By Annie Conderacci | June 9, 2026
I also read it as someone currently raising young children and is deeply invested in how we can make this country work better for working families.
There is a lot in this report worth taking seriously because policymakers already are. We’ve seen Heritage Foundation’s influence with initiatives like Project 2025. 53% of that plan’s policy objectives have been completed in Trump’s second term, according to organizations tracking Project 2025’s progress.
At a foundational level, the report is right: families matter. They are the people we fight with and fight for and the ones we love the most. They shape who we are and who we will become. They matter for our social and economic well-being. The report correctly recognizes that economic conditions alone do not explain family outcomes: culture, norms, and expectations all play a role. The report reinforces what policymakers across the political spectrum are beginning to acknowledge: families are not peripheral to the economy, but central to it.
In a 2025 Gallup poll, 49% of Americans listed “family” as one of their top values, remaining the highest priority value across subgroups like educational attainment and political party lines. If family matters that much to Americans, we should be talking about it.
That’s an important baseline.
Next, this report reflects a framing within a moral universe. While that universe is clearly Christian and normative, the report reflects a moral imperative behind their policies. Policy conversations on the left often avoid moral framing–perhaps because they believe a moral framing undermines the strength of an empirical argument or a moral argument gets too easily confused with religiosity. But can’t we have both?
For example, who would argue that starving children is good? We don’t need years of peer reviewed research to know that it isn’t. And still the United States lets about 14 million of its children go hungry every day. We elect officials who continue to allow children to go hungry and starve underfunded programs intended to help. This is a reflection of our collective values. If that makes us uncomfortable, perhaps we should put a finer point on framing policy in a moral universe. We can have evidence and conviction at the same time.
The Heritage Foundation frames this report under the backdrop of the “breakdown of the American Family.” There is a lot in here that does not warrant in-depth discussion. The research methods are unreliable, cherry picking statistics that flatter their thesis (lots of mention of marriage rates, none of divorce rates or rates of domestic violence) and ignoring those that don’t. The authors consistently use spurious correlations as evidence. In their analysis, the rate of weekly church attendance, abortion rate per capita, and “global warming fear” serve as the sole “Culture” measures for the “social value placed on having children”. Policymakers looking for pragmatic proposals have to wade through extensive discussions of internet pornography, AI sex robots, the sexual revolution, and online dating that, frankly, miss the plot.
Still, the methodology is less important than the diagnostic failure. The problem is not that Americans don’t want to have families—it’s that having one is slipping out of reach.
Americans have created more wealth than the world has ever seen, yet this wealth is not distributed evenly. Soon enough this country may create the world’s first trillionaire, while wealth inequality is at its highest point in 30 years. The number of first time home buyers is at a historic low of 1.14 million, down from 3.2 million in 2004. For many Gen Z’s and Millennials, the promise and the stability of the American Dream seems out of reach. Dual income families are not only the norm, families view them as a necessity.
For women, the gap between expectation and reality is especially stark. Women are more likely to complete college than men. The gender pay gap for women has narrowed. Teen pregnancy is at historic lows. These outcomes were not accidental, rather the result of deliberate (often bipartisan) efforts over decades.
But we expanded women’s roles without updating the rest of the family system. The reality of unpaid and invisible work at home remains. Women know that when they marry a man, they will often find themselves taking care of their partner or “mankeeping” in addition to caring for themselves. Women know they will take on the lion’s share of domestic tasks like care work, cooking, cleaning and invisible management of family life (also known as the mental load). Post girl-boss era, women now have two full time jobs where they can never slack: managing a career and managing family life.
At the same time that we expanded women’s roles, Barbie’s “We girls can do anything” campaign failed to make it over to men and boys. While Millennial men are spending more time than ever with their kids, the gender roles for men and the narrative around masculinity have not evolved (and some may say the “manosphere” has posed a devolution). This cultural gap is showing up in the data. Men are not thriving. They account for 80% of the country’s suicides. Men make up 76% of violent crime offenders. The narrative around masculinity has not kept pace with the economic and social changes reshaping American life.
When the cost of building a family is this high, choosing differently is not a moral failure. It’s a math problem.
In a recent Pew Research survey of what made a fulfilling life, “having a job or career they enjoy” and “having close friends” outranked “having children”, “having a lot of money” and “being married.” Americans aren’t abandoning the good life. They are defining it more honestly. The American dream needs updating to include meaningful work and strong social bonds: a far cry from a moral failure.
Americans know what the Heritage Foundation refuses to admit: the nuclear family was never meant to stand alone…and never did. The “traditional” American nuclear family was always supported by a web of unpaid, invisible labor, much of it performed by women. Neighbors, aunts, babysitters, housekeepers, grandparents, after-school teachers, and coaches aren’t peripheral to families, they are instrumental to families. We have always needed help raising children, caring for the elderly and disabled, and forging connection with people and places. The Heritage Foundation touts traditional family values without actually valuing the work it takes to form a family.
The Heritage report proposes a few policies intended to support families, including:
While these proposals signal support for families, they do not come close to addressing the real economic pressures families face.
Having a baby costs approximately $20,000 in the first year alone. Childcare costs often exceed rent or mortgage payments. Against that reality, modest credits and one-time incentives function more as gestures than solutions.
If we want to strengthen actual families (not just a narrow, idealized version of them) we have to measure (and design for) what actually makes family life worth living.
That means an America where people can:
A family-forward agenda is not just about more policy or more benefits. It is about scaffolding a set of systems, surroundings, and skills to enable families (blood and chosen) to flourish on their own terms. Center for the American Family is committed to advancing the family-forward agenda and strengthening the American family for the next 250 years.
Annie Conderacci is the Founder and Executive Director of Center for the American Family. She serves as the Policy Lead for the Maryland Chapter of the Chamber of Mothers and on the Comptroller of Maryland’s Women’s Economic Empowerment Advisory Council. She has consulted for public, private, and non-profit clients, dedicating her career to improving public health and opportunities for women, children, and working families. A Rice BA, Kellogg MBA, Harvard MPA, and graduate of the world’s top improv comedy schools, Annie integrates lessons from all three to inform her work and deliver results while keeping her sense of humor. All of this training only slightly prepared her for her greatest and most rewarding test—parenting two toddlers.