As candidates prepare for the 2026 midterm elections, they have the opportunity to address what Americans consistently rank as their top priority: family. Smart candidates who embrace a comprehensive family policy will likely be rewarded at the ballot box. 

What is family policy? Family policy encompasses any policy that directly affects family outcomes—from family formation and partner relationships to economic support, caregiving, and child-rearing. Other policies, such as labor policies, are indirect family policies in that they have the power to shape family dynamics and well-being. Through this lens, nearly every policy decision becomes a family policy decision.

Family policy is rarely treated as a unified or distinct policy area. This must change. The United States needs a comprehensive family policy with a clear, unified goal: to strengthen the stability, predictability, and quality of family life.

Here are five reasons why:

1. Family already matters most to Americans. The Gallup-Aspen Ideas American Values Index survey (April 2025) confirms what elected officials should already know: Americans rank family as their most important value. Politicians who ignore this do so at their peril.
2. Supporting families isn’t merely kindness. It is foundational to social order. Human beings are fundamentally social creatures, and the family is our most basic social unit. When families lack the time and resources to raise their children with dignity and hope—because for example, low-quality jobs don’t provide the time or resources to care for their children—the damage extends beyond individual households. It weakens our entire social fabric. As Michael Novak wrote in 1976, “Political and social planning in a wise social order ought to begin with the axiom: What strengthens the family strengthens society.” Voters understand this. Today’s leaders need to prove they understand it too.
3. Current policy is fragmented and inadequate. Unlike our national economic or defense strategies, the United States has never articulated formal goals around family policy. The policies we do have are disconnected and disjointed—prioritizing funding streams, programmatic interventions, and age bands over a holistic view of family life. We pay too little attention to ensuring all parts of public policy work together to create conditions where families can flourish.
4. Family instability threatens our national future. Unaffordability, housing insecurity, and unpredictable work destabilize family life. Children need stability to thrive, which includes predictable routines, secure relationships, and consistent environments. When families lack this stability, the consequences extend far beyond individual homes, affecting our nation’s future prosperity and security. A family policy would directly address the forces creating instability, helping families build the predictable, secure foundations children need to thrive. If we’re serious about winning the future, a family policy isn’t optional. 
5. Parents are struggling under compounding pressures. When we listen to parents, we hear consistent themes: financial strain, chronic stress, and pessimism about the future. Their challenges aren’t reducible to any single issue: neither child care, nor housing, nor income alone. Their stress emerges from the combination and interplay of multiple factors. A family policy oriented toward strengthening stability, predictability, and the quality of life would comprehensively address these interconnected challenges, making it viable for families to have and raise children. 

Let me illustrate this. As my colleague Elliot Haspel wrote last August

… in the United States, paid leave and child care have long been considered separate if related issues—cousins, perhaps. In general, paid leave and child care policies are separately negotiated and go through separate legislative committees. They have historically had separate though overlapping advocacy coalitions. As constructed, the policy areas’ underlying philosophies and goals are not fully aligned, nor are they both necessarily focused on what babies need throughout their first year, or how to best help parents or other close caregivers provide care during that period.

As a result, child care for infants (defined here as children under the age of one) is a massive challenge not only for individual families, but also for human development more generally. It is also a thorn in the side of those fighting for a strong external child care system: infant care is expensive for parents and expensive for providers to offer, and it frequently becomes a political flashpoint. 

A comprehensive family policy would recognize that new parents don’t experience their first year through separate policy silos—they experience it as one interconnected challenge. Rather than administering discrete programs for child care, paid leave, and health care, a family policy approach would coordinate these services around a single goal: ensuring stability, predictability, and quality of life during a child’s first year. You can read more about how child care and paid leave policies should be developed and coordinated under the overarching framework of a family policy here. 

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote that “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 in 2026: What will the family policy agenda look like over the next 15 years? How can we start preparing now? Either America will adopt a family-centered approach 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.

Joe Waters is Capita’s Co-Founder & CEO