In a recent New York Times opinion piece by Hillary Clinton, she lays out a familiar case: families are struggling with high costs of living, child care, and health care and policymakers should provide targeted relief via tax credits, paid leave, and expanded health care and child care support. None of this is wrong, but it’s not enough. And it certainly isn’t inspiring.
What we’re seeing (again and again) is a well-intentioned but ultimately incomplete approach to family policy: a collection of incremental fixes without a unifying vision for what family life in America should actually look like. It’s a checklist, not a strategy. Clinton has spent her career advocating for children. What happened to It Takes a Village?
The rebuttal from conservatives then was the same as it is now: “It takes a family.” Rick Santorum used it as the title for his book in 2006, framing the left as anti-family for wanting more state and societal support for children. For all of Hillary’s criticisms of conservatives and the Heritage Foundation, their vision for American families has been clear for decades: traditional family values and gender roles, rooted in evangelical Christianity, with limited government support. But that’s for another article.
Affordability remains a top concern for Americans. But Americans aren’t asking for a patchwork of policies that give a few thousand dollars here and offsetting a cost there. These incremental fixes (and navigating how to get them) only add to the complexity of getting by. For many Americans, the American Dream achieved by their parents and grandparents is further and further out of reach for themselves.
In a recent study, 7 out of 10 Americans said having children was unaffordable. 4 in 10 said that financial concerns affected how many children they had (or planned to have). American parents aren’t just managing record child care costs (which, by the way, cost more than rent in many places). They’re managing:
That is a system designed for failure and Americans as parents, professionals, and people are stressed and overwhelmed. If we want to move beyond incrementalism, we need a new frame–one that reflects how families not only survive, but flourish. At Center for the American Family, we think about aFamily-Forward Agenda in three parts:
What would a society that promotes family flourishing look like? How would our lives be different? What would work look like? What about our neighborhoods?
Yes, families need paid leave, housing, child care, and health care, but what is this all for? Right now, policies are fragmented, reactive, and often misaligned with realities of modern family life. Families don’t experience their lives in a compartmentalized bureaucracy, but that is how the government administers their support.
A family-forward approach centers the family experience and asks:
The goal is to meet families where they are and promote their flourishing. For example, in her report “Whole Child, Whole Day, Whole Year” economist Kathryn Edwards outlines a vision for providing safe, enriching environments for children while their parents are at work, all year round. Proposals like this support both parents’ careers and children’s development.
We can’t ignore the physical environment families operate within as they navigate life and its transitions. We mentioned in a previous article Urban95, an organization challenging us to view our communities from the perspective of 95 centimeters–the height of an average 3 year old. If we designed policies and places to maximize the wellbeing of 3 year olds (and 3 month olds, and 13 year olds, and 83 year olds for that matter)…..how would we be different?
In your own community, consider its:
It’s not just affordability that is harming families, it is the friction of daily life. It just feels harder and harder to get by. That includes isolation, loneliness, and stress. When we invest in infrastructure with community and family flourishing in mind, we design differently.
Enabling people to build the lives they want includes skills that are not usually taught in school. When posed with life’s most difficult questions, how do we prepare young people to address them? Questions like:
Currently, the process to learn these skills is informal and outcomes are disparate depending on a variety of factors. Conversely, a family-forward agenda would invest in:
The current conversation, including Clinton’s op-ed, frames families as victims to economic pressure. Yet they are also the foundation for social stability, human development, and long term macroeconomic prosperity.
If we only focus on costs, we miss the conversation about the value of happy and healthy families and communities. We need to think beyond affordability to flourishing.
That is why we will begin a series of articles on the Family-Forward Agenda, reimagining policies to build the systems, surroundings, and skills enabling families to thrive.