The Care Dilemma by David Goodhart review – a flawed study of family life

The Road to Somewhere author argues that the liberating impact of feminism has harmed our children in a book shot through with claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny

It was mostly in the small hours that I first read David Goodhart’s new book on caring. By coincidence, it arrived as I was trying to look after my dying father at one end of the country and my own family at the other, while simultaneously attempting to work. Well, that’s life: there are millions of us in the same boat, which is why a deeper exploration of care feels so very overdue. But perhaps it hasn’t been Goodhart’s life, exactly. When it came to his own four children and elderly parents, he confesses, like many men of his generation he “played a subordinate role” to his now ex-wife and his sisters respectively. As a man tackling this topic now, he writes, he’s braced for some flak. Well, yes; and perhaps particularly as the kind of man who writes that while the early days of lockdown might have been tough on women, “the story in the UK was also one of people finding domestic life unexpectedly rewarding”, which may not be exactly how parents of stir-crazed toddlers remember it. But anyway, back to the book.

This is the third in a trilogy that began in 2017 with the thought-provoking The Road to Somewhere, which immortalised the two warring tribes of Brexit as Everywheres (liberal, cosmopolitan, faintly haughty urban elites) v Somewheres (socially conservative, anchored in provincial towns, annoyed at being condescended to). This time his focus is family life and fertility, a hot topic for British Tories obsessed with the idea that millennials aren’t having enough babies, but also for Trump-era Republicans and the European far right.

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