How can you make your company more competitive in the war for talent? By understanding the pressure on working parents. Best-selling author Tim Carney, author of the new book, “Family Unfriendly” has a prescription that goes deeper than the standard answers of parental leave and childcare.
He lays out the reasons working parents find it so hard to balance career and family. And he articulates why young workers are putting off families precisely because they don’t think they can handle both at the same time. These factors combine to cost companies money, exacerbate turnover, and undermine productivity and innovation. For America to remain competitive, we must confront a fact that has rocked economies around the world: Birthrates have plummeted to all-time lows, and fewer people are getting married.
Tim Carney, a father of six, will explore why companies must understand that the challenges faced today are more than just about work and economics: American culture, in general, is hostile to families. By understanding this, employers can take concrete steps to become more family-friendly in a family-unfriendly culture.
Carney lays out the little things and the big things that make a workplace family-friendly. He also articulates the steps that are most transformative – many of which go beyond benefits – to right your company’s internal culture. Employment data and sociological research reveal that the workplaces with the happiest employees are the places where management says that family comes first, where this message gets to conscientious working mothers and fathers, and where they can see this commitment in visible, concrete actions.
Tim’s inclusive and thoughtful game plan includes the best practices of the most family-friendly employers. He explains which policies don't work as well as expected. Most importantly, he spells out the cultural touchstones that make an employer family-friendly. Employees who feel supported in the most important work of their lives – marriage and parenthood – will be healthier, more balanced, more invested, more productive, and more loyal employees. Tim will equip your company to reach this new vision in a positive and affirming way.

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. Researched over three years and written in between rec baseball games and church picnics where nobody was watching the kids, Family Unfriendly is deeply wise, energetically told, and destined to be the most consequential book about parenting in years.
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