Why Family Policy?
And what, exactly, are we doing here?
Before we get into the meat of The Family Frontier and a fun two-part series on incrementalism vs. maximalism (that’s fun, right?), I think it’s important to take a step back. What is family policy, and what’s the ultimate point of this enterprise?
The former is an easier question to answer than the latter, but not as easy as you’d think. A working definition of family policy might be “laws and regulations that directly shape the lives of households with dependent children and/or adults.”1 That clearly involves areas like early and school-aged child care, elder care, K-12 education, paid family leave, home visiting for new parents, and maternal and child health. There are also chunks of other issue areas that solely impact those with kids in tow, such as creating playgrounds within urban planning or the Child Tax Credit and other such tax code items.
But what about something like housing? Whether policies and regulations allow for widespread construction of single-family homes and three-bedroom apartments that can be but are not necessarily occupied by parents and children has an indelible impact on family life. Yet housing is usually considered outside the bounds of family policy. How about climate change and its outsize impact on developing bodies and brains? A criminal justice system that includes mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of fathers? How about job quality, like ensuring workers -- including the huge proportion that are parents -- have predictable schedules, regular breaks, and humane working conditions (sadly, these are hardly a given)?
I actually think this is part of a bigger challenge: we get so caught up in segmenting family life based on programs, governance structures, and/or funding streams that we lose the forest for the trees. As a reviewer of one of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s books put it, Moynihan argued that “government at all levels must take into account the actual or potential effects upon families of other programs seemingly unconnected to family welfare.”2
Which brings me to the bigger-picture question: what are we doing here? Putting the family at the center of the ecosystem, rather than a given issue or program, changes the conversation by allowing us to apply a family filter to view every policy area.3 It’s like donning infrared-vision goggles that reveal what was there all along. Labor policy is not family policy, but has a family policy filter. Housing policy is not family policy, but has a family policy filter. And so on. To quote Moynihan directly, “in the nature of modern industrial society, no government, however firm might be its wish otherwise, can avoid having policies that profoundly influence family relationships. This is not to be avoided. The only option is whether these will be purposeful, intended policies or whether they will be residual, derivative, in a sense concealed ones.”
For my part, I think the ultimate goal of family policy is promoting a stable, healthy family life that allows all members to thrive by living, in community, lives filled with love and meaning-making. I think we should all be more regularly making an affirmative case for the family and the good life, even if your definition is different.4 This, in turn, builds up to a stable and healthy nation. Economic productivity is a driver of healthy family life, but it is not an end goal. Rising female labor force participation rates can be a sign of self-determination, but it is not an end goal. Even achieving universal child care -- a cause to which I commit most of my working hours -- is not an end goal but a means through which to build a society of widespread flourishing, agency, and connectivity.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that policy does not exist in a vacuum: it exists in a two-way dialogue with culture. Part of the reason it has been so difficult to establish a right to child care or elder care in this country is because culturally, we still see those facets as primarily borne by families (most often women) as opposed to a place for the state to come alongside families and bolster them. As the writer Elissa Strauss has explained, care is actually part of the social contract, yet it’s frequently invisible. “Care is as fundamental to the good life as justice,” Strauss writes, “but it’s rarely presented in fundamental terms.” Similarly, the rise of what Derek Thompson calls “The Anti-Social Century” can’t help but influence family life.
So when I’m talking about family policy or getting into the weeds on a particular piece of child care legislation, keep in mind the forest. Humans are complex, messy creatures living complex, messy lives in complex, messy communities and complex, messy families.5 It’s easy to get lost; or, as H.L. Mencken once put it, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Here at The Family Frontier, we’re going to embrace the complexity and embrace the mess (here in my household, my two daughters ensure we embrace both!), while always remaining clear on where we are going and why. I’m glad you’re along for the ride.
Setting aside that adults who don’t have dependent children or adults, or dependents at all, are of course still part of a family. It’s interesting that we use ‘family’ in this context as a gloss for ‘parents and their dependent children and/or adults’, but it’s also a lot easier than writing out ‘parents and their dependent children and/or adults’ every time, so let’s go with it for now.
My Capita colleague Joe Waters is the unofficial captain of the DPM fan club, so I’ve read a lot of DPM and he will come up not-infrequently.
At times, we err even just by putting the individual in isolation at the center of the policy question, like when we make young children the unit of change around “school readiness” as if child development was not overwhelmingly shaped by interactions with parents, caregivers, and their overall environment (this is the basis of Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which we’ll go much deeper on in a later post!)
Democrats used to be better about making this case; go back and read speeches from FDR, JFK, RFK, MLK Jr., etc. I think it has fallen somewhat out of fashion partially as a reaction to retrograde ideas of “the family” that certain conservative right-wingers use as a cudgel to enforce a narrow conception of what the family must be. It’s time to reclaim the family in all its pluralistic glory.
How complex? The average human adult brain experiences quadrillions of synaptic firings every single day. That’s a number with 15 zeros after it.