The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals

American policy is uniquely hostile to families. Other wealthy countries guarantee paid parental leave and sick days and heavily subsidize early childhood care — to the tune of about $14,000 per year per child, on average. (The United States, by contrast, spends around $500 per child per year.) So it’s no wonder our birthrate has been in decline, with many people saying they’re having fewer children than they would like. Yet if you look closer at those other wealthy countries, that story doesn’t entirely hold. Sweden, for example, has some of the most generous work-family policies in the world, and according to the most recent numbers from Our World in Data, from 2021, their fertility rate is 1.67 children per woman — virtually identical to ours. Caitlyn Collins is a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of “Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving.” To understand how family policies affect the experience of child-rearing, she interviewed over a hundred middle-class mothers across four countries with different parenting cultures and levels of social support for families: the United States, Sweden, Italy and Germany. And what she finds is that policies can greatly relieve parents’ stress, but cultural norms like “intensive parenting” remain consistent. In this conversation, we discuss how work-family policies in Sweden frame spending time with children as a right rather than a privilege, how these policies have transformed the gender norms around parenting, why family-friendly policies across the globe don’t increase birthrates, how cultural pressures in America to be both an ideal worker and an ideal parent often clash, why many American parents feel it’s impossible to have more than one or two children, how cultural discourse has led younger women to “dread” motherhood and more. Mentioned: “Parenthood and Happiness: Effects of Work-Family Reconciliation Policies in 22 OECD Countries” by Jennifer Glass, Robin W. Simon and Matthew A. Andersson “Is Maternal Guilt a Cross-National Experience?” by Caitlyn Collins If you're interested in this topic, we also recommend checking out this series from the New York Times Opinion: “Would You Have Four Kids if It Meant Never Paying Taxes Again?” by Jessica Grose “Are Men the Overlooked Reason for the Fertility Decline?” by Jessica Grose “If We Want More Babies, Our ‘Profoundly Anti-Family’ System Needs an Overhaul” by Jessica Grose Book Recommendations: Competing Devotions by Mary Blair-Loy Mothering While Black by Dawn Marie Dow Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Jessica Grose and Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  So earlier in the week, we released an episode with demographer Jennifer Schubert, looking at falling birth rates around the world. But that was looking at a lot of different countries with very different levels of wealth, very different cultures, very different places. Today's episode is a little closer to home. Why have fertility rates fallen so much in America? You'll sometimes hear, particularly from liberals, that it reflects our very family unfriendly policies. We're unusual, for instance, in having no guaranteed paid family leave, which is nuts. No guaranteed paid sick days. No national childcare. Of course, people aren't having more kids. But how does this look in countries that are more like us? Caitlin Collins is a sociologist and the author of Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving.

• 1:08Ezra Klein?

  The book is built around more than 130 interviews of middle-class women in four countries: Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the US. And we look particularly here at Sweden, which has just extraordinarily family-friendly policies, and the US, which doesn't. Having kids sounds a lot easier and better in Sweden. But spoiler, that hasn't really changed how many kids families have, so you have to dig deeper, which Collins has done. What are the parenting cultures like? How are they different, sure, but how are they similar? And how have they changed over time in ways that are similar? As always, my email, [email protected].

• 1:51Ezra Klein?

  Caitlin Collins, welcome to the show.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me today.

• 1:54Ezra Klein?

  So you have this great term in your book, "the life worlds around parenthood." What is a life world?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  A life world is the distinctive social universe of individual experiences, interactions, the organizations and the institutions that shape the employment and child-rearing possibilities that women can envision for themselves. So what women want and expect, I think, what also men want and expect when it comes to caregiving and employment, is confined by this life world, what they can envision for themselves in their daily lives.

• 2:31Ezra Klein?

  What does the life world surrounding parenthood in the US feel like right now? And how is it different, maybe, than it was 30 or 50 years ago?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  The life worlds for parents in the US, to be honest with you, as far as seem to be defined by a great deal of stress and overwhelm, unfortunately. So for parents today, there's an expectation that they are largely going to go it alone when it comes to working for pay in the paid labor force and caring for their children largely on their own, with the expectation that it's on them and them solely to make this work. A fabulous study, actually, by Jennifer Klass and Robyn Simon and Matthew Anderson, has shown that when we compare the feelings of happiness for parents versus non-parents, that gap between parents and non-parents in their levels of happiness is widest in the US of any Western industrialized

• 3:25Speaker 01

  country. And they conceptualize parenting in the US as a stressor. And they argue that, in fact, institutional support and resources can buffer the stress that parenthood brings to parents. And of course, unfortunately, the United States has the most family-hostile public policy of any country in the Western industrialized world when it comes to supporting work and family.

• 3:49Ezra Klein?

  I remember before I had kids, being very interested in this research on whether having kids made you happier or not. And now that I have kids, I find that research weirdly beside the point. That there's a lot of things in life that are not about making you happier on a hour-to-hour time use survey.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:08Ezra Klein?

  That if you check how happy I am any given hour of the day at work versus, you know, when I am at a bar with my friends or reading quietly in a coffee shop or sleeping or something, I might not be happier with it, but it does bring certain kinds of meaning into my life, certain kinds of deeper satisfaction. And so I also wonder about this discourse that doesn't feel to me like it has always been true for humanity, that the right way to ask this question is, given the universe of things I could do for myself, will having kids make me happier than the other options?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  I love this question. And to me, the issue of happiness and studying it, measuring it, quantifying it cross-nationally is a useful and partial way to understand the role of parenting in an adult's life. We know, research shows that the vast majority of adults in the US do want to have kids. And the truth is also that eight in 10 adults today have children during their working-age lives. So the vast majority of adults are navigating employment with child rearing. And this looks very different here in the US than it does in other countries. And to me, that, as a sociologist, is an interesting question, and it's part of why

• 5:17Speaker 01

  pairing these fantastic cross-national survey studies with qualitative interview research, which is my area of expertise, helps to sort of triangulate and paint a much more rich, nuanced, complex picture of what's going on for parents today.

• 5:33Ezra Klein?

