Family life in America is changing. Tectonic forces are at work, and the context in which families strive to maintain loving relationships, make cherished memories, and pass on stories, traditions, and values will look markedly different in 2030 and 2040 than it has in the recent past. Capita’s goal is to help strengthen and safeguard, in the face of these forces, the stability, quality, and predictability of family life—features that, in turn, deeply shape child development.

To be specific: The nation is experiencing widespread loneliness and social disconnection, undergirded by what some consider a crisis in meaning-making. The chaotic effects of climate change regularly plunge communities into calamity. America is also undergoing unprecedented population aging and declining family formation. At the same time, certain trends offer hope: the corner seems to have turned on unfettered smartphone and social media usage by youth, attachment to faith communities is beginning to rebound, and the medical field continues to generate marvel after marvel. On top of all of this, advances in artificial intelligence are injecting massive amounts of uncertainty and variance into any future scenario.

In short, this way lies both peril and possibility for the family.

American family policy, as it stands, is not ready to meet this moment. What policies the nation does have—for the United States has never had a formal set of goals around the family akin to our national economic or defense goals—are generally disconnected and disjointed. They prioritize funding streams, programmatic interventions, and age bands over a holistic view of family life and the broader systems and conditions that mold it. Too little attention is paid to ensuring all parts of public policy work in tandem to support the conditions families need to flourish.

This is why Capita’s Family Policy Lab is proud to present the Unifying Family Policy series. Our goal is to lay the foundation for the family policy agenda that is needed now and in the medium-term (a period we define as going through 2040), one that will allow families to successfully and resiliently navigate this era.

As family policy scholar Karen Bogenschneider notes, “Family policy refers to a perspective or framework for understanding and thinking about the consequences of policies and programs for families…It is not limited to the specific laws or regulations labeled as family policy.” We think of each of the Unifying Family Policy products as threads in a tapestry; each is necessary to form the whole. It is our hope that policymakers, advocates, scholars, think tanks, philanthropies, and practitioners find these products useful. Each is a combination of forward-looking casemaking and actionable recommendations. Just as importantly, no single product in this series is intended to stand alone: they are mutually reinforcing. The series will be regularly updated with additional publications as we build out the tapestry.

Audre Lorde famously said that, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” We might add, here in 2025, that we do not have a single-issue future. Or, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once put it, “a nation without a conscious family policy leaves to chance and mischance an area of social reality of the utmost importance, which in consequence will be exposed to the untrammeled and frequently thoroughly undesirable impact of other forces.”

The questions thus loom large: What does the family policy agenda of the next 15 years look like? How can we start preparing now? Either America will embrace a family lens across all policy areas, or the American family will suffer. If we do embrace such a lens, however, the future for the family may well be boundlessly bright. The choice is ours.

Elliot Haspel is a Senior Fellow at Capita.

Joe Waters is Capita’s Co-Founder and CEO.

Caroline Cassidy is Capita’s Chief Strategy Officer.