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How Liberals Talk About Children

Many left-leaning, middle-class Americans speak of kids as though they are impositions, or means to an end.

The book sometimes feels a bit too online; the size of the anti-natalist movement, for example, which periodically rages on social media, looms larger in Berg and Wiseman’s telling than I imagine it might in real life. The book is best read, I think, as a corrective to liberal neuroses about having kids, one that feels necessary at a time when the right wants to dictate the terms of the family, whether through the banning of abortion or anti-trans legislation or what gets taught in schools. But when was the last time you heard or read a full-throated case for the public school not merely as a necessity but as a great resource, a place where children can make friends with everyone within a community and where they can learn what we, apparently, have forgotten—that the problems of the burning world will not be solved by individuals?

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