  So one of the things that is motivating this episode and other episode we're doing is how rapid and striking the change in total fertility rates has been. So in 1958, the total fertility rate in the US was about 3.6. So on average, women are having 3.6 children. By 2021, it's 1.66. In Sweden, it's 1.67. France, a little bit higher, 1.8. Italy, which always surprises me, given that it's a highly Catholic country, is a little lower, around 1.3. But they're all somewhat clustered, and that's a really profound drop in a fairly short number of decades. How do you understand that?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  This drop in total fertility rate has been dramatic, and demographers have been trying to puzzle out answers to this question. For years now, and we have to take a broader look at the sorts of social, political, historical, economic factors that are shaping, as you said, these life worlds of parenthood, right? So in the past half century, we have seen dramatic revolutionary change, really, in women's interest into the paid labor force, right? So of course, that's a good thing. Along with paid employment for women comes increased economic independence, access to finances and occupations that provide, again, meaning and fulfillment.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  What we also see in this same period of time, of course, is a boom in the way that women can access birth control, for example. They have more power in economy when it comes to controlling their reproductive decisions, which is, of course, a fabulous thing. So the set of factors influencing the sorts of decisions parents, or adults, I should say, make in their daily lives about whether or not they want to have children truly has shifted, right? When women have a wider array of opportunities available to them, the opportunity cost of having children versus other meaningful avenues to achieve, you know, that sense of fulfillment we talked about have really shifted.

• 7:30Ezra Klein?

  So one thing that can change the life world, one thing that can change the lived experience of parenting is policy, is what a particular country does to support working parents, to support parents of all kinds. Something I so appreciate about your book is the cross-national nature of it, looking at what this looks like in Sweden, in Germany. Let's start with Sweden, because I think that is an example that if you are a liberal who uses the internet, you run into fairly often.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:58Ezra Klein?

  What is different about becoming a parent in Sweden?

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Sweden. What is so often held up, this nation, as this gender equality nirvana, and for very real reasons, I think this stereotype applies. I wouldn't call it a nirvana for gender equality yet, but they are light years ahead of the United States. So Sweden has what sociologists refer to as a social democratic welfare state. The state intervenes intentionally in people's lives with the explicit goal of bringing about gender equality. And that's to my American way of thinking, quite revolutionary, right? They have intertwined their labor market policy and their family policy with this goal of gender equality policy. So let me give you a few examples of what their work family policies look like.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  In Sweden, parents have the right to 480 days of paid parental leave after their child is born. If you are single, you get all 480 days. If you are in a relationship, three months of that time is reserved for each parent and the remaining days can be shared as you like between the two parents. These parental leave days are paid out at 80% of your wages. And very often, as a result of collective bargaining agreements, employers top that up the last 10 to 20% so that you don't actually receive any pay cut when you take parental leave. So this is a way, I think, of those policies is sending messages, right? They are symbolic about what is valued in a given society.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  And Sweden sends the message that it is paramount that parents have time to spend to, for those giving birth, recover from that experience, but also to bond with and care for their child. So paid parental leave is dramatic. You also have a legal right to reduce your working hours from full time or 40 hours a week to 30 hours a week, or a 25% reduction in those hours worked for the first eight years of your child's life. Can you imagine how many parents in the US would welcome the prospect of working a 75% schedule for the first eight years of their kiddo's lives? To me, that feels, again, quite revolutionary. Sweden also has what is often regarded as the most high-quality early childhood and

• 10:11Speaker 01

  education system in the world, where spots are available to children starting at the age of one, and it is highly subsidized by the state. It's on a sliding scale, right? So you pay nothing if you're a low-income family. But the wealthiest families in Sweden, for full-time childcare, including meals and everything for your little ones, the most expensive rate that could possibly be applied to a wealthy family in Sweden is the economic equivalent in the US of roughly $175 a month.

• 10:43Ezra Klein?

  Great, I'm moving to Sweden immediately here.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Right? I can't tell you the number of times when I say that figure out loud to audiences here in the US and folks either laugh in like an angry way or kind of their jaws just drop because for anyone who has kids who are enrolled in some form of childcare in the US, those numbers sound comical. There are many families who pay 175 US dollars a day for childcare here. So the idea that that would be a monthly rate is again quite revolutionary. And these policies again serve the message that child rearing is a collective responsibility that is a public good. It is in our collective best interest for children to be raised well.

• 11:22Ezra Klein?

  So one thing I always wonder about when I hear about these Swedish policies is you can put all this into statutory language. You can say you need to give parents this much time off and these many paid family days and etc. But it's hard to keep workplaces from preferring people who are not going to take eight months of leave repeatedly. It's hard to keep workplaces from not preferring people who are going to be available constantly around the clock. First, is Sweden able to keep there from being what you might call implicit discrimination against parents who fully take advantage of these policies? And if so, how?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  So something that struck me so much in spending time in Sweden and interviewing middle-class mothers in Stockholm was that truly, work makes way for family for everyone. Not just workers, but managers, folks in the C-suite also take time away from work to have, I don't know, leisure pursuits, but primarily to spend time with their families. Sweden has 25 days of paid vacation a year. You have a right to at least four consecutive weeks of those vacation days in the summer when the weather and light are awesome, which is rare in Sweden. And to me, like, that is such a revelatory way to think about the world of work.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Moms would tell me all the time, well, yeah, I mean, I have a boss who's a man, but he leaves work at 2:45 every day to go pick up his kid from daycare. I interviewed an emergency room nurse who said, oh, yeah, the surgeon I work with the most, he's on a 10-month parental leave right now with his newest child. And to me, hearing about surgeons taking 10 months of leave felt, again, very different from how we think about this in the US. So, yes, Sweden is a place that does value the market, but we can see that it has not hurt their GDP, it has not hurt economic productivity, it has not hurt creativity and innovation to have folks focus on things other than work. And to be honest, the level of stress and overwhelm and burnout we feel here in the

• 13:28Speaker 01

  United States for being obsessed with our jobs, it doesn't make us better workers. It doesn't make us more creative and more efficient, right? The truth is that when we think about, again, our well-being more holistically, I actually think it makes us much better workers.

• 13:43Ezra Klein?

