Katherine Boyle Profile picture
Apr 13 5 tweets 2 min read Read on X
One of the greatest evils of my 90s childhood was the sedation and casual drugging of young boys for acting like boys in a school system built for little girls.

And it’s only now that we’re finally allowed to ask questions. Decades too late. Image
My father (the last of the old-fashioned family docs) used to say if you want to remain healthy, stay as far away from the hospital as you possibly can.

The same maxim could be said for children: you want healthy kids, keep them far away from grand medical experiments, especially when it relates to their developing minds.

Well-meaning people will try well-intentioned things that only get tossed aside decades later when it’s far too late.
Parents are faced with the “what do we medicalize” question constantly. It starts at birth. Six hours into my son’s life, he was immediately “diagnosed with a tongue-tie,” something I had never heard of but was told is an easy fix that would help all sorts of things. When I asked how many babies get the tongue-tie fix at this research hospital, the answer was “40 percent.” Forty percent of kids have an issue that didn’t exist 25 years ago?

Tongue-ties are a small, meaningless thing. But medicalize the small, you start medicalizing the big.

Moms and Dads must play defense from Day One.
23 Percent of American 17-year-old boys have an ADHD diagnosis.

Stop. Medicalizing. Boyhood. Image

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More from @KTmBoyle

Feb 24
Technology and the Family

Thank you so much, Tony, for that kind introduction. It’s a pleasure to be here today at the American Enterprise Institute to speak about the opportunity in front of us to rethink technology’s relationship to the family. When I say relationship, many of us think of the screens we hold in our hands or the amount of time our toddlers spend watching Cocomelon. And those are all important debates. Today, I want to discuss a deeper, philosophical alliance between technology and the institution of the family.

We recently watched the Vice President head to France where he discussed the importance of American dominance in artificial intelligence, and I’ve been struck by the new administration’s focus on innovation. Those of us listening to the inaugural address just last month couldn’t help but notice references to colonizing Mars, the split atom, holding all the world’s knowledge in the palm of our hands. It’s refreshing to see technology celebrated as the engine of American economic growth after years of Washington denigrating it. And we’re now finally seeing enthusiasm for how government can leverage our technology sector to promote American Dynamism by unleashing limitless energy, deterring conflict, and manufacturing abundance of all kinds.

And indeed, investing in American Dynamism my day job, my life’s work and my calling. But today, I want to talk about my other job. My most consequential job according to the Ordo Amoris, a job that is deeply tied to building American Dynamism in the most concrete way. And that is my job and my duty as Mother. For all the talk of Technology and the State, there should be much more talk about that other institution that is perpetually at war with it.

The Institution of the Family.

All of history is a war between the family and the state. Any college student studying Plato’s Republic learns quickly of this conflict, though it’s often only discussed in political theory classes. But in practice, it’s clear these two institutions are often incompatible in their quest for control over how we live, what we believe, what we worship, our history and our daily reality. If this sounds a bit hyperbolic because the family now seeminglysits comfortably inside the state, that is because the state has been winning this civilizational war against the family for decades.

The long 20th Century should teach us this. It is a story of American growth and excellence, but it can also be accurately told as a story of the weakening of the family. It begins with thefundamental transformation of industry, where mothers and fathers are pulled from the home to work in factories, then companies. It proceeds with two atrocious world wars in Europe, where millions of families are decimated. The strength of states is greatly intertwined with war—states grow stronger in war while families are literally destroyed. It’s no coincidence that as we look to our European neighbors, we now see a continent subsumed with regulation, censorship, green authoritarianism, and a birth rate that predicts their demise.

A very strong state, yes. But very anemic families.

