Transcript 0:00 [gentle instrumental music] Welcome to the liberalism.org show. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, senior director of liberal projects at the Institute for Humane Studies, and I'm joined today by Lauren Hall. 0:14 She's a professor of political science and associate dean of academic affairs at the Rochester Institute of Technology. 0:20 She's also the author of the books Family and the Politics of Moderation and The Medicalization of Birth and Death, and she writes the Substack, The Radical Moderate's Guide to Life. 0:31 Thank you for joining us today, Lauren. Thanks. It's always a pleasure. We are talking about a piece today that you wrote for liberalism.org called Why Liberalism Needs the Family. And so I guess we can start there. 0:46 Your piece points us towards a question that liberals don't usually ask out loud, which is: where do the people who make markets and governments work actually come from? 0:58 So can you walk us through why that question gets dropped and then what it looks like to recenter it? Yeah. So I think there's a couple... 1:07 The-there's sort of a theoretical reason that it gets dropped, and then there's a, a more practical/political reason that it gets dropped. 1:13 Um, I think a lot of, you know, when you look at, for example, the, the Declaration of Independence, right, we, we crib right from John Locke, uh, you know, the, the, uh, importance of the rights to, um, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 1:26 Um, and Lockean liberalism is pretty individualistic. Uh, Locke talks a little bit about the family, but a lot of his work on the family is still sort of heavily contract-based, right? 1:36 He has this sort of understanding of, like, well, as soon as you reach the age of reason, you can get rid of your family if you want to, right? 1:42 And so there's this very-- He's really emphasizing the contract, uh, orientation that, that his entire second treatise is trying to lay out. Now, there's a reason for that, right? 1:52 He's responding to Filmer's Patriarcha, which is this, this sort of family justa- familial justification for absolute power, right? 2:01 So we-- it's important to sort of take Locke's individualism in context, in the sort of context of what he's responding to. But when you take that particular strand of liberalism 2:11 that's really heavily focused on the individual, that's really heavily focused on individual choice and individual contracts, um, that makes it really hard to account for this kind of bizarre, non-political, n-non-choice rela- like [chuckles] you know, the family isn't a matter of choice. 2:29 You don't get to choose who your parents are. You don't get to choose who your kids are. 2:33 Um, and, and so I think there's a, an extent to which the family kind of rubs against a lot of the liberal principles that we think are so critical. 2:41 Now, this doesn't mean that those principles aren't deeply important, because they are. They're just not the principles that are relevant in that particular social context, right? 2:50 Those are much more important principles for sort of political, the political context. So that's the first reason, and we can dig into that, um, in much more detail if you'd like. 2:57 The second reason, though, I think, is that for a long time, at least the last maybe three or four decades, um, the family was kind of owned as, as a, as an issue by social conservatives. 3:08 And so a lot of liberals felt like they had to kinda take a step back, and they felt like the only way to sort of get involved in conversations around the family was to sort of lean into this traditionalist approach to family life, where you have this nuclear family, and you have a mom and a dad, right? 3:22 Um, and again, this sort of actually ties back to the sort of Filmer, right? Like, there's this one specific kind of family life that, that... and, and then, uh, other kinds of forms are not, are not acceptable. 3:32 And so I think a lot of liberals understandably were concerned about wading into a space that seemed to be kind of owned by conversations on the right, on the one hand, in terms of traditionalist understandings of the family. 3:45 And then, of course, at the same time, the family's getting, um, attacked on the left for also kinds of justifiable reasons in the sense that, you know, feminists are looking at the way that family life has, uh, undermined women's freedom over many, many generations. 4:01 Um, so, so I think a lot of liberals just felt kind of uncomfortable, right? 4:04 They felt like if, you know, to quote-unquote, "take the family seriously" meant that you had to either take a side in terms of the sort of left concerns about the family as an institution or the right's kind of ownership of the traditional family as this one way of doing things. 4:17 Um, and my perspective is that that's completely wrong. 4:21 There's lots of ways to talk about the family that don't require you to take a political side because the family, while it's deeply politically relevant, it is not a political structure, and so we don't have to think about it in political terms. 4:32 We can think about it in much more complex and nuanced terms. 