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, American 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 the evening of 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 and 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 non-adultness. 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.