  Tell me a bit about how Swedish policy treats fathers and their role, and how does Tred to change or influence fathers and their role?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Sweden was the first wealthy Western nation in 1974 to implement a gender-neutral paid parental leave with the idea that men and women alike should be taking time off after they have children. Sweden had had paid maternity leave for decades, but again, it was quite revolutionary for the state to say, actually, we think men should be involved in this very vital time in a child's life. There's abundant research that shows that involving men in these early weeks and months of a child's life has enormous, wonderful benefits to men and their children and their women partners if they're in different gender couples over the long term.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  And so Sweden used policy as a lever to try and incentivize men to take this time off. And they did that with this high wage replacement where they economically incentivized men to do it such that it would seem, honestly, illogical for men not to take this time off. Why work when you can be paid to stay at home, right? And so we see absolutely dramatic change on the part of Sweden. Swedish men in virtually one generation go from not taking time off when their kids are born to taking paid parental leave. And it is the case still in Sweden that women still take more of the paid parental leave days than men, but virtually every single father in Sweden takes paid parental leave.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  And in fact, when I spoke to Swedish fathers, they told me that they would be stigmatized if they didn't take time off to spend with their children, that people would think something was wrong, that they didn't want to spend time with their children. And I would say, I think it's really cool here in Sweden that men feel this kind of duty and obligation to be involved so deeply in their kids' lives. And they would look at me sort of funny and say, obligation? No, I have a right to spend time with my child. Fathers there joke to me, in fact, that often Americans get off the airplane and look around in shock like I was about the sight of so many men in public with their babies on the metro, in the grocery store, at the park, running errands, at the doctor's office, and

• 15:57Speaker 01

  ask why it is in Sweden that so many men work as nannies. And the fact that Swedes have this stereotype about Americans being so confused at the sight of fathers' caregiving says a lot about the cultural imagination about parenthood here in the United States.

• 16:13Ezra Klein?

  It's very depressing.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Isn't it so depressing? It's honestly embarrassing.

• 16:17Ezra Klein?

  And I say that from a household where I do half the parenting and our nanny is a man.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Oh, I like it, Ezra.

• 16:24Ezra Klein?

  We're subverting the dominant paradigm here. One of the things, though, that is striking about Sweden is there's a way the conversation over fertility rates in America goes, particularly on the liberal side. So somebody will point out that the fertility rate is falling, and then liberals will tend to say something like, yeah, it's incredibly hard to have children here, if only we looked like Sweden. If we want it to be possible, if we want it to be doable to have bigger families, like the government needs to support that. We need paid family leave, we need paid sick days, we need to subsidize childcare, we need to make parenting more equitable across the genders. And Sweden did all that. And again, to go back to these numbers again,

• 17:06Ezra Klein?

  the US fertility rate in 2021 was about 1.66, and in Sweden, it was about 1.67. So Sweden has done, I think, functionally, every intervention you could possibly imagine to make it easier to parent. And it has probably made it easier to parent. I mean, I think your book has quite a lot of evidence in that direction. But it has not, on the margin, shifted Swedish parents towards having more children. Why do you think that is?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  You're right. The total fertility rate in Sweden and the United States is virtually identical. And to me, that suggests that public policies are part of the equation. They are a necessary but insufficient set of resources to influence couples or individuals' decisions whether or not to have children. And the flip side of that conversation about policy, to me, is culture. What's going on culturally that influences this decision? What are the cultural norms about being a mother, being a father? What it means to be a good mother and a good father? And one thing that I actually think is quite similar across the two of them, especially for highly educated,

• 18:18Speaker 01

  socioeconomically advantaged parents, has to do with the very lofty cultural expectations of what it means to parent, quote unquote, "well" today. I think we have to be talking about this cultural dimension.

• 18:31Ezra Klein?

  I want to put a pin in that because we are going to talk about that cultural dimension. But before we leave Sweden, one of the things I was thinking about as I looked over their policies and looked at all this data is that you could call these pro-family policies, and they are. But I think you could also call them pro-working-family policies. You could call them, in a different way, pro-work policies. One way to look at them is these are policies to make it more possible to have high female labor force participation. And parenthood, which is great, right? You know, I don't want to turn back the clock on full participation in the labor force either. But that's actually different in a way than policies that are meant to increase family size or policies that are just meant to be pro-family.

• 19:16Ezra Klein?

  Sometimes I think we almost don't have a language for, are we talking about policies to have more children? Or are we talking about policies to make it easier to exist in what is in rich countries, the modern parenting condition, which is to be a two full-time earner parent household, or maybe even a one-parent household where the single parent is a full-time earner? Are these policies about children or these policies about work-family balance?

• 19:45Speaker 01

  So in Sweden, these policies are absolutely not pro-neotalist in intention. The Swedish government has stated outright for decades that that is not their goal. The goal is exactly what you pointed to, Ezra, which is about enabling women to participate in the paid labor force. And Sweden's work-family policies are oriented at individuals, not at families, which is different than in other Western industrialized countries. These policies try to enable independence and self-sufficiency amongst individuals so that they can make the decisions that feel best for themselves as individuals, not in order to encourage or incentivize them to have children.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  And again, this intentionality behind the policies is significant. Like you said, we know lots of other nations very intentionally create policies with the goal of increasing fertility, and that's not the case in the Swedish context.

• 21:04Ezra Klein?

  One of my conclusions from looking at at least some of the policy studies on this issue is that policy just isn't really effective, at least at any of the margins anyone has been able to try if what you want to do is increase the birth rate. I mean, the example to me that stands out most is South Korea, where the birth rate is now below 1. It was 0.81 in 2021, which means that society is going to go to very rapid shrinkage. They've spent more than $200 billion, which is a fair amount in South Korea, subsidizing childcare and parental leave and other things over the past 16 years. Fertility rate fell in that time from 1.1 to 0.81. Japan and Singapore have both really wanted to get their birth rates up, neither have been particularly

• 21:49Ezra Klein?

  successful. Is there any example you know of, putting aside some of the really authoritarian efforts like Romania back in the day, where policy's been effective at increasing fertility rates? And if not, why not?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  No. I know of no nations in which implementing policies has increased the fertility rate. Investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the goal of increasing the number of children women have has been ineffective, which is fascinating, right? There's more going on here when adults are weighing what they want in their short lives.

• 22:29Ezra Klein?