4:36 It's interesting that we don't, we being liberals, don't talk about it as much, um, and particularly kind of classical liberal and libertarian types don't talk about it much, given how much even when we're not talking about it, we're talking about it, we now being just everyone who's engaged in politics in this current political moment, be- through even just proxy arguments. 5:01 Like, the family seems to be the core thing that's being fought over, and this turns into most of the arguments we have now about gender tie into family and family roles, the kind of trad conservative, trad wife arguments that are all over. 5:21 The, the liberatory effects of, um, self-identity are often bound up in what, like, escaping families that don't let you live your identity or finding support in it. 5:34 Like, we're all talking about the family all the time, and all of our political debates, or a lot of them, are grounded in this thing. And yet, as you pointed out, it's, 5:46 it's either ignored or it's under-theorized or understudied. It's just weird. Yeah. I mean, you know, conversations around, uh, school ch-choice, around education broadly speaking, right? Uh, around welfare, right? 6:01 Why, why do some families need more support and others don't, right? A lot of these things come back to, uh, these arguments that we're not comfortable making. Um, and I think it, it... 6:12 there's a bunch of different reasons for that, but I do think that- A huge chunks of the, of the conversation, including, um, connections that often don't seem as sort of direct. 6:23 Um, this is one thing that I bring up in the, in the article. When we talk about, um, one of the foundations of liberal society, right, is trust, right? The ability to trust other people, right? 6:33 Markets don't work unless you trust that the other person isn't gonna steal your goods and, you know, blow you away. Um, the legal system requires a certain degree of trust in institutions. 6:43 Um, and we know just from lots of research on developmental psychology that trust is ultimately started in the family, right? Like, you learn to trust other people as stable members of your community, um, in the family. 6:55 So even sort of the strength of our institutions comes back to this, like, critical developmental window. And yet people don't wanna talk about that. 7:03 And, and I think there's, again, there's a discomfort in talking about it. There's also a concern that that's gonna create certain kinds of political conversations that we might not be comfortable where they go. 7:14 Um, and I also think it just makes it... I, I think we want to think that we have more agency and more autonomy than we really do. 7:22 But when we, when we actually look at sort of how the human brain develops, right, the, the, that critical period is the first, um, at most kinda decade of your life is when your brain is figuring out how to live in communities with other people. 7:34 And yet we, as liberals, we under-theorize that completely. 7:38 So I have to ask about those uncomfortable political conversations because that, that does seem to be, like, a very clear or potentially clear outcome of recentering the family is if you're right that effectively everything is downstream of the family. 7:52 Our politics is downstream of what happens in the families that we grow up in and are influencing us, our, our economy, our culture, um, our very way of just interacting with, seeing, exploring the world comes out of the way that we were raised. 8:06 Then suddenly, this thing that maybe part of the reason we're comfortable talking about it is we view it as an intensely personal thing. 8:14 Like, it's this, it's this box that we don't want to intervene into, particularly we as liberals because we respect diversity and autonomy and self-authorship, and that self-authorship includes, like, how you're going to lead your family, how you're going to be participate in it, how you're gonna raise your children and so on. 8:33 And yet, if you are right, the choices that I make when raising my children and the choices you make when raising your children and everyone else have found impact on everything else that happens. 8:46 And given that, it seems like someone could argue, well, therefore, we really ought to be intervening heavily in this because those early years are formative. And that could point in very 9:00 what we would see as illiberal directions. The state has a strong interest in making sure kids are raised in a way that is supportive of, we would hope, liberal ends, but could be other kinds of ends. 9:15 So how do we, how do we think about that tension? Yeah. 9:19 I, I think that's probably the primary reason that, that sort of libertarian-leaning classical liberals are uncomfortable thinking about the, the, how deeply central a family is because you're absolutely right that then the next step is, well, like, we, we should intervene all the time, right? 9:33 Well, but liberal sort of, liberal instincts also demonstrate the problem of that thought as well, right? 