We then move to Communism and the Cold War, where we see Communism’s brutal attack on the family for both political and psychological reasons. The one-child-policy that ravaged China with forced infanticide wasn’t just to remind mothers that the good of society matters more than the good of her home. It was a reminder that the family is not, nor will ever be powerful enough to compete with the Chinese Communist Party.
Authoritarian regimes always attack the family first. Christian imagery was removed in the Soviet Union for this reason: the core institution at the heart of the Christian Church is the Holy Family. Our myths and stories in the Judeo Christian and Western tradition are ones of tribes, families, lineage, and the authority that comes from them. It’s no surprise then that the Christian story begins with conception and childbirth. And the Holy Family’s lineage ends with a mother watching in horror as the state tortures and murders her son.

I’ll say it again— all of history is a war between the family and the state. The greatest enemy of the family is authoritarianism.

Now, what does all this have to do with Technology?

The adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” always rings very true in Washington. Coalitions are built by identifying the most serious threat and finding common ground from that. Strange bedfellows are sometimes necessary, and to paraphrase Peter Thiel, what does a general, a businessman and a priest have in common except for their shared hatred of communism? For a good half century, the conservative movement in America was a tenuous alliance of business owners, social conservatives and hawks who came together to defeat the 20th Century threat of authoritarianism.

But we are now faced with a new authoritarianism. The Tech Industry, once able to peacefully bury its head in the golden sands of California, has woken up to its most important choice: to ally with the powers of the State— as Big Tech did during theCovid era, becoming the useful pawn of an authoritarian censorship apparatus — or to rapidly course correct and ally itself with decentralized authority.

There is no greater decentralized authority than that of the family, and the philosophy of the early Internet is at its nature, too, one of decentralization. It prizes creative destruction– birth and death and birth again– of ideas and companies, and the freedom that comes from ensuring no central authority can ever control, stifle, or break the long arc of creation and innovation. This is fundamentally the philosophy of technology, and one we must ensure is embedded in our most consequential technologies going forward.

In recent decades, tech has moved away from its natural inclination to support decentralization and open-sourceauthority. Marc Andreessen has called this movement to squashopensource innovation in AI a greater threat to freedom thananything tech has ever experienced, including the most recent social media censorship wars. Indeed, the open-source debate is not merely a heady debate of how the nerds in San Francisco will architect artificial intelligence. It is a political debate of control, and one the family is very familiar with. The same calls for “safety” and “harm avoidance” that regulators use to attack innovators have been used to decimate family rights in education, healthcare and religious freedom for decades, and we should recognize these rhetorical attacks for what they are:disingenuous power grabs.

Much is now being written of the nascent alliance between the so-called Tech Right and this administration, and how weird it is for the transhumanists of Silicon Valley to find common ground with a MAHA mother in Missouri. Except that they have identified a common evil: they know the gravest threat to the flourishing of their business, their industry, their family’s health,and their freedom is a censorious and authoritarian state.

We are now living through a generational political shift, whereby an industry of builders can choose to ally with the most organic, nurturing, and future-focused institution that nature has ever created, the family. And I believe it's in the best interest of both tech and the family to do so.
While this philosophical alignment is important, it doesn’t help a mother with her childcare. It doesn’t lower the cost of education and building a future for our children. The question mothers and fathers care about most is how technology can make their lives easier, safer, and more prosperous.

I want to focus today on three things tech can do to support the family in concrete ways. Indeed, we must do these three things if we want stronger families in this country. 1) We must change the way we work. 2) We must change the way we educate our children. 3) And we must work to radically transform the Culture by making families a priority again. And if we can build trust through these common goals, I believe we’ll see a thriving alliance between tech and the family for generations.

Let’s start with work.

Every major technological innovation fundamentally reshapesboth work and family, whether a physical innovation, as electricity did to spur the Second Industrial Revolution, or a biological innovation, as a single pill led to millions of women entering the workforce in the 20th century. Digital innovation is no different in how it will transform work and family, and we must ensure it truly benefits the family.