  Let's talk about some of that more that's going on. So in your book, you discuss two competing, not just pressures, but archetypes that are weighing on parents nowadays. So one is the ideal worker norm, and the other is the good mother, good father, good parent norm. So tell me about those and how they conflict.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  So the ideal worker norm, this is a term coined by Joan Acker. The ideal worker norm is the idea that adults today should be fully committed and entirely devoted to their jobs and their employers, available at a moment's notice, unencumbered by external responsibilities that might diminish from their ability to perform their jobs well. And competing with this ideal of the ideal worker is, as you said, this intensive parenting norm. And often, we talk about it as an intensive mothering norm because it is primarily mothers who take on the lion's share of domestic work in households today.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yes, fathers in decades past did less than men today do. There has been an increase in the amount of time men spend caregiving compared to previous generations of men. But there's still a large gap between the amount of time men and women spend doing childcare and housework today. And this intensive mothering norm suggests that, as you might guess, child rearing should be time-intensive, emotionally involved, and child-centered or child-focused, such that what it means to be a good mother is to be self-sacrificing, to devote yourself entirely to your children's well-being and upbringing. And you can imagine why these two cultural norms are in distinct tension with one another.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  It is categorically impossible to be an ideal worker and an ideal mother at the same time. And so abundant research has shown just how painful that tension is between the two norms. Sociologist Mary Blair Loyes calls these competing devotions. She talks about the moral weight that adults in the US, especially, again, mothers, feel in that they are unable to feel like they're giving it their all in the workplace or giving it their all at home. And I think the tension, the stress of trying to enact both norms simultaneously, to be honest with you, Ezra, I think it's crushing American parents right now. I heard this time and again in my interviews with US mothers.

• 24:55Ezra Klein?

  I want to add some numbers to this because these shocked me. So these are from a 2006 study that was looking at time diaries from back in the year 2000. So this is even back a bit. But I found that married fathers in 2000 were spending 153% more time per week caring for their children than they did in 1965. At the same time, though, married mothers were spending 21% more time with their children than in 1965, even though so many more of them were now working. Single mothers were spending 57% more time with their children than in 1965. So somehow, overall, labor force participation is much higher than it was in 1965.

• 25:37Ezra Klein?

  We have this whole kind of ideal worker model and hustle culture and all the rest of it. And we're also spending more time with our children. And you've done a lot of the qualitative work here. How do you understand this? Like, what did it look like to be raising children in this less intensive parenting sphere? And how does it look differently now?

• 26:00Speaker 01

  This is so interesting and so complicated to me. So there are still 24 hours in a day, just like there were decades ago, right? And yet, parents have eked out even more time to spend with their children than in decades past. And to me, as you said, that's remarkable because the vast majority of adults participate in the paid labor force and most of them do so full-time. So a full-time work in the US is roughly 40 hours a week, and we know many folks work over 40 hours a week. There just aren't that many hours in the day left. And yet, these intensive parenting norms suggest that the cultural imperative is to spend as much time with your children as possible. And in addition, you should be cultivating your child, right?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Thinking about what it means to help them develop optimally. And so many parents today talk about, for example, all the extracurricular activities they've decided to enroll their children in and the schlepping to and from that is required to get these kids to and from the many activities that especially middle-class parents are enrolling their kids in. And To be honest, Ezra, something has to give. There's only so many hours in the day. And what I heard mom say over and over again to me is that what has changed is time to themselves, time to foster their romantic relationship with their partner, with their friends, time to exercise, time to engage in leisure pursuits that also

• 27:29Speaker 01

  help bring meaning to their lives. So many women told me, this time in my life, I work and I care for my children and that's all I have time for. I will get back to the rest when I don't have kids at home anymore. So they're really sacrificing their well-being, right? To me, that feels remarkable and also really alarming, to be honest with you.

• 27:49Ezra Klein?

  I feel like this as a father too.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:53Ezra Klein?

  But the thing I don't quite understand about it is, and my kids are quite young. My kids are five and two. When I think about the way I parent, it's not clear to me what it would mean to not be parenting this way. I mean, they can't put on their clothes by themselves. They're just not that capable.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:13Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, the older one can put on some of his clothing by himself if he's in the mood to. When you look at those numbers, what were people doing? What was this less intensive kind of parenting? I mean, what were these kids doing all day?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Good question, Ezra. And I'm laughing to myself. I have an 18-month-old and she definitely can't dress herself and she would never wear shoes if it was up to her, but turns out she needs shoes on and someone has to put those on her body, right? So the actual labor involved in keeping your child healthy and safe, I would argue, is probably similar. But when I talk to my own mom and my own grandmother about their experiences parenting compared to mine, especially when I talk to my grandma, she is shocked about how much time I spend with my daughter and also shocked about how I take her places.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  When I send her photos of us at the park, at the zoo, at the museum, at the grocery store, out to lunch with us, she is struck at the fact that my child is engaged in the public sphere with me and that we do so many child-centered activities in addition to things we just need to get done, like grocery shop together. And she'll say to me, yeah, but she's just a baby. What are you doing? And it hasn't occurred to me not to do some of these things, right? Like you were saying, like, what's the alternative? And for my grandmother, at least, upper-middle class in Los Angeles, she often dropped, my understanding is, dropped my mom and my uncle off at the grandparents' house, and they just kind of toddled around and took care of themselves.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  And of course, I'm sure that wasn't the case when they were teeny babies, but the intensive supervision, I think, looked very different for folks of my grandmother's generation than now. At home, I'm often with my daughter doing art at her little arts and crafts table. I'm reading books with her, or maybe she's looking at a little book for 60 seconds while I try to catch up on the news on my phone, or, I don't know, review an article or something for work. And my mom recounts, especially when, you know, she was, I don't know, maybe elementary age, leaving the house in the morning. This is that stereotypical idea of, you know, leaving the house and my grandparents having absolutely no idea where she was all day long. And sometimes she would come home for dinner, and sometimes she wouldn't. And

• 30:36Speaker 01

  that just didn't really matter. She was left to her own devices, and that was considered much more normative. And of course, the sorts of social structures, the architecture of our neighborhoods in terms of children spending time with one another in little bands roving around neighborhoods was also very different than it is today.

• 30:53Ezra Klein?

  Let me pick up on something there, which is this idea of are the children... In the parent's world or as a parent in the child's world? And then there are also others, right? Or the children just in a world with other children, the parents just with other parents? And something I notice in modern parenting that feels different to me than what I read about from past eras is that, at least in my cohort, on the weekends, the parents are in the children's world. It's just like an endless procession of this playground, Brooklyn Children's Museum, you know, go here. As the kids get older, you take them to sports, you take them to martial arts, you take them to dance class, whatever it might be. There's tutoring, there's...

• 31:34Ezra Klein?

  You know, when I look back, it seems like much more the kids were forced to tag along in the parents' world. I mean, they were working on the...

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 31:41Ezra Klein?

  You know, to be a little bit glib about it, they were working on the farm. But there's also, it seemed to me, a kind of discipline where the kids were expected to like sit quietly in church. The kids were expected to... Sometimes people talk about being seen and not heard. I don't know exactly how true that was, but it's very much not how a lot of us parent today, where it's like anytime my five-year-old wants to be heard, that kid is getting heard.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:02Ezra Klein?