9:41 So one of the major arguments against government intervention, even in, even with good intentions, uh, is unintended consequences. Um, and we see this all the time. 9:51 If you look at the, the research on, um, child protective services, right? Um, if you look at the research on child removal from homes. 9:59 Uh, we actually have an enormous number of false positives when it comes to removal of children from homes, right? We remove children from homes that they shouldn't be removed from, and we also fail to... 10:08 There's also false negatives, right? We fail to remove children from homes that they should be removed from. 10:13 Um, and so this is just, I mean, the, like, a centralized system is gonna have a really hard time identifying which children are at risk. What actually works much better, and again, all of these are imperfect, right? 10:23 Because human society is imperfect, right? Humans are imperfect. But what works much better is having these extended networks where people can step in in various kinds of informal ways to support children. 10:36 And yes, probably at some level you do have to have government intervention for serious cases of coercion and harm, just like you do in the criminal justice system, right? 10:44 So this isn't saying families are off the hook, but it is saying that we should hold family harm to the same kind of level as we do other kinds of things. 10:51 But we also have lots of other levers, and there are civil society levers. There's all sorts of other things. 10:58 Um, one, you know, one criticism, for example, of the nuclear family, and this is sort of a, a response to a lot of traditional kinds of... 11:05 the, the traditional conservative emphasis on, um, on sort of the, the, the sort of isolated nuclear family of a mother, a father, and, and kids, um, is that when kids grow up in sort of more informal extended family networks, there's more people to catch issues before they become severe. 11:24 So there's more people to see, oh, wait, there's someone... That kid does not look very well fed, right? That child needs more support than they're getting. That kid is actually being abused. Someone needs to step in. 11:36 Um, and so the last thing that I think... 11:38 I, I guess one of the frustrating things that I have is that we, we are falling into this trap of thinking that the only solution to any kind of social failure is government intervention, and that's simply not the, the case, right? 11:50 We have religious institutions. We have educational institutions. We have this large network that children grow up in. 11:57 And I think this is another thing that I get a little frustrated with is, uh, that, you know, the idea that sort of it takes a village to raise kids is absolutely true. 12:06 Um, and yet a lot of us are still operating in this false binary between, like, it either has to be the family making completely autonomous decisions about everything that happens or the state Comes in and intervenes. 12:17 Uh, and, and those are the t- the only two options. You know, most kids grow up in a pretty complex web of networks and relationships. 12:25 Um, and in fact, my kids have lots of adults in their lives who can step in and would step in if something went wrong at home. 12:33 What, what I fear is that our cultural sort of attachment to this ideal of the family as kind of something unique and apart actually means that we're cutting off a lot of those relationships. 12:45 So I see it from a, from a couple different directions. 12:48 But I think it's actually growing more common that kids don't have a lot of other trusted adults that they can go to because we've done this weird thing where, you know, part of it's I think a lot of concerns about, uh... 13:01 And, and not to say that concerns about sexual abuse by non-family members are... That's not to say that those aren't merited. 13:07 But I think we've really overemphasized, right, the danger of those kinds of, uh, those kinds of relationships, which means that people are no longer letting their kids have sleepovers. 13:17 They're no longer letting their kids have close relationships with, for example, coaches or teachers or, or religious figures. 13:23 Um, and I think we've learned some really important things from, for example, the, the priest abuse scandals, which is you need to have protective mechanisms in place across the board, right? You should not... 13:33 Your kid should not be spending a lot of time with one single adult unsupervised. Um, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have adults, trusted adults in your child's life that are outside of the family. 13:42 So, so I guess ideally we're, we're sort of failing in a number of ways. 13:46 But, but maybe the biggest way that, that I think libertarians and, and classical liberals have, have sort of, uh, failed is falling into this false binary that it's, that you have this forced choice between total family autonomy on the one hand or government intervention on the other. 14:00 Um, and really we've always known that there's a ton of different s- third, third way institutions in between that help families, uh, 14:10 be resilient and be strong and, uh, and also can help those families when they are failing because families will fail in all sorts of predictable ways. One of the things you mentioned I think speaks to this. 14:23 There's this interesting question of what families can do for liberalism and what liberalism can do for families or, or how, what liberalism has to teach families and what families have to teach liberalism. 