In the late summer of 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, senior staff member in the Department of Labor and future United States senator from New York, took to the pages of America magazine to argue the case for a “national family policy.” While Moynihan may have missed the mark with his infamous 1965 government report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, his magazine essay was full of the optimism for genuine change that characterized the early 1960s, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. That optimism would dissipate with the quagmire of the Vietnam War and the apparent, yet debatable, failures of Great Society programs to improve the lives of America’s poor before the resources needed to fight the War on Poverty were redirected to fighting communism in Southeast Asia. Fifty-six years after Moynihan’s essay, in the midst of a global pandemic and with renewed attention to the racial injustices that litter our country’s history, it is time to design the family policy of the future.
Why a children and family policy?
The family is the nucleus of society. It is, in the words of Augustine of Hippo, the “seedbed of the city.” However, as Moynihan argued in 1965, social policy in the United States, unlike social policies in other industrialized democracies, focuses chiefly on the individual child or adult. While a number of its programs intentionally meet the needs of families or households (SNAP, for instance), the United States has never had a comprehensive policy focused on ensuring the stability, flourishing, and health of American children and families.
To understand this last point, we must review another of Moynihan’s key insights. In dealing with poverty and other social issues, the United States has taken a “program approach”. We have created individual programs that ameliorate some distress (like hunger), then hoped that those programs, in the aggregate, would somehow equal a policy that produces some ill-defined outcome. In contrast, our approach to foreign policy, monetary policy, and employment policy is shaped by strategic imperatives. These policies transcend government departments in their administration and, ideally, focus on grand outcomes like peace, security, full employment, and a stable dollar. We have nothing analogous when it comes to the welfare of America’s children and families. Given their importance to our future prosperity and security, we should.
A policy approach to children and families
Our focus on individual programs means that American policymakers are chiefly concerned with how to achieve better outcomes for children by funding and administering programs. A policy approach would do something much more basic: it would declare that “the policy of the American government is to promote the stability and well-being of the American family.” Programs would thus be funded and administered in view of that goal and the specific, measurable outcomes that support it.
If our political leaders and social policy advocates decided to take a policy approach to the American family, many shifts would need to occur.
First, we would need to adopt new comprehensive measures of what it means for children and families to flourish–that is, to live with equity, opportunity, and dignity or in a definition provided by Harvard professor Tyler VanderWeele flourishing is “a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good.” Flourishing is not captured by GDP, the poverty rate, or data about participation in programs nor is the promotion of flourishing the sole responsibility of the government, but is a whole-of-society effort that engages nonprofits and businesses, faith communities and civic organizations. For example, the total enrollment of children in child care programs does not tell us if they are learning or are well cared-for. It does not reveal whether child care supports the full flourishing of their families. (In some cases child care could work against family flourishing–for instance, if it encourages parents to work outside the home, when they would prefer to care for their children at home instead.) Some of these measures have been developed, but any statement of a national child and family policy would need to clearly articulate an appropriate suite of measures of flourishing by which the federal government would hold itself and all its programs accountable for family flourishing.
Second, if we view existing programs in light of a family policy, we would undoubtedly discover that some actually undermine the goals of that policy and need to be eliminated. For example, there is likely some number of young children in child care whose fathers are among the millions of prime-age men not in the labor force and who spend some 2,000 hours a year (5.6 hours per day) watching television. Could some portion of these men (those without drug problems and in meaningful contact with their children) spend more time caring for their children? Could they be better supported in their roles with home visiting programs? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but adopting a family policy would necessitate a search for those answers.
Third, as many commentators have observed, too many middle-class Americans teeter on the edge of financial precarity despite having well-paying and stable jobs. In many of our major metropolitan areas, raising children requires both parents to work (even if they would prefer for one to care for the children at home), take on unsustainable credit card debt, and work in the gig economy to supplement incomes. Proposals like the one in the latest round of Covid stimulus to provide a $3,600 cash payment per year per child is step in the right direction. But they do not add up to a comprehensive policy approach that would marshal a “whole-of-government” effort to secure the future for the American family.
Finally, a comprehensive approach to family policy demands that we include reparations for Black Americans to compensate for their generations of unpaid and exploitative labor. Additionally, it must embed an ongoing preferential commitment and concern for Black Americans.
An audacious proposal
For advocates, pursuing a truly comprehensive approach to children and family policy means that we need to surrender our habits of advocating chiefly for programs. We must marshal our energies and resources to push the federal government to adopt a comprehensive children and family policy under which all programs will be formulated, administered, and judged. This cannot be a modest effort. It must be bold. We must completely remake America’s social policy. Inspired by the vision of the Employment Act of 1946’s “Declaration of Policy,” the family policy might be stated thus:
The Congress hereby declares that it is the continuing policy and responsibility of the federal government to use all practicable means consistent with its needs and obligations and other essential considerations of national policy with the assistance and cooperation of industry, agriculture, labor, and state and local governments, to coordinate and utilize all its plans, functions, and resources for the purpose of fostering and promoting the stability and flourishing of all children and families in America, to hold all government-funded programs measurably accountable to serving the stability, welfare, and flourishing of the child and their family, and consistent with the science of human development to marshal all government efforts and resources in the task of mitigating the negative impacts of adverse childhood experiences resulting from violence, abuse, neglect, substance abuse, mental health problems, parental separation, or incarceration.
Congress should also establish a council of advisors, equal in prestige to the Council of Economic Advisors, within the Executive Office of the President. It would help ensure that all domestic and foreign policies address the need to help American children and families flourish.
Two caveats
The well-being of our families is deeply affected by the broader social and cultural environment, over which government’s powers are rightfully limited. Policy and law formulated by the people’s representatives can act as a sort of teacher within the broader environment to guide and instruct. But our expectations for the government’s sole capacity to drive better outcomes must be tempered by an understanding of its limits.
Finally, there are plenty of takes right now to suggest that we are living in a “failed state.” If that is true–I suspect and hope it isn’t–then the government’s capacity for doing big things will be even further circumscribed than usual by dysfunction, disorder, and institutional sclerosis. Nonetheless, America has prevailed through crises before to enact policies that made it stronger. We can do it again under the right political conditions.
This essay was published on February 15, 2021.