  You know, and then, as you mentioned, there's like the roving bands of kids, where the older ones take a little bit more care of the younger ones. We sometimes talk about whether or not society is pronatal or antinatal, but it sometimes feels to me that we've become like pro-child and antinatal. Like, we're so pro-child that you can't have many children, right? Maybe it's pro-child and anti-children is a different way to put it, you know? And another canonical example is just like the rules on car seats, where if you want to have more than two kids, you just need a really big car now, because you have to have a ton of car seats, you know, and they're not going to fit in a Prius, or they're not going to fit in a Honda Civic. So there's something there about the way in which we have oriented towards individual children, such that having lots of children has become incredibly daunting.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. It, to me, gets back to this cultural ideal of what it means to be a good parent. And intensive parenting, again, requires that this is incredibly emotionally absorbing. It tends to be quite expensive. It should be time-consuming, and it should be child-centered. Sitting around and doing arts and crafts is something that my... grandmother really can't fathom. She'd be like, she's a year and a half, you know? She's just drawn scribbles on paper. What's the deal? And in my head, I'm like, well, this is a sensory activity, right? I follow Instagram accounts that tell me how important sensory play is to help my child develop her socio emotional skills and creativity, right? And that to me feels so wildly different than how parents of previous generations

• 33:30Speaker 01

  have thought about passing the time with children. And like you said, Ezra, you know, I don't know how to do it differently, to be honest with you. I mean, weekends after I have spent, you know, two solid days with my child. When I go back to work on Monday morning, I'm like, oh, okay. Now I get to have my easier work week, which feels so much less intensive and involved than caregiving for my child full time, to be honest with you. And of course, it would be categorically quite difficult to do that with a whole bunch of kids, right? You can't give them the time and attention and resources that we think children need in order to turn out, quote unquote, well, right? What does well mean, I guess, is part of what my question is here? Because these cultural ideals are really moral imperatives

• 34:15Speaker 01

  that get to the heart of what it means to be a good person, but also like a good mother, a good father, a good adult, a good parent. And these, again, are so morally weighty that not fulfilling these ideals would make us feel really, really bad about ourselves.

• 34:32Ezra Klein?

  This feels like it also bears on the question of why a lot of what is called pro-family policy does not have an impact on birth rates.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:41Ezra Klein?

  Because if you think back to the, or if I think back to the Swedish policies we were talking about earlier, and I'll say something here that makes me both sound like a bad liberal and a bad parent, although I want people to have a lot more paid family leave than they do, they'd be taking eight months off of work for each kid. Like, I shudder to just sit there staring over an infant. Like, I love my children. I absolutely love them. And that's a lot of time, you know, to do that. Like, I don't know how to say this differently, and I want people to have the options they want to have in life, but that is a policy built around intensive parenting. I don't know what the policy structured be to encourage eh, parenting. Like, I don't know what you're supposed to do as a policymaker to make it easier to be like,

• 35:23Ezra Klein?

  yeah, you go play outside. But there is something here that if you understand, I mean, if you wanted to conceptualize, the fertility rate is a problem. And behind that problem is the idea that we have just made parenting too hard and intensive. I mean, most of the policies that I can think of are operating within the structure of you should be able to spend more time with your children, more and more and more time. And, you know, I've taken parental leave for both of my children, and that that time was really important to me. But there is some issue here that I think is a little bit harder to conceptualize or resolve between, you know, what does it look like to say from a policy or a culture

• 36:07Ezra Klein?

  perspective, that we like children and we think children are great, and that it's not supposed to be exactly a whole other job?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Man, this is so thorny and important. And I think it gets to the heart of this broader demographic issue around total fertility rates, Ezra, because what we're talking about is how we spend our time minute to minute, day to day with our children feels often wonderful and often very exhausting. That's just the truth of contemporary life as a parent today. And I think back to what you just said about parental leave. I also took paid parental leave with my daughter. And I look back on that time thinking, I'm so glad I had it. I'm so glad I survived it because it was really hard. And I want to draw a comparison to Sweden for a moment to drive this point home. Because virtually

• 37:04Speaker 01

  all parents take substantial paid parental leave, they have also built a number of infrastructural supports to help parents during this time. So, for example, there are community centers attached to public parks where parents regularly go when they're on parental leave and their other, you know, if they're partnered, their partner has gone back to work. And there are little classes or meetups or Informal gatherings or little child centered activities like a little music class or something, you know, your baby might be eight months old, but you just kind of sit and play and do something that gets you out of the house and around other people who are going through the same thing you are. And to me, this source of communal support

• 37:48Speaker 01

  sounded absolutely vital to parents I interviewed in Germany and Sweden. It got them out of the house. It got them around other people. It got them in conversation with other parents who are struggling with the same thing, like introducing your child to solid foods for the first time is a really big deal and being able to talk about that with other parents rather than sitting at home stressed on your phone, trying to figure out the right way to cut up blackberries so that your child doesn't choke on it. It's much easier when you're having these conversations in community. And I think parenting in isolation here in the States is part of what it makes it so profoundly difficult, exhausting and overwhelming to be a parent in the US and having abundant playgrounds.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  I mean, Ezra, you walk around Sweden, I should talk about Stockholm in particular, urban areas. They are flooded with gorgeous parks and playgrounds for kids and families flood there as soon as kids get out of daycare. And it's so fun to not be able to walk more than a block or two without stumbling across one of these. It is an immensely family friendly, cultural environment and also built infrastructural environment that feels so different from the US.

• 38:58Ezra Klein?

  I want to pick up on a tension that I think is like lurking here because we're talking about intensive parenting. We're talking about being the ideal worker. And we're talking about all of these as external pressures. But there's also the internal pressure, the intrinsic motivation and the pressure of one's own identity, where one derives their meaning from. I mean, you and I have now both confessed to finding parental leave beautiful and hard.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:26Ezra Klein?