14:34 And the thing you mentioned about the way that we are increasingly 14:41 keeping kids out of situations where they're on their own and have to figure things out, this is, this is a standard gripe, and it's the, it's the like I'm Gen X, and all the kids today are like nostalgic for my childhood when we were just gone all day, and our parents had no idea where, and hopefully we would just show up at the end of the day, you know, dirty and hungry. 15:02 Uh, and, and that's very much the case that it's not really that way anymore. Um, and, and it does seem like that would push in kind of anti-liberal directions. 15:16 If you're raised as a, as a child, you're, you're taught that the world is scary. You can't really be out in it, and if anything goes wrong, turn to an adult to solve it. 15:30 Looks like a recipe for, uh, illiberalism, whether that's of a left variety or a right variety. Um, are there other examples like that? Like, I guess the, the question is what features of a family life 15:47 do you think actually turn out to support liberal citizens broadly defined? Yeah. Um, I, I think there's, there's quite a few. Um, one that I think, uh... 16:00 I mean, this is like a little bit more controversial 'cause people don't like hearing that like certain kinds of family forms are better than others. 16:06 I mean, I think one of the things that growing up with siblings does, and, and we've moved away from larger families, which means more and more kids are raised in what I call atomic families, which are families where you have one child, uh, two sets of, you know, two parents. 16:20 Um, and, and sometimes if you, if you have a long enough string, right? Like, there's lots of kids right now who are growing up without cousins, right? So they've... 16:28 There's been enough of the sort of, um, uh, single child, um, families that, that kids aren't growing up with, uh, within this network of other kids who are sort of semi-related to them, right, who, who serve this kind of interesting buffer role. 16:41 There's been a couple folks who have written interesting essays on like the function of cousins. Um, but that being said, like even if you have cousins, very often you don't live anywhere near them, right? 16:49 So that's, that's this other piece. So I think siblings, they play a really critical role in sort of thinking about how we norm children into, um, navigating the pluralism that liberalism requires, right? 17:03 So toleration, right? How do you learn toleration? Well, you learn toleration by having to share space and resources with people that you sometimes absolutely hate, right? Like this is... Right? 17:13 These are not people that you chose. They are not your friends. Um, my kids are like wonderful examples of like the, the sort of in-group, out-group phenomenon, right? Like they're... 17:21 Like within the house, they will come close to murdering each other daily, right? They have these like huge fights. I have three girls. 17:30 Um, and yet if, if somebody tries to, you know, attack one of them or like if they're under threat in any kind of way, then, then all of a sudden everyone's circling the wagons, right? 17:38 Um, and so, so there's that kind of dynamic which is always funny to see. But I think more broadly speaking, you know, my kids right now share a room, um, at least two of them do. 17:46 They have to learn how to navigate conflict. They have to learn... And, and we have pretty, uh, pretty strict rules about like tattling and things. 17:55 Like they need to do some degree of problem-solving on their own before they come to an authority figure for anything. 18:02 Um, so I think having siblings around is, is one of those things that we often don't think about, but it is kind of our first lesson in toleration. 18:11 It's our first lesson in how to deal with and live with and share resources with people that we don't like. 18:16 Um, I think a lot of families do a fair amount of work when it comes to, or at least they did, um, when it comes to things like, you know, markets and financial management. 18:25 Like, you know, the family is often the first place that kids have jobs. Um, the economist Anthony, Anthony Da- uh, Ant Davies, I remember w- uh, talking to him about his... 18:34 Like he has this very complex like, um- chore system for his kids. Um, but they will be amazing financial... Like, they will be amazing at, uh, you know, at, at finance later. 18:45 Um, but I think, you know, to understand why markets require fairness, right? Though all of these kinds of things really grow up in the family. And so 18:54 again, I think back in the day when kids had more interaction with kids that they weren't related to, that, that also occurred in villages, right? It occurred in small towns. 19:03 It occurred with, like, the kids in urban areas who play pickup basketball. But that's happening less and less now. And so now I think more of that falls to siblings to do that kind of training, um, and that norming. 