In the modern and postmodern West, the formation of families, that is, getting married and having children, has become less common.

And when parents do have children, the number of children each family produces has grown smaller. Demographers hold that,

for a population to simply reproduce itself, each woman has got to have at least 2.1 children.

That's the magic number, for replacement, let alone growth.

The World Bank records that, as of 2020, Americans are well below that number.

Now, this has all kinds of consequences,

economic, social, political, no less than spiritual and moral consequences. In thinking about what to do about them, it's natural for policymakers and social scientists to think about laws and

incentives that can make the having and rearing of children a little easier.

There are, to be honest, mixed results when governments try to incentivize family formation,

but given how important it is, it's probably worth trying, at least in the States.

Even so, perhaps the challenges that women and men face today,

when confronting the prospect of marriage and children,

are not primarily to be found in policy and law and economic incentives.

I don't want to trivialize those things, of course, but we have to ask ourselves the question.

What if the real challenges that are faced are to be found in the cultural attitudes and norms of behavior

that lie underneath our policy and law? What if you were to

ask how to strengthen the American family by looking at our society alongside our economy and

legislature? Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. That's precisely what my

guest today does in a new book, entitled Family Unfriendly, How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be.

Tim Carney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior columnist at the Washington Examiner.

As you'll soon hear, in looking for examples of sub-communities that have developed healthy family cultures,

and that could serve as an

...