Free the Children

Family Unfriendly:
How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be
by timothy p. carney
harper, 368 pages, $29.99

The Anxious Generation:
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by jonathan haidt
penguin, 400 pages, $30

In the first Petrine epistle, Peter exhorts his readers, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.” His instruction presumes that our hope is visible, even startling or foolish in the eyes of the world. Christian hope provokes questions and confusion in a way the hope and happiness of a materially wealthy man does not.

So, before we ask whether we are prepared to explain our hope, we should ask: Do we order our lives according to this semi-scandalous hope? Do we live beyond worldly prudence in a way that prompts questions? In two new books on families and children, Timothy P. Carney (Family Unfriendly) and Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation) argue persuasively that we are losing the most visible evidence of our hope—children.

America is facing a baby bust. The total fertility rate has fallen to 1.7 children per woman (well below the replacement rate of 2.1). It isn’t simply a matter of liberated men and women being free to “choose me” over potential children—women in America wind up having fewer children than they say they hope to have.

Still, American parents feel a certain hesitation when envisioning their children following in their footsteps and raising children in turn. In a 2023 survey by the Pew Charitable Trusts, nearly half of parents said it was “not too” or “not at all” important that their children have children of their own. By contrast, only 2 percent of parents showed similar indifference when asked how important it was that their children have a successful career. A hands-off, “nonjudgmental” attitude about children isn’t neutral. Children are seen as “nice to have,” not as a foundational part of being human. That attitude makes it easier to see children in public spaces as intruders, rather than as members of the body politic.

A culture that doesn’t see children as foundational to human life and community doesn’t have the patience to deal with the frictions and challenges children bring. Despite the obvious financial costs children impose (diapers, childcare, and so on), Carney believes that casual antipathy toward families and children is an even greater barrier to having one more kid (or any at all). When children are seen as a personal extravagance, and ordinary, free-range parenting choices are viewed as unacceptably risky, parents’ work gets more expensive, more time-intensive, and lonelier.

Some of the pressure comes from the criminalization of what was, in Carney’s childhood, normal parenting—letting elementary-age kids wander the neighborhood with their friends, without so much as a GPS minder, let alone a supervising parent. But there’s also a miasmic antipathy, expressed even toward children who are all but leashed. “I don’t like kids” is treated as one “lifestyle choice” among many—whereas it’s harder to imagine people saying out loud, “I just don’t think the elderly should be out in ‘normal’ spaces.” Of course, our built environment often makes concrete the hostility toward anyone with a sufficiently different body or difficulties with emotional or bodily self-mastery. Discrimination against the disabled or the elderly is often expressed through a lack of physical accommodation, whereas children attract open hostility.

In one of Carney’s interviews, a city mayor is blunt about the problem with children. “Businesses mean revenue. Families mean costs,” he says. A family-friendly neighborhood has “schools, playgrounds, sidewalks, and social services, all of which cost money, and none of which bring in revenue.” But businesses offer a town sales tax and property tax. From a narrow economic viewpoint, families are necessary, perhaps, but the best thing is to off-load them, like a noisy, noxious power plant, onto a nearby community. Accept their money, sure, but you wouldn’t want to live with them.

As Jonathan Haidt argues, this issue has been “solved” partly by pushing children out of public life and into the online world, where their problems are less visible to their communities—at least initially. Children who are present in the real world are noisy, they break things, they take up space. In one Boston suburb, residents proposed making local day cares pay penalty fees for bringing children to public parks, since neighbors saw children on the playground as a nuisance, best addressed through vice taxes.

A child stooped over a phone, however, is quiet, nondisruptive, and doesn’t have to be in public at all. Kids on their own phones aren’t tying up the landline with long calls to their friends, as Carney and Haidt’s generation did. They’re out of sight, out of mind, until their online lives spill out into their real lives. As Haidt carefully chronicles, the rise of digital life for teens corresponds to dramatically climbing rates of anxiety, depression, and emergency room visits for self-harm and suicide attempts. There’s no single smoking gun, but the data Haidt amasses makes a persuasive case, one that accords with many parents’ observations. The tech companies themselves, in their private discussions and secret files, admit that they’re ramping up depression and eating disorders, but they accept it as the cost of doing business.

In Haidt’s view, we’re thinking about risk the wrong way. As he summarizes: “We are overprotecting our children in the real world while underprotecting them online. If we really want to keep our children safe, we should delay their entry into the virtual world and send them out to play in the real world.”

Both Carney and Haidt are deeply interested in our tolerance for risk and our capacity for play. The turn from the real world toward the hyper-world of images and “social engagement” destroys the opportunity for “free play.” It robs children of the chance to try on new responsibilities, and to continue growing into adulthood. For Haidt, the core element for free play is that “mistakes are generally not very costly.” It might seem that the unreality of the online world lowers the cost of mistakes, but when children are exposed to their peers (and the whole world) on social media, any misstep can become viral. Even a semiprivate error in a group chat can be screenshotted and live forever, as a passing remark in an in-person conversation cannot.

Under the scrutiny of peers and strangers on social media, children have become more and more risk-averse, even as high-attachment, high-achievement parents have grown more fearful about their children’s future. Instead of viewing parenting as an act of hope, many parents worry that their children will be downwardly mobile. Parents (including Carney, as he confesses) turn for consolation to measurable excellence and competitive endeavors. Carney finds himself repeatedly declining his son’s friend’s invitations to pickup baseball, because it conflicts with Official Travel Team Practice. The friend gets spurned week after week in favor of tracked, measurable, adult-organized achievement. Eventually, Carney tells the travel team coach what feels like a near lie: that his son has a superseding commitment one Saturday. He finds it hard to imagine telling the coach that his twelve-year-old wanted to skip practice just to play with his friend.