19:16 And if that's not happening, then, then it's not happening. Um, I will say, too, that I've talked to... And this is sort of anecdotal, like get-off-my-lawn kind of commentary. 19:24 But as someone who's been in higher ed now for 20 years, um, I was talking to one of our student services folks the other day, and she said that they, they have been really struggling with the fact that now they are asked to do conflict mediation for everything with, with students. 19:42 So, you know, the most basic conflicts with their roommates. Students are not comfortable talking to their roommates about them, right? They expect adults to come in and handle every aspect of conflict management. 19:53 And, and so I, you know, I think that's probably not only a sort of result of, of a different kind of family form. 20:00 I think that's also the loss of kids having the opportunity to learn in the real world in, in unstructured ways. Um, but I do think the family probably plays a role in that too. 20:09 I think in general, parents are much more ready to intervene, um, even among conflicts with siblings, uh, now than they were back in the day. 20:16 So, so there's a kind of form problem of fewer families with large numbers of siblings, but then there's also the sort of interventionist role that parents now feel like they have to play in solving kids' problems for them. 20:28 So there's a cultural shift as well. Is this a seeds of its own destruction sort of problem then? Because the, the features of society that led to this particular approach to parenting, which is widespread. 20:45 It's my kids. We don't, we don't try to raise my kids in that, like, sheltered way, but it is the fact that kids don't get together and ride their bikes around as much. They go over. 20:56 They have organized play dates and, um, it's, it is a significant cultural change, is if we were to trace like why did that happen? It had to come from somewhere. It seems like 21:08 part of it is, like, the not being around cousins, is people move more for, for work or just because you can. 21:16 They move to different places, so you're not in that village for your entire life building up those deep relationships with cousins and second cousins and cousins removed and so on. 21:27 Um, the, the fearfulness is partly a result of technology enables us to learn about every bad thing that happens anywhere in the world and, um... And so the, the technological 21:39 growth that liberalism has unleashed has given us the capacity to scare ourselves. Um, and then part of this, part of the fear of others is that there's people who are different from us. 21:53 When you're in that village, everyone is known to you, and now you're exposed to a whole lot of difference. 21:57 And that's one of the glorious things about liberalism is it allows that difference and that diversity and that ongoing dynamism, and yet... And so is this an issue where if the family is this, 22:11 the foundation of liberalism because it's creating liberal citizens, and it's shifting in this direction, but it's shifting in this direction because of forces and changes and capabilities liberalism unleashed. 22:24 What does that mean for the future of the liberal project? Hmm. Um, yeah, I, I won't, I won't deny that I do see a, a fair amount of the... And, and this is, it's not all the family. There's a lot that's going on. 22:38 But I think that people are becoming more comfortable with authoritarianism kind of in the broad sense, whether authoritarianism from the right or the left, um, because we feel less competent to solve our own problems. 22:49 We feel less competent in our own ability to sort of do basic conflict management and navigation. 22:55 Um, and I do think that that's in large part because of a variety of changes that have happened, um, at the level of the family. 23:01 And I think you're also right to point out that, uh, that a lot of these changes were in fact spurred by liberalism itself, right? 23:06 Um, we have a twenty-four-hour news media cycle largely because of the prosperity that, that liberalism allowed. But that means that we're, we're working... 23:14 And, and this is something I've always kind of struggled with, right? 23:16 We, we have all of the advantages of liberalism, right, all of this prosperity, and yet we're still working with a brain that is very much a sort of Pleistocene brain, right? And so we are still very much tribalistic. 23:29 We are still very much, uh, like we, we have deep negativity bias that, that comes out in our media. 23:36 Um, and so that's why, for example, I will hear people say, "Well, it's just, you know, we could do things in the '80s that we can't do now because things are too dangerous now." And I'm like, "It's the opposite," right? 23:47 [chuckles] Like, when you, when you and I were running around our neighborhoods without our parents, like, that was actually a more dangerous time to be doing that, right? 23:53 Our kids are actually living in a very, very safe time and, and, and certainly my kids are living in one of the most safe, um, suburbs that you could imagine. And I still see parents from my town arguing that their... 