At the height of Covid and a few weeks after I gave birth to my first son, I wrote an essay titled “Can Zoom Save the American Family?” At the time I was hopeful that working from home would be a transformative shift to knowledge work. By removing the morning commute a few days a week. By allowing parents to be more present in the family home. And by allowing the “always on” culture of the Internet to replace the 9-to-5 rigidity of sitting at one’s desk. I still believe this is the best 21stCentury model of work.

But recently, we’ve seen many leaders in corporate America demonize work from home, arguing the experiment in their companies has failed. Now, I will concede work from home doesn’t always work—it doesn’t work for companies building in the physical world or when a company— or yes, even a government--- is focused on downsizing or reducing headcount. But I believe work from home should become a common benefit for working mothers of young children.
The white-collar workforce is becoming dominated by women, and women are now entering and graduating college at higher rates than men, an obvious problem for anyone who believes in biology and is watching macro trends in the Western world: the declining birthrate, the increasing age of new mothers and fathers, men dropping out of the workforce entirely. There are some in tech who hope that the Deus ex Machina of economic productivity will be artificial intelligence and automation, but tech must not make accelerationism its singular contribution to this moment.

We must normalize working from home as a benefit for mothersof young children. Not a right, but a benefit. It is more important than fertility benefits, maternity benefits, childcare benefits. I single out mothers here, because we can’t ignore trends showing that women workers are essential to the growth of the American economy—and we desperately need more of those working women to become mothers.

Work from home is not the only way technology is supporting the family. It is making the family more entrepreneurial. Etsy, Shopify, payments technology and small business software has made it possible for anyone anywhere in America to become a small business. To turn their hobbies into a storefront. For all the denigration of the influencer economy, there are countless mothers and fathers who’ve used the tooling of the Internet to sell their ideas and their goods from the comfort of their kitchen table. This means a mother can now earn income while her children nap. From the school parking lot. And it means she has much more opportunity to support a family from her home.
Read 5 tweets
Nov 8, 2024
My HOA has miscalculated.

They don’t know how prepared I am for war. Image
Headed to Home Depot right now to buy a bigger Santa.
Read 9 tweets
May 24, 2024
One of my more controversial beliefs on raising children is that you probably want to raise theater kids. Theater, debate, speech, song, something that requires performance in front of a room full of people, alone with a spotlight, where if you fail you fail alone.

Learning the embarrassment of forgetting a line or your notes as a kid— and moving on from it —is a valuable skill that’s harder to learn and gets more painful with age. Sports won’t teach a kid this.
Fwiw, you can often tell the founders, politicians and leaders that did debate and theater growing up from the ones who didn’t. There’s a reason for that. Comfort in front of an audience comes from practice.
Also, sports doesn’t teach you to command a room. It gives you confidence under pressure, sure. But a stirring speech to your team when things get tough? That’s a different skill.
Read 5 tweets
Mar 28, 2023
Believe in something. Anything.

You are not enough.



Read 8 tweets
Dec 15, 2021
It’s my son’s first birthday so in true millennial fashion I’m going to talk about me:
A few days after my son was born, I started writing “Can Zoom Save the American Family?” It turned out to be the roadmap for our lives, where we’re working on Zoom, socializing in the metaverse and physically living near family in a corporate family model. boyle.substack.com/p/can-zoom-sav…
After publishing it, one of the comments I heard most often was “How did you find the time to write with a newborn?” The truth is I wrote on my phone while I was rocking him in the middle of the night. I wrote faster and with less self-consciousness than ever before.
Read 12 tweets
Dec 3, 2021
To those at Reagan National Defense Forum #RNDF, if there’s one BLUF you take away from the weekend, you should know: Time is running out with Silicon Valley.
After five years of DOD saying “we want to work with the best startups”, we have, at most, two years before founders walk away and private capital dries up. And many, many startups will go out of business waiting for DOD to award real production contracts.
Some context: In the past five years, thousands of startups have received funding from various innovation orgs. OTAs. STRATFIs. Startups believe they’re getting REAL contracts and many investors do, too.
Read 22 tweets

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