Welcome to 10 Blocks. I'm Jordan McGillis, economics editor of City Journal.

Joining me today is Tim Carney. Tim is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,

and he's a columnist at the Washington Examiner. His latest book is Family Unfriendly,

how our culture made raising kids much harder than it needs to be.

Tin, thank you for joining the show.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Okay, I want to start where you started in this book, Family I'm Friendly, with the Travel Ball Trap. Take us through your experience with falling into that trap, what the trap is, and why families can't find a way out of it.

So, yes, the book starts with a coach telling my son, baseball isn't fun.

Winning baseball is fun. This was because we had accidentally, after years of avoiding anything like travel sports and just doing a local little league or even a t-ball league we had started up ourselves, that we had sort of just decided, well, you know, he's kind of good. Well, we'll at least give him a tryout,

and I didn't think he'd make it. And then he made it. I just thought, oh, you know, $800. That's an

expensive price. We used to paying $120 for local baseball. But this is going to be real high level.

This, you know, this might set him up to make sure he makes varsity one day,

give him real training. And we, we always wanted what was best for our son. And we let other people's standards of best take over what we knew was right. And so he was practicing too much

during the week. He wasn't able to play with his friends.

And he had coaches who told them that this game wasn't fun. That it was a job or something? I don't know. It was a job for them. They were getting paid a decent amount.

And this takes over youth sports in so many communities. There are places where the little leagues are withering away because all the good baseball players have gone off and are playing expensive, intensive travel. It harms families. It takes over your family

schedule. I've had many dads say, I thought my wife and I would control our family schedule.

It turns out our swim coach does. And so it's corrosive to communities. It corrods family culture. But I think the most important thing it does is contributes to this epidemic of childhood anxiety. And it makes parents think, oh my gosh, raising kids is so much more work than I thought it would be. And I certainly can't imagine, you look at these

families and you can't imagine having more than one or two kids. The point you mentioned there that

struck me was other people's standards. And this, some sort of cliche idea of keeping up up with the Joneses does seem to fit with this

particular phenomenon in our society. When the other families are doing it, it's hard to keep

yourself out of it, even if you and many others don't really want to participate. Yeah. And so sometimes

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