24:03 that it's too dangerous for their twelve-year-old to, you know, ride their bike somewhere by themselves. And the fact that I'm talking about a twelve-year-old is crazy to me, right? 24:12 Like, we were doing that when we were, like, seven or six. 24:15 Um, I will say that there, there are some patterns that are interesting, um, one of which is that this is very much, uh, at least some of the sort of the very high investment parenting practices that we're seeing, 24:27 um, is not necessarily liberalism per se, but it, but it is a function of abundance. 24:32 Um, and, and so when we look at, for example, the sort of high intensity parenting, the fact that parents are having fewer children and investing more in those children, um, that is a pattern that we see, and it's a pattern that, that means that a lot of these These sort of broader patterns of parental, uh, investment really do change across areas. 24:54 So when I first moved to, back to Rochester, um, I would go to the local playground, um, in the city of Rochester with my kids. Um, and the city kids are by and large running around like we did, right? 25:06 They are running to neighborhoods by themselves. You have six-year-olds hanging out with eight-year-olds, and nobody's... Like, parents are not trailing them. 25:13 So to a certain degree, this is the result of suburban living, right? 25:18 The fact that you have, uh, people who are, first of all, I mean, I think the fact that we're more car-bound makes it harder for kids to do the kind of connecting that they used to do in, like, villages or urban areas. 25:29 It's harder to get from point A to point B without parental help. 25:33 Um, but also the risks seem higher for parents who are living in these, uh, in these spaces where they have one or two kids, and then they invest an enormous amount in those kids. 25:42 Um, and so that leads to not just less, um, comfort with allowing kids freedom, but it also means that kids are overscheduled, right? 25:51 We, we tend to push a lot of, um, activities, formal activities on kids because we think that they need to have certain skills in order to succeed in whatever kind of space that they need to be in, right? 26:02 Everyone has to be in gymnastics and tennis and math club and, you know, all these kinds of things. Um, so I remember talking to my daughter, who's 12, last year. Well, she's 13 this year. She was 12 last year. 26:13 And we, we asked if she wanted to... She had asked us to have a couple weeks off where she wasn't doing camp, and I said, "Sure. You should have a summer where you wander around with your friends for a couple weeks." 26:24 Um, and then we realized that she couldn't do that because none of her friends had any unstructured time. So she did not have anyone that she could hang out with. 26:31 So this year she's actually, she's fine being scheduled fully because she knows that none of her friends are gonna be available to do the kinds of things that we used to do. 26:38 So, so I think some of this is cultural, and some of it is definitely a specific kind of suburban, like, education. Like, higher educated suburbanites are doing this. 26:50 Um, and so I think the good news is that we still have folks who are not doing this, and so we have these, like, comparison groups that we can look to and see, you know, who are g- who are the folks who are gonna be sort of less neurotic, less anxious, um, and more capable of solving problems later in life. 27:05 Um, it may not end up being the suburban, you know, kids of parents with, you know, dual master's degrees or doctorates. 27:12 It may end up being the kids who have had a less structured kind of space, and they've been able to do a lot of this work. So, so there's still pluralism in the system, I guess I'll say. 27:20 Like, there's still people who are doing parenting differently. 27:24 Um, but it's really hard to untangle the educational piece and the income piece from a lot of these patterns, and it's hard to see, um, the trade-offs involved, right? 27:35 Like, your kid may do okay because they come from a relatively well-resourced background, but they also may have a serious anxiety disorder because they've been sort of constrained in this way. 27:46 Um, and those are trade-offs that I think we have to be much more willing to vocalize. 27:50 Uh, that, you know, the kids who grow up with fewer parental resources, with fewer economic resources may actually have mental resilience in a way that, that other kids don't, um, in large part because they've had to do more on their own. 28:03 And that's not an argument for neglect, but it's an argument that different kinds of parenting have, have trade-offs, right? 28:11 So looking ahead, we are in this moment when the family's always important in politics, even if we're not talking about it, but we're in this moment where it seems to be a primary driver of a lot of the fracturing that we see in politics and this call for liberals to reengage. 28:29 What does that conversation look like right now? Like, you're a liberal listening to this conversation you and I are having, and you're persuaded that this stuff really matters and that we need to engage. 