Would you guess that compared to the 20th century, dads in the 21st century spend more time with their kids? You probably know moms work more hours outside the home. But do you know what moms are still spending more time with children even though they’re working more, AND that family size has shrunk?

Timothy Carney is right: something is wrong. In his new book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be (Harper), he writes, “Somehow Mom and Dad have become full-time chaeuffers, Secret Service agents, and playmates—while both parents work full-time jobs.”

He wants us to know that today’s maximum-effort, high-anxiety, low-trust parenting hasn’t produced high-quality parenting. He writes, “Our culture expects a person more and more to handle life on his own, stripped of the support, guidance, expectations, and meaning traditionally provided by religion, community, and extended family. This supposedly ‘liberating’ modernity makes life a lot harder.”

Carney is a father of six children, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and columnist at the Washington Examiner. He wants to show us a “way of life that makes family easier, makes parents less anxious, and makes kids happier.” Who doesn’t want that?

But first we need to see why American civil society has collapsed in the past two generations. We did just that in this episode of Gospelbound as we focused on the effects of secularization on community life in America, especially for the middle and working classes that previously built their social life around church.

“So when you look at low marriage rates and high divorce rates among the working class, I think you chalk that up to a de-churchifying of the working class,” Carney told me. “Not because the sermons from Pastor Brown were so convincing that you should stay together, but that the community support, the modeling of the couple that’s 10 years older, the advice, the mentoring, the norms, the babysitting, the things for your kids to do, et cetera, that was so valuable and that has been lost. So even that collapse in community support we were talking about earlier, that is downstream from the secularization, the unchurchifying of American culture.”