“Our society is failing to make people want to have kids,” Carney said. “Our society is falling short in all these ways. … It is our culture that is family-unfriendly.”
Carney said that having children used to simply be a part of life, but now people postpone and agonize over the decision. He criticized “helicopter parenting” as one of the reasons people are afraid to have more children.
“Millennials were more helicoptered as kids, and so their view of what parenting is was much more daunting than [Generation] X, where it was ‘come home when the street lights turn on’ when we were little,” Carney said.
“It’s our culture’s values that are off,” Carney added. “And it’s all tied to the overparenting [and] the strange new mating and dating norms, which [are based on] a belief in hyper-individualism.”
Complexities in fixing these trends
For her recent book, Pakaluk interviewed women who have defied these trends and built large families with their husbands. The reasons that those women decided to have large families, she noted, were rooted in religious faith.
According to Pakaluk, these women believed that “children are blessings from God, expressions of God’s goodness and the purpose of my marriage.”
“Churches and religious people are actually holding the one thing that can make the biggest difference because it’s either true or it’s not true that children are blessings [and] that they’re always valuable,” Pakaluk said. “... If it’s true, it’s not propaganda to say it. … If it’s true and it’s not propaganda, people can begin to believe this.”
Pakaluk said the central assertion of Christianity is that “God became Man as a human infant and that reality is supposed to color the way we see the value of human infancy.” Although the women she spoke to have goals and responsibilities apart from their roles as mothers, she said the faith component ensures that they prioritize building a family first.
“To get more children, you have to find some way … to argue that this particular good — the ‘children’ good — is of greater value or more importance,” Pakaluk added.
Carney suggested that some of the cultural difficulties could be mitigated through economic incentives. He criticized the failure to pass a child tax credit and rebuked the mindset that society has no role in supporting families.
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“People have less community support,” he said.
Still, Carney cited the importance of a resurgence in faith as a fundamental component of raising fertility rates.
“The secular story — the godless story — ends up being too sad to want to continue the human race,” Carney said.
Tyler Arnold is a staff reporter for Catholic News Agency, based in EWTN News’ Washington Bureau. He previously worked at The Center Square and has been published in a variety of outlets, including The Associated Press, National Review, The American Conservative, and The Federalist.