Despite all her grating condescension, you can’t really blame Chappell Roan for noticing that parental despair seems ubiquitous. Maybe it was always this way, the only difference between Now and Then1 being the ability—through the erosion of social stigma plus the advent of social media—to articulate dissatisfaction and attribute its causes so directly. Maybe we are uniquely slighted. Maybe we are uniquely spoiled. I tend to favor the explanation that parenthood in general is “both/and,” in other words, a sharply bimodally distributed experience of difficulty and joy where the experience of difficulty is simply more legible to the outside observer. Parenthood aside, I don’t think difficulty and joy can truly be understood or appreciated in total isolation. Personally, I’ve never exactly been satisfied by ease. Regardless…

Parental despair has become a meme for both left and right, who share a basic consensus that to raise children in America is to subject them to ever-present, slow-rolling harm. Our foods are toxic. Our healthcare system is Kafkaesque. Housing is unaffordable. Education is, too, its publicly accessible versions being irretrievably politicized or ineffectual. There is no national maternity leave. No federal support. No village, no built-in support for the inevitably mentally ill American mother or father. The left’s worst answer: sterilize yourself. The right’s worst answer: abandon the commons to LARP as Amish in the sparsely populated countryside.

Compared to other countries—Sweden, Italy, France, Hungary, whichever—the American family might appear beleaguered and bizarrely unsupported. Fair enough; it isn’t hard to find policies abroad that far exceed ours in, well, let’s call it generosity. But having now spent meaningful time in one of the countries most lauded for its innovative pro-family programs, and having immersed myself in the research and conversations that surround these efforts (I organized a major international conference on the topic, which, by the way, went very well!), I find myself returning to a more simple conclusion, maybe even a hot take:

It is not just good, it is uniquely good to be a parent in America.

In order to explain myself, allow me to first take a step back in time…

In 1831, author and aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, born in 1805 into a family whose fortunes and fates had been rearranged by the enthusiasts of the French Revolution, came to America in order to better understand democracy. Tocqueville saw the expansion of democratic politics as inevitable in light of progressive historical expansion of equality of living conditions, enabled by technological progress, the enlightenment, and the constant, mutual undermining of kings and nobles, which ultimately flattened the credibility of both. Tocqueville’s pedigree had made him particularly sensitive to the world-historical tensions between old world and new, which American democracy represented, and which he rightly judged would prefigure Europe’s future. The result of his trip was Democracy in America, in the words of Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, “at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.”2