Our culture tells parents there’s one best way to raise kids: enroll them in a dozen activities, protect them from trauma, and get them into the most expensive college you can. If you can’t do that, don’t bother.

How is that going? Record rates of anxiety, depression, medication, debts, loneliness and more. In Family Unfriendly, bestselling author and Washington Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney says it’s time to end this failed experiment in overparenting.

Have more kids, have more fun, cancel the travel soccer games, let your kids wander off, and give them deeper sources of meaning than material success.

This is an old-fashioned view, but every day the evidence validates it. Drawing on rigorous research—both as a reporter and as a dad of six—Carney demonstrates why modern parenting is so misguided. The high standards set for modern American parenting are unrealistic and setting parents—and our kids—up to fail.

Lunch will be provided.

Timothy P. Carney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on civil society, family, localism, religion in America, economic competition, and electoral politics. He is concurrently a senior columnist at the Washington Examiner.

Mr. Carney’s forthcoming book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, will be published by HarperCollins in March 2024. He is also the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse (HarperCollins, 2019), which was a Washington Postbestseller; Obamanomics (Regnery Publishing, 2009); and The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), which was awarded the 2008 Culture of Enterprise award by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

In addition to his Washington Examiner columns, Mr. Carney has been published widely, including in the Atlantic, National Review, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. His television appearances include CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and PBS NewsHour.

Mr. Carney has a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis.