COVID, where these free food distribution really set up, where churches would start giving out food.

And then they kept doing it because the food kept coming in, and there would be cars circling the block.

I was like, can we now turn this into, like erect a little pavilion and turn this into a lunch?

Every Saturday, everybody who shows up, sit down, sit down and let’s eat and talk and get to know your neighbors.

That would be my sort of hope.

And it would be uncomfortable and it would be awkward.

And there would be people who didn’t speak the same language.

And you might, in Washington DC area, you might have two people of opposite parties who ran against one another sitting at the same table.

So as I said at the beginning of our conversation, a big focus we have here at Benedictine College is to form the students in particular in community of faith and scholarship.

What advice would you give to college students who want to help, who want to be part of the solution?

So again, there’s nothing that’s going to replace giving your time to people in need and search for ways to help them belong, which involves you joining stuff.

And if the thing to join doesn’t exist, start a thing.

Don’t try to do things by yourself, but just say, let’s get a bunch of people together and we’ll look to help the people who need help.

And you’ll find that that joining a real strong institution of civil society is one where people come together and they’re pursuing a greater good outside of themselves.

So you can think, oh, well, I’m sacrificing my time, I’m doing that.

You will get so much more out of trying to come together and serve other people than you expect.

And you might get more than the people you’re trying to serve.

So I would look to plug in to institutions that are already there if need be, form them.

And we don’t always think in terms of institutions and clubs.

But really, that’s the way you have to think about service.

Mr.

Carney, this has been a fantastic conversation.

Thank you so much for coming to campus.

Thank you for being part of the show and thank you for all your work and everything you do.

Thank you to all of our viewers and listeners.

Be sure to share this with your friends and family, and we’ll see you next time.

God bless.

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God bless.