What we’re about
This is a book club for those who are interested in reading and discussing books about topics important to parents who have concerns in raising their children in the modern era. Education, social media, marriage, community and cultural forces will be a strong emphasis and gratefully many books are being written on the subjects that concern parents.
Examples of books we may begin tackling include:
-“Family Unfriendly” by Tim Carney which is about the growing anti-natalist bias in our culture and what policies can better serve families,
-“12 Rules for Life” by Jordan B. Peterson which besides being required reading for millennial and Gen Z conservatives includes excellent advice on parenting,
-“The Coddling of the American Mind” by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff which was among the first books to identify social media as a concern for young minds, and
-“Irreversible Damage” by Abigail Shrier which postulates that the recent surge in teenage girls identifying as trans and non-binary is a social epidemic.
Other books might include “Full Time” by David Bahnsen about embracing the purposefulness of work that supports the family unit, “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam about the dissolution of communities and the subsequent alienation of the individual, or “A Time to Build” by Yuval Levin about the importance of institutions in shaping young people and bolstering communities.
What I hope to guard this group against is “purity spiraling” - which is where a group with a shared ideological perspective devolves into arguments about who is the most pure according to its values - and factionalism. I wish for this to be a big tent that doesn’t adhere strictly to the tenets of a specific strain of conservatism, rigidity to specific positions, nor devotion to any given figure in its ambit. I hope for this to be an inclusive group where independents, moderates and even liberals who share similar concerns about parenting feel free to voice their opinions, contribute and be heard. And you may notice that some of the books we take on are not written by right-of-center figures; these can be the most insightful because they address topics that are cause for concern on both left and right, rather than contribute to echo chambering and groupthink. I also encourage people who don't yet have kids but are interested in these issues to participate.
This is no longer the COVID era so meetings will be largely - if not entirely - in person. I’m open to suggestions about places to hold meetings, and want to encourage members to offer up book ideas and post casually about shorter-form articles of interest to conservative parents - parents being the operative factor; videos about Tucker Carlson’s views of the war in Ukraine are foreign policy, and beyond the narrower scope of this group.
I also hope to offer events from time to time that offer like-minded parents a chance to just meet one another outside of a book club format, exchange information about the issues that face Lincoln and the greater Nebraska community, arrange playdates for kids, picnics, cookouts, that sort of thing.