  And for me, one reason it's hard, and I recognize not everybody has a job they love and derive tremendous meaning from, but I'm lucky to have that. And a lot of people I know have that. And in general, our society is set up to tell people to get a lot of meaning from their work. And this is something people, I think, correctly critique. But nevertheless, we have built, I mean, from the time you are young, right? You are in school, you're being pushed into standardized testing, pushed into bolstering your college application resume with all these extracurriculars. Then you go to college, then, you know, and eventually, like, this is all to get a job and a career, and then to advance in your career. And so we train everybody at this very deep level from very early on to put a tremendous

• 40:08Ezra Klein?

  amount of their self-worth into how their career is going and what is happening in their career and what is happening in their work. And then all of a sudden, you have children, and the demand is to first shift a tremendous amount of self-identity to your parenting, to your family. But also, they're just, I think, at some level, you can only be so good a parent and a worker at the same time. And that's not just the outside world asking it of you, it's the inside world, to say nothing of any hobbies you might have, to say nothing of like what it means to be a person yourself. But to have a culture that is so built around professional identity, and then also prizes

• 40:50Ezra Klein?

  intensive parenting, you know, I just wonder if that is actually a tension you can resolve.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Good question, Ezra. And I think important to this conversation is kind of rendering visible the truth that, as you said, lots of folks aren't fortunate enough to be in jobs that, from which they derive meaning and fulfillment. But of course, jobs in the United States are also the primary way that we access security for ourselves and our families, right? Our healthcare is tied closely to our employment these days, or security and other benefits, right, are tied to our employment. So not only is this about self-identity and fulfillment, but I think part of it is about what it means to secure. To create security for yourself and your family long term. And I'm right there with you. My job matters a lot to me. I love being a professor and I also really love being a mom.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  But I have about as wonderful a set of resources at my disposal, both in my personal life with my wonderful partner, who's quite egalitarian in our family, and also on the job to help me have what I might call the ideal, probably work-family balance of anyone I can think of. And yet, Ezra, I am still exhausted.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  I heard this from my American interviewees all the time. They are obsessed with the concept of time because they feel like they are short on it constantly. Not enough time, carving out time, eking out time. I thought to myself before leaving for work, maybe I won't make my bed so that I can get to work five minutes earlier in the morning because I need to meet a deadline. And when I zoom out and look at myself thinking that question, I'm like, this is insanity. Whether or not I make my bed has no bearing on whether my day is going to go poorly or well. But it doesn't matter how many policy supports I have. The fact that my job is very intensive and demanding and caring for my daughter is very intensive and demanding is a tension that I don't think can be resolved by even the best set of policies and resources.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  And in truth, it's just because parenting is hard, right? Both the time and the resources necessary to do it are kind of non-negotiable. What I would really love is to live in some sort of cohousing community where my dear friends, who I want to co-parent with, share, for example, a communal kitchen and we rotate meals and cleaning responsibilities. Because the isolation of feeling like my partner and I are raising our kid without community support to me is part of why this feels so exhausting.

• 43:20Ezra Klein?

  Oh, see, now you're really talking my language. All I want here is to move to a future of utopian co-parenting communes.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Yes, right? Let's make it happen.

• 43:28Ezra Klein?

  That's my, that's my actual solution to all this.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Right. And that means we have to change the structure, the architecture of our homes and our neighborhoods. We have to think creatively and expansively about what it means to create families for ourselves that give us the support and the meaning and fulfillment that we all both need and deserve. You've had an episode before about what kind of relationships you would have if you could choose them, right? You've had episodes about polyamory and folks who are co-parenting, right? You and I were just talking about co-housing communes. I think we need to think again much more creatively and expansively about envisioning the life we want for ourselves than the pretty current, limited and limiting set of options we envision.

• 44:07Ezra Klein?

  The only thing we have to change is everything.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Just everything, no big deal.

• 44:37Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that operates in the background here is just like this enormous crushing guilt. I think I'm a pretty good parent. I try really hard. I have a very close relationship with my kids. I just constantly feel guilty. And they make me feel guilty, to be fair. They're very good at that. And then I also feel guilty sometimes at work. I'm pretty good at my job and, but, you know, like, everything is just, you're always making choices, taking it from one or the other, to say then nothing of how often am I calling my family? Am I showing up for my friends, right? It's not possible to do everything as well as you want to do it. Am I taking care of myself? I was so impressed that you sometimes make your bed like that. That sounds wonderful, but, but yeah, you must, you must really time-rich to be making your bed daily.

• 45:18Ezra Klein?

  Rachel Cohen at Vox had a really interesting piece a couple of months back about how millennials are coming to dread motherhood and parenthood. And how the sort of dominant language discussion, I mean, even in this conversation about it, it really frontloads this set of just really negative feelings. And she writes, quote, "For at least the last decade, women my age have absorbed cultural messaging that motherhood is thankless and depleting, straining careers, health and friendships, and destroying sex lives. Today, it's genuinely difficult to find mainstream portrayals of moms who are not stressed to the brink, depressed, isolated, or increasingly resentful."

• 45:57Ezra Klein?

  What do you see in the way that the portrayal and conversation about motherhood has changed in recent decades and what it looks like in different cultures?

• 46:08Speaker 01

  I think Rachel is right in her depiction of how we think about motherhood here in the United States. I think that that dread is real. And I mentioned that I took paid leave with my daughter after she was born. And I would say like the six month mark is about when your little bean becomes like a person you can interact with in a way that feels fulfilling. But I remember telling a girlfriend who was pregnant, "My daughter is so fun. I have so much fun with her." And she got teary and said, "You do? She's fun? You have fun with her?" And I said, "Absolutely." Like, taking her to the tile

• 46:50Speaker 01

  store with me and to pick out glasses at Warby Parker, it's so much more fun because she's along for the ride with me than if I was there by myself. And this was kind of revelatory for her. And she said, "Thank you for sharing that with me because no one has talked to me about it being fun to have kids." And the truth is, it is so fun to hang out with my daughter. She makes me laugh all day long. In addition to it being exhausting to care for her, we have a blast together. And I think the truth is that most US parents lack the time and resources to access the wonderful parts of parenthood. And to me,

• 47:30Speaker 01

  that is the devastating consequence of this lack of public policy support for parents. And this is why it looks very different in other countries. As you mentioned, Swedish moms, for me, talk about spending wonderful time with their children, and they also feel guilty. The difference is that they can use the policies available to them to alleviate that guilt. So moms in Sweden did tell me they... Wanted to make sure they were getting enough time with their children. They worried about their children's well being. They worried about their working hours. However, moms could use policies like schedule flexibility, as I mentioned, to spend more time with their children if that's what they wanted, right? Many parents in Sweden told me that they would, for example,

• 48:15Speaker 01

  pick up their children every day from daycare at 3 P. M. in order to spend the kind of quality time with them that gave them meaning and fulfillment. And again, that joy and happiness we've been discussing. And having more time and resources to access the joy to me feels like a crucial piece of the puzzle that we're missing here.

