The birth dearth and the smartphone age

My newsroom colleagues Jason Horowitz and Gaia Pianigiani have a lovely report about family-friendly policies in the Italian province of Alto Adige-South Tyrol, which has the highest birthrate of any region in an aging, depopulating Italy.

Their story is a portrait not just of a particular policy matrix but also the culture that policy can help foster. In particular, it highlights the extent to which the province offers not just direct funding for parents — for the family with six kids profiled in the story, that means 200 euros a month for each child until they turn 3, on top of the family benefits offered by Italy’s national government — but also a more comprehensive attempt to build a child-friendly social order. The province’s parents “enjoy discounted nursery schools, baby products, groceries, health care, energy bills, transportation, after-school activities and summer camps.” Teachers are encouraged “to turn their apartments into small nurseries,” workplaces offer breastfeeding breaks, and one workplace lobby is filled with “flyers advertising ‘Welcome Baby’ backpacks loaded with tips for new parents and picture books.”

As a portrait of a family-friendly exception to a larger anti-natal rule, the story dovetails with arguments in a new book from Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner, “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be,” which focuses on the ways that American society conspires to make parenting seem incredibly high-effort, well-nigh impossible.

Some of what Carney describes is a set of habits that’s beyond the reach of policy. (I don’t think there’s much the government can do to persuade parents to “Have Lower Ambitions for Your Kids,” to select one of his more striking chapter titles.) But some of the sense of overwhelmingness that comes with modern parenting seems like it could be mitigated, not just through a once-a-year benefit or tax credit but also through small consistent signals of support: the family discount on groceries, the convenient in-home child care option, the open play space, the flexible workspace.

If the developed world isn’t going to disappear into a gray and underpopulated future, there needs to be some “change in the overall ethos and structure of parenting,” as my Opinion colleague Jessica Grose put it last year, some rewiring of both parental and societal expectations — a rewiring that one Italian province, in my colleagues’ account, seems to have partly achieved.

Part of the explanation for the special fecundity of Alto Adige-South Tyrol, my colleagues suggest, lies in its particular heritage as a Germanic enclave absorbed into the Italian republic, which may instill a special interest in its own cultural survival. Likewise, Carney’s book discusses the Israeli exception to the general rule of rich societies having below-replacement birthrates — an exception that includes secular Israelis as well as the ultra-Orthodox and clearly has something to do with a sense of national mission that the Israeli experiment retains. And another new book, “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,” from Catherine Ruth Pakaluk at the Catholic University of America, looks at a different exceptional group, U.S. women having five or more kids, and finds a similar sense of mission, usually religious, as their defining commonality. (I should note that I’ll be moderating a conversation with Pakaluk and Carney at Catholic University in Washington on April 29.)

How you would translate this sense of mission from the smaller to the larger scale, from small regions and countries and particularly religious cohorts to mass societies, is a question whose lack of obvious answers leads us back to pessimism.

At the very least it’s clear that any sweeping kind of fertility recovery would have to defy current expectations and integrate structures of meaning, habits of family formation and modern lifestyles in a way that nobody can quite see coming yet.

Which brings me to smartphones. One of the best reviews of Carney’s book, from Leah Libresco Sargeant in First Things, pairs it with Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” about the effect of phones and screens and social media on childhood and adolescence. Carney’s book has a discussion of the screen world’s negative effects on family life, and Haidt’s book offers a portrait of what’s gone wrong with Western childhood in the smartphone age — the loss of independence, unscheduled play and face-to-face interactions between kids — that would be fully at home in “Family Unfriendly.”

Uniting these accounts, Sargeant makes the point that screens have arguably become a substitute for better forms of family friendliness, a way of managing kids in a society that doesn’t want to really deal with all their disruptive energy, their irreducible nonadultness. It’s a new way of making them seen and not heard, or neither seen nor heard: “A child stooped over a phone,” after all, “is quiet, nondisruptive, and doesn’t have to be in public at all.” If screens are possibly making them unhappier, they’re also making them more tractable in a way that substitutes for any larger social transformation that might make them welcome.

We talked about Haidt’s book a bit on our Times Opinion podcast this week, and there’s much more to say about his argument and the critiques that it has generated. But let’s stay with this question of how screens help manage childhood.

All my biases make me agree with the anti-smartphone case, and indeed my strong suspicion is that the culture smartphones create among not just kids but also 20-something adults helps explain the acceleration of the fertility decline in recent years. But because those are my biases, it’s useful to push against them. So consider a different read on Sargeant’s argument: If screens make kids more manageable, shouldn’t they potentially make it easier to have and rear them?

Yes, in this timeline, their use is often intertwined with helicopter parenting and obsessive achievement culture, and may feed into anti-child tendencies in the wider social landscape. But just as a bare fact of parental life, an iPad really can make a long family trip or plane ride much more bearable for a beleaguered mom or dad. A family network of phones really can make it easier to juggle the responsibility for multiple kids and all their play dates and activities. There really are times when it’s OK for kids to be seen but not heard and for streaming entertainment to play a crucial role in letting a parent get dinner on the table.

Likewise for adults and their screens. My phone distracts me from my kids, it sets a bad example for them, but it also makes it possible for me to be present in all kinds of important ways, even when I have work obligations. Remote work seems to make it easier to have kids and to live in houses and neighborhoods that give them space, to escape the potentially fertility-crushing effects of urban density. The internet makes it easier to encourage eccentric childhood interests, to run a home-schooling cooperative, to connect with grandparents in distant states, and more.

In our podcast discussion, I was perhaps a bit more optimistic than my co-hosts about our capacity to create a more smartphone-free form of childhood. But I will concede that we are not going to build a smartphone-free society on any nonapocalyptic timeline.

So to imagine a transformed culture that’s friendlier to families and more welcoming to kids is necessarily to imagine one that employs screens in all kinds of ways, but with a mastery over their effects and an intentionality about their uses that we have not yet been able to achieve.