Haidt worries that children are being diverted from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. Carney observes that even in the real world, children aren’t allowed that much play when they gather. Real-world activities have been stripped down and made functional and competitive, rather than fora for exploration, play, and risk. Athletic kids are steered toward expensive, time-consuming travel teams, whereas they once might have been three-sport generalists. If a child shows talent, he is seldom allowed to be an amateur in the classical sense—playing for the love of the sport itself, the capacities of his body, and his growing bond with his friends. Instead, he is put on a pathway to competitive tryouts, where his teammates are his rivals for advancement to the all-stars and spots in front of college scouts. Instead of exploring the full range of what his body can do, and getting used to seasons of excelling in one sport and being a supporting character in another, he sharpens his focus to a single kind of excellence. He’ll seldom become “the best,” but he’ll commiserate with his fellow also-rans in the teenage Tommy John surgery clinic.

Part of what the kids lose when their lives are too regimented is the chance to work out their own conflicts and practice self-governance. When every game comes with adult umps, the kids become rule-followers, not rule-negotiators. Haidt contrasts free play with the hardwired rules and algorithmic moderation of the video games boys are drawn toward. Instead of getting to try on the responsibilities of “legislators (who jointly make up the rules)” and “judges and juries (who jointly decide what to do when rules appear to be violated),” kids who boot up their video games enter a world of someone else’s making, where they are subjects, not citizens.

Haidt admires the free play groups that, instead of regulating kids, post rules for the grown-ups, instructing them to take a step back. Parents and teachers don’t swoop in within seconds to shout “Share! Share!” when kids reach for the same toy. (In my own playground trips, I usually turn back my daughter’s first request for help policing a kid with the question: “What are you going to do?”) The kids are given room to act, in an environment designed to direct them toward conflict and collaboration. As Rusty Keeler, the author of Adventures in Risky Play, tells Haidt, the best playgrounds include heavy, movable objects like hay bales and sand bags. The kids can reshape their play environment, but not alone. They have to ask things of each other to remake their world.

Whereas real-world heavy hauling directs children toward each other, online dynamics leave kids feeling isolated and dependent on a diffuse, unpleasant audience for validation. Haidt frames this problem as a matter of attunement—a way of being oriented to social dynamics—comparable to the strange situation wherein young children and their teachers stayed masked long after Covid vaccines initially rolled out. The kids may not have been vaccinated as soon as their teachers were, but social distance posed its own danger to little children, limiting what they saw of adult speech and expressiveness.

Haidt sees a strong gender split in how apps and social media divert our natural hungers. Girls move their social lives online, with busily buzzing chats and large (often disturbingly adult) audiences asking for one more post about their thoughts or, more often, their bodies. Meanwhile, boys turn to immersive online worlds such as “online multiplayer video games, YouTube, Reddit, and hard-core pornography.” In essence, girls wind up getting social feedback from too broad a range of (sometimes predatory) voices, and instead of being shaped by a trusted community they are led to distrust their bodies and their minds. Boys skip to the rewards of social and bodily excellence (sexual pleasure, competitive victories, and so on) and thus do not build up the skills and bonds those rewards used to require. And when boys and girls come into contact on dating apps, they interact in a way guaranteed to drive them further apart. Women get a high volume of creepy messages (augmenting their fear of men), and men get a high volume of rejections (augmenting their resentment of women).

How can parents and children be reoriented to the real? By returning to physical play and work, to a smaller “village” of in-person friends. The more parents build up their local connections, the more risk they can take on, for themselves and for their children. My husband and I moved to the suburbs of D.C., but we picked a very specific suburb in order to retain some of what we loved about the walkable density of the city. Our neighborhood of single-family homes is densely occupied by big families with kids crammed into bunk beds. When I take my girls out on our electric cargo trike for errands or adventures, we run into someone we know on about a third of our trips, and it’s easy to slow to a stop for conversation.

There are neighborhood listservs: I’ve relied on them for help in getting my kids to school when I was laid up with a leg injury, and to find neighbors we’d not yet met and invite them over for a poetry party. The parochial elementary and middle school encourages parents to sign a “Wait Till 8th” pledge not to give kids smartphones, which means our kids will benefit from a certain degree of herd immunity. We can take on more risk because we know there are people who live only a block or two away who will step into the gap for us (and we for them).

Kids and parents need a little cushion, a promise that they can take reasonable risks without going viral or having Child Protective Services called. Both Haidt and Carney are focused not just on what parents need to say “no” to for the sake of their kids, but on what good things they need to be freer to say “yes” to. Parents need a little slack to take risks on their kids’ behalf. They can pursue it, as we did, by moving to a supportive community of peers with a school that supports children as children, with plenty of room for play. But they also need broader structural supports.

Carney argues, persuasively, for an expansion of explicitly “parenting-track” careers for men and women, wherein flexible work schedules make it easier for parents and kids to stay on the same schedules, rather than rely on aftercare or extend the school day to match the workday. He also points out that child allowances and baby bonuses can help parents cover the costs of making the right choice for their kids—especially in a culture that puts a steep social and financial price on giving priority to one’s family.

But the main obstacle to children is the cult of perfection. When perfection is the expectation, online and off, there’s little room for the messiness of human life. This is unrealistic. Being a parent never becomes “safe,” no matter how much you sock away in a 529. Indeed, there’s risk in too much safety. The goal, as one child development expert tells Haidt, is “bruises, not scars.” Kids and parents will make mistakes, and we all need a little mercy and support in recovering from them. To hope means to persist in turbulent times, even to the point of bringing children into the world—and letting them live in it. 

Leah Libresco Sargeant is author of Building the Benedict Option.

Image by Rawpixel, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.