• 48:34Ezra Klein?

  But is this just a time and resources question? So something in my mind here is you go back to 2007. The U. S. Total fertility rate is 2.12. So it's fallen by more than 16% since then. And our family policy did not get worse. Whether we're working did not change dramatically. But I do think there's a way in which digital media and social media and everything else has created across a lot of domains, a preference for highly negative conversations. Everything in politics is terrible. Parenting is terrible. I'm super anxious. You know, we're seeing a big teen mental health crisis. And I do wonder sometimes if it hasn't become harder to talk about anything being good, right? If you say something is good, you have to like confess your privilege in six different

• 49:17Ezra Klein?

  ways before you do so. Yeah, I was just thinking when you were telling that story about your daughter. There's actually nobody in the world, in the entire world, and I have like the most doting mother. I have friends who adore me. I have a great marriage. Nobody in the world is nicer to me than my five year old. Nobody is more purely nice to me than he is.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  What a beautiful statement.

• 49:39Ezra Klein?

  And this is not something I talk about that much. I do wonder, to Rachel's point, if there isn't a way that the conversation feeds on itself, if it becomes self fulfilling, right? It is safe to confess your exhaustion. It is not safe to confess your joy. But also, there's something about the things we learn how to notice in our world. The stories we tell ourselves also become the stories we exist in, right? If we are taught to notice what is so hard, we will primarily notice what is so hard. If we're taught to feel guilty all the time and we are hearing everybody else feeling guilty all the time, we will feel guilty all the time. And so I do wonder if this is all about policy and material resources because fertility rates are going down fast.

• 50:24Ezra Klein?

  But it's not like the world is getting worse fast in terms of those things. Most family policy has gotten better. People have gotten richer. And, you know, we're still seeing these declines. And so it does seem to me there's got to be something happening that is beyond, that is not just policy and money and time.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Yes, and this gets back to the issue of culture. I think you're spot on here, Ezra. First of all, I would love to hear more about how nice your son is to you. That sounds like a fabulous topic of conversation to me.

• 50:53Ezra Klein?

  Four-part series.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  The truth is here, you're right. We do not talk about the more positive aspects. You know, you mentioned guilt, Ezra. To me, guilt matters a lot here. I wrote an article about guilt across these four countries because to me it is an internalized way we see these cultural ideals manifesting in our sense of self. And to me, that's a big problem and we need to push back on it. I also want to interject here with a point about inequality. Often, when I interviewed women here in the US, when they mentioned taking two months off for paid parental leave, when they mentioned that they like the childcare that their kid always enrolled at, they always, always followed it up with telling me how lucky they were.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  I'm really lucky that I got two months off of paid leave, which again, Swedes would be appalled at. I'm really fortunate that we can afford a good quality daycare for my kid. And to me, this is a way that socioeconomically advantaged folks deal with the discomfort of living in a deeply unequal society where they know other folks are way less fortunate, less privileged, right? So me complaining about my kid and then following it up with, oh, but I'm so lucky, is one way to address this strident inequality. And in the other three countries in Europe where I conducted interviews, in Italy and Sweden and Germany, moms did not use a discourse of privilege to talk about the things that they appreciated by way of support.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  They talked about it with a sense of entitlement, as a right to have time with their children, to have paid parental leave, to have good quality care for their children. And that, to me, feels very different about the US compared to these other countries is that we feel grateful for anything because, again, we are told to think that child rearing and our family's wellbeing is our personal and private responsibility. And that's just not how all these other societies structure it.

• 52:50Ezra Klein?

  But there's also a way in which that discourse can lead us to flatten ways in which the data doesn't back up what that would imply. So I'm just looking here at a chart of birth rates in the United States in 2019 by household income. And the birth rates are higher when you go down the income ladder, not up. People making 200,000 or more, people making 150,000 or more are having fewer children than people making 25,000 or less, people making 50,000 or less. There's a recent Pew survey where 80% of respondents described parenting as enjoyable, quote, "all or most of the time." But crucially, low-income parents, Black parents, Hispanic parents were most likely to rate it highly, not least likely to rate it highly.

• 53:35Ezra Klein?

  What do you make of that?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  I have seen these statistics, and to me, this has to do with, again, the sorts of privileges that accrue to folks in positions of advantage means that the opportunity cost to having children is much higher when you are advantaged. When you have a degree that gives you access to a variety of fabulous jobs, the idea of having children and perhaps, honestly, having to step away from or pivot your trajectory in that fantastic career trajectory looks very different when you're advantaged compared to when you, in the United States anyway, don't have access to those sorts of opportunities in the paid labor market or, you know, in the world of education, for example.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  And there's research by Kathy Eden, a sociologist with low-income mothers, who talk about putting parenting before marriage. And they talk about how much, again, meaning and fulfillment they derive from parenting and how prioritizing that over a job or even a marriage mattered because it was a source of stability and a source of...

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Fulfillment and connection that they desperately desired. And I understand completely why that would be the case.

• 54:50Ezra Klein?

  And this opens up to the question of values and meaning. I mean, something we observe not in every single subgroup, but I think overall this is true, is that more religious communities have more children than more secular communities. And you know, what you were just saying, that when you're more privileged, you have more of these choices of affluence, more places to get not just meaning, but again, going back to something we talked about at the beginning, fun, happiness, delight, right? You know, you're deciding whether to do more international travel or not, you know, deciding what to do in your career. And, you know, I wonder about the values, but there is something that, you know, when you observe it at a population level, about this question of societies that understand

• 55:34Ezra Klein?

  themselves as in continuity, cultures that understand themselves as about what comes after them, and cultures that are highly individualistic, highly built around not just individual choice, but individual satisfaction, such that it makes a ton of sense to ask the question, is having children going to make me happier? Will it be a more pleasant or less pleasant choice for the next seven years? And if the answer is less pleasant, maybe that's a good reason not to do it. And it's funny, because on any individual level, like, I think that choice is totally fine to make. And then when you see it happening across a society, you begin to wonder, well, like, what do I think of a society that just doesn't value children on their own merits that much because it's kind of a pain in the butt for a lot of the adults?