28:41 Where do you start? How do you have those conversations? Well, I think there's, there's a couple resources that I really love. 28:48 Um, the, the Free-Range Kids movement, um, started by, uh, Lenore Skenazy, and she has, uh, her website, Let Grow, actually has a series of sort of levels of intervention depending on what you're comfortable with, right? 29:02 And so there's, uh, there's individual, like what families can do on their own. There's, uh, if you wanna bring your school in, if you wanna have these conversations with your community. 29:12 Um, and I think those are kind of, um, those are safer conversations to have because they have to do with sort of individual choice on this local level, right? 29:20 So what can we do as parents, um, to help our kids be resilient, to help them be successful, to help them navigate conflict, and to help them learn how to work with liberal institutions in a meaningful way, right? 29:34 How to appreciate liberal institutions. Um, so that's, I mean, that's one thing. Um, the broader question I think i- is a tough one because when people talk about family policy, family policy is so bound up 29:48 in a number of things related to culture wars that it's really hard to untangle it. 29:52 So typically, when people talk about family policy, they're talking about a combination of, um, abortion and contrapres- uh, contraception. They're talking about welfare access and welfare benefits. 30:03 Um, they're often talking about sort of pronatalism versus antinatalism, right? Like, should we be encouraging people to have children? If we do encourage them to have children, what does that... 30:12 what do those incentives look like? Um, and so I, you know, I think it's really important to zoom in as far as we can to talk about very specific policies. 30:22 Um, you know, my understanding is that things like, for example, the child tax credit are very meaningful and very positive sort of benefits to folks, and they're things that libertarians, progressives, and conservatives can largely, largely agree on. 30:35 Um, so I think that when we, again, when we think about sort of how to start having these conversations as liberals, starting with the least polarizing, um, and kind of most concrete examples is a good way to, to go. 30:51 I also think we have to get better at just honestly, uh, I've used the term trade-offs a lot. I've been thinking a lot about trade-offs. 30:57 I think we have to be really honest about, uh, getting better at having conversations about family forms, for example. 31:04 I mean, I think there's this, the, again, the sort of binary of the current conversations around the family is that, um, if you're, if you take the social conservative position, there's a specific kind of family that is the only kind of family that works. 31:18 And then if you take the sort of progressive position, all family forms are good because we don't shame people, right? Like, and those are like the two positions that you have to take. 31:26 But of course, there are family forms that work better than others to, to create the kinds of individuals that are tolerant and flexible and capable of handling conflict and capable of nav- navigating pluralism. 31:38 And we shouldn't be afraid to say some family forms do that better than others. 31:43 Now, what that means, of course, is a secondary question that people are often-- they, they don't get to that secondary question, which is: how do we support families even if they can't, right? 31:53 Even if they aren't sort of that particular family form, how do we support families who, who need to be able to raise kids who, who can do this stuff, right, even if, even if the family is struggling? 32:05 And so that's where sort of the, the policy argument kinda loops back in. 32:09 So, um, but, but I guess I just would-- I wish we were able to have more complex conversations, um, around parenting, around family life, where it was easier to say, "Yeah, certain kinds of family forms do this well. 32:23 Certain forms do this poorly." There's usually trade-offs involved, right? 32:28 The really high-intensity parenting that most sort of suburban intellectuals like myself practice, um, is good for some stuff and really bad for other stuff, and I think people should know that. 32:39 They should be able to walk in with their eyes open to understand the kind of, the kind of thing that they're choosing. Um, and most people are, are sort of somewhere in between. 32:47 I mean, most people actually don't walk into parenting with, like, a harsh, like, a hard philosophy about parenting, right? We kind of muddle through. 32:54 Um, but that's another reason to, I think, be more clear about what, what our choices mean for our kids' success now and in the future. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Lauren. Yeah, this was great. 33:06 Thanks for inviting me, Aaron. And I wanna thank all of you for listening to our conversation. Uh, if you enjoy the liberalism.org show, be sure to tell your friends about your favorite episodes. 33:16 And to find Lauren's essay on why liberalism needs the family, as well as essays by many other liberal thinkers, visit us on the web at www.liberalism.org. [outro music]
