📚 I’m halfway through Matt Feeney’s Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age and it is excellent:

For my part, as both an anxious and pugnacious dad, the idea of that this great competition in which my wife apparently birthed our children requires us to submit the inner workings of our family to the needs of an alien, immoral, technocratic, utilitarian system of achievement kind of pisses me off. And the idea that I have to suck up to certain guardians and gatekeepers of opportunity within this system, and my parenting should be devoted to urging my kids into this sucking up as well, roils my fatherly pride. It makes me want to recommit to the idea that my family is a place apart, a vantage from which I can look upon these forges and these people and tell them, No.

This defiant retreat has a romantic appeal, I admit, and it might be a healthy move for parents to make in the short term. But as a general outlook it is counterproductive in the longer run. It takes for granted our atomized predicament as families, and thus reinforces it. Admitting this leads to some of ironic conclusions that might be hard for America’s more conservative defenders of family life to accept: that the autonomy of families is actually undermined by our system of individualized competition; that reorienting the nuclear family away from this anxious striving and toward its traditional rewards and inherent virtues might require heightened solidarity in our social outlook.