• 56:20Speaker 01

  It does make you wonder. And to be honest with you, Ezra, as a sociologist, as a feminist, I don't really care about our total fertility rate as a policy target. If you asked me, I would tell you, we should open up our borders and let immigration solve our, quote unquote, fertility problem. I don't think that we should try to be using policy as a lever to encourage more births. What I do care deeply about is creating a society in which adults can make choices for themselves that bring them, again, as we've been talking about today, joy, meaning, fulfillment, happiness, a sense of wholeness. That's what matters to me.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  I want to create a society where people feel they have the opportunity and power. I call this in my, my book. Rather than this goal of work-family balance for parents, I really think about the term "justice," right? Thinking about this as political in orientation, that parents really deserve, men and women alike, the opportunity and the power to participate fully in paid work and in child rearing, should they elect to do so. And supporting parents to give them a multiplicity of options to pursue those identities is my goal, not just increasing the birth rate.

• 57:43Ezra Klein?

  Let's say you do care about the birth rate. And I hear you that you may not. Given that we've talked about the ways policy does not have a lot of leverage on this, what does change culture? Because I think the place where I get a little nervous about a pure choice framework is that the choices we even want to make, and we're not even getting to make those. I mean, on average, people want to have more children in the United States than they are having. But people's, the choices they want to make are very dependent on the culture around them, what the people who they know are doing. In a world where a lot of people have four kids, having four kids becomes something you can really imagine. In a world where almost nobody does, it's like, you know, you're the unusual couple of four kids. In a world where all of your friends

• 58:26Ezra Klein?

  don't have kids until they're early to mid 30s, having kids at 24 becomes a very, almost a countercultural decision. So, you know, individual choice, it's so also communal that I almost never know how to think about it. But how do you change culture? Like, if you wanted to have a culture, if you think, as I kind of think, that our culture is too tilted towards the achievements of work, and just not towards other things, not just family, honestly, but just living, what is the leverage on culture?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Oh, Ezra, this is what keeps me up at night, thinking about culture and social change, positive social change. But you're right, our reference groups really matter. And I think this era of the, you know, digital age in which we now live means that perhaps our reference groups are opening up because we have access to understanding what life looks like for other people in a way that we didn't when we didn't have, you know, the world at our fingertips on our phones. And to me, culture change here is absolutely vital, especially when we're thinking about, for example, gender, thinking about who can and should care for children. How do you bring about revolutionary social change?

• 59:40Speaker 01

  I do know scholars in this arena talk about what they call punctuated equilibrium, that things kind of stay the same until there are dramatic events that really upend things. And that often is an opportunity that creates fissures in our cultural collective imagination, where we can envision how life might look a little bit different than it does right now. And to me, the pandemic was, there was a lot going on in the pandemic. Is it really to start a conversation today about parenting and employment? We are not going to hope for another life upending and tragic circumstance like that, of course, but the pandemic brought about an absolute about-face in some of our understandings. For example, in the world of work, the possibility for remote work opened up tremendous possibilities for parents, for example.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Activists have been calling for more flexible remote work options for decades, both for feminist reasons, also folks in the disability movement have been calling for remote work also to bring about more autonomy for disabled folks in their world of work. So, big disruptions like the pandemic, which is of course entirely unexpected, can bring about cultural change, shifting the cultural narrative about what is possible for adults. To me, requires thinking broadly and expansively in kind of liberatory terms and turning to communities that maybe we don't often put the spotlight on to think about how we might do this differently.

• 1:01:02Ezra Klein?

  So my colleague Ross Douthat wrote this essay in 2020 that I think about sometimes. And he's taken on this argument that it's selfish to not have children. And he kind of flips it on its head. He says, quote, "The deepest reason to have more kids is self-centered in a radically different way. Having a bunch of kids is a form of life most likely to force you toward kenosis, self-emptying, the experience of what it means to live entirely for someone other than yourself." And what Ross goes on to say in this piece is that we are getting meaning wrong. Ross comes from a different politics than I do, but he's more critical of the sort of individual rights-focused, secular liberalism that dominates particularly in a lot of elite circles now.

• 1:01:43Ezra Klein?

  And this idea that you will live a more rooted, meaningful life if you were actually more tethered towards responsibility, towards community, towards family, towards others, is actually something we should be pursuing for ourselves, not just for others, right? It's not sacrificial. Actually, what we're doing here might sound good, but it's not the way to kind of pursue a deeper happiness. I'm curious how you think about that.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  That's powerful and compelling to me. And you're right, perhaps different from how I tend to think about this. But we think about parenting sometimes through this lens of altruism. But of course, having children can be deeply meaningful for ourselves. I think parenting can be the utmost act of selflessness and selfishness at the exact same time. I don't think we need to use either-or language to talk about what it means to be a parent and to caregiver and to submit your time and resources toward the well-being of someone other than yourself. I think of that as something that can give you tremendous meaning, I guess, of course, in the emptying, but also in the fulfillment.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  At the same time, we can think of that through the lens of kind of both and rather than either or.

• 1:02:57Ezra Klein?

  And then always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Oh, three books. I mentioned one already by Mary Blair Loy called Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives. This is a groundbreaking interview study with women executives in the financial services industry. And she, Mary, is really powerful in leveraging this interview data to show us the moral weight of these competing devotions between work and family. I think it's a must read for anyone interested in this topic. A second book is by Dawn Dow called Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burdens of Middle Class Parenthood. And I think of Dawn's book as this fabulous, crucial complement to my own about the necessity

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  of an intersectional approach to studying work and family. And she really shows us that the frameworks researchers are using to study middle-class families tend to really focus on white moms' experiences, which are unsurprisingly very dissimilar to how African-American, middle-class moms are navigating often very different expectations about breadwinning and caregiving. So I adore Dawn's book and encourage folks to read Mothering While Black if they've got the time. And the third book is not a sociological one. It's by Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold History's Wild Possibilities. She's also written a book called Men Explain Things to Me, which I find fantastic. But Hope in the Dark, to me, is this sort of much-needed balm for the kind of political

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  cynicism and despair of our contemporary moment. And it implores us to really continue to engage in collective action, even and actually especially when our future feels so uncertain and unknowable these days. She begs us to not kind of sit in despair, but in fact, she talks about hope as this mechanism for action that I really love. And this idea that, she says, "Hope is not a lottery ticket. You can sit on the sofa and clutch feeling lucky." I say it because hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency, because hope should shove you out the door. And this, to me, is how we bring about the kind of cultural and political change we desperately need here in the US so that adults are able to make the decisions that

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  feel right for them when it comes to combining work and family.

• 1:05:22Ezra Klein?

  Caitlin Collins, thank you very much.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:05:35Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klein Show was produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu and Kristin Lynn. We've original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Samuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.