Public policy affecting families—or “family-friendly” policy—is a distinct form of policymaking, with special ends and means.  It is also a “necessity” [as I explain in a recent paper, “The Necessity of Family Policy,” published as the July 2005 issue of The Family in America].  In my few minutes, I will briefly explore the three reasons for the necessity of family-friendly policy and then offer several additional comments about its nature and value.

We need “family-friendly” policy:

First, to protect the family as an institution in the context of the centralizing state.

The American Republic took form in the late 18th Century as a political entity rooted in independent, or autonomous families.  As political historian Barry Shain explains in his book, The Myth of American Individualism, the American Revolution had more to do with the defense of “family independence” from state intrusion that it did with quests for personal liberation.  Americans of the founding era, Shain insists, were rooted in religious, family-centered communities, which were necessary to free governance, the ultimate bulwark of liberty. 

A century and a quarter later, the English writer G.K. Chesterton expressed a broader, but similar idea.  Modern governments, he wrote, seek to isolate individuals from their families, the better to control them; to divide in order to weaken.  However, the family grounded in marriage is self-renewing.  As Chesterton explained: “The ideal for which [the family] stands in the state is liberty.”  It stands for liberty because it is “at once necessary and voluntary.  It is the only check on the state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state, and more naturally than the state.” 

Put another way, the family is the only institution able to raise up citizens capable of “ordered liberty,” and it so requires legal protections…indeed, legal privilege.  This role played by the family becomes all the more urgent as local, state, and federal governments now squeeze into every aspect of our lives and claim nearly 40 percent of national income.

The second reason that we need “family-friendly” policy is to shelter the integrity and necessary functions of the family from excessive intrusion by what is called “modernity.” 

For virtually all of our history as distinctive creatures on earth, we humans have usually lived and worked in the same place.  Since the dawn of the Neolithic Age, thousands of years ago, the vast majority of each generation resided on small farmsteads, in small villages, in fishing cottages, in nomadic camps, or in family-scale artisan shops.  In all these forms of co-living, there was a unity of work and family.  Children were welcomed as little economic assets.  Wives and husbands never quarreled over “gender roles.”  They were too busy cooperating in their common family enterprises, employing their complementary strengths and skills.

Over the last two centuries, though, the rise of “modernity” tore through this settled world.  “The Great Transformation,” cultural anthropologist Karl Polanyi calls it.  The new urban-industrial order shattered the unity of home and work.  The family household ceased to be the center of productive labor.  Mothers, fathers, and children alike were pulled out of their homes, into factories.  Family bonds such as marriage became obstacles to the efficient allocation of labor.  Infants, toddlers and non-working children became economic burdens.  Marriages grew more fragile.  Divorce rates soared.  Fertility plummeted.  As demographers Kingsley Davis and John Caldwell summarize:  “The family is not indefinitely adaptable to modern society, and this explains the declining birth rate.”  In short, the common products of urban-industrial “modernity”—weakened marriages, widespread divorce, and low fertility—are another reason for crafting family-friendly policies, so restoring a social-political balance to protect the vital tasks of family life.

The third reason is to respond to the “anti-family” ideologies that dominated policymaking from the mid-1960’s into the 1980’s.  Neo-Malthusians seeking “population control;” playboy philosophers seeking sex without commitment or babies; feminists committed to rooting out “patriarchy;” “New Left” socialists seeking to crush the autonomous family; atheists angered by deference to God’s created order: all could agree on a common foe, the so-called “traditional American family.”  During the tumultuous 1960’s and 1970’s, they won policy victories: from “no fault” divorce to programs of population control to “day care” rather than “home care” subsidies to marriage penalties in the tax code.  Much damage was done, which now must be undone, for the sake of the children.

These are the reasons, then, why we need to craft family-friendly policy.  I will end with three additional comments about its nature.

First, any coherent family-friendly policy must rest on a clear definition of “family”: the ideal toward which policy aims.  I recommend: “The natural family is the union of a man and a woman through marriage for the purposes of sharing love and joy, propagating children, providing their moral education, building a vital home economy, offering security, and binding the generations.”  [Source: The Natural Family: A Manifesto.]  Any deviation from this ideal model predictably results in higher levels of social pathology.

Second, family policy making cannot be avoided.  Key choices face policymakers, where neutrality is not possible.  Consider income taxation.  Here, policymakers must decide whether children are merely a consumption choice (that is, some people have poodle dogs, others have children), or is the creation, rearing, and protection of children the central purpose of common civic life?  If the former, just ignore the children and “modernity” and the centralizing state will conspire to sharply reduce their number.  If the latter, wise public policy will encourage marital childbearing, committed parenting, and autonomous homes.  Even seemingly simple choices can bear huge consequences here.  For example, policymakers must decide: What should be the unit of taxation?  The married-couple household?  Or in all cases the individual?  In 1971, the nation of Sweden abandoned the joint-income-tax return for married couples, in favor of mandatory individual taxation.  All analysts agree that this seemingly simple, innocuous change was the most radical reform of a very radical decade there, for it “more or less eradicated the traditional family” in Sweden (that phrase comes from analyst Sven Steinmo). 

Finally, policies favoring business do not necessarily favor families.  It is true that, in the long run, a free economy needs strong and capable families, who will raise intelligent, able, and responsible children (what economists call “human capital”).  The businesses that best understand this lesson are those closely-held family companies that are also tied to their communities by bonds of history, residence, and responsibility.  These companies are the glory of capitalism.

All the same, it is also true that, in the short-run, business can prosper from family weakness and decline.

• Divorce, for example, can provide a short-term economic boon.  Consider a hypothetical town with 1000 married-couple homes.  If all of these families simultaneously sought divorce, the economic stimulus would be fantastic.  Twice as many dwellings would be needed; twice as many refrigerators; twice as many living room sets; and so on.  Manufacturers and merchants and lawyers all would gain.  The terrible social costs—poorer health among adults and children, greater delinquency and crime, more suicide, more school drop outs, more illegal drug use and alcoholism—these would only come later. 

• Working mothers are also a great short-term boon to the economy.  In place of home cooked meals, these households now buy fast food.  Instead of the home care of small children, they buy day care.  The negative effects of these changes on children—in forms of physical and emotional health—only show up in the long run.  These examples do point to a common rule: as families lose functions, the Gross National Product goes up…for a time.

• Finally, businesses have clear short-term interests in cheap labor and disloyalty to communities.  When a multi-national corporation abandons a factory or office in Utah, and moves the jobs to—say—China or India where wages are substantially lower, the company gains; so, too, may the broad class of global consumers.  However, the Utah families involved face at least temporary unemployment and—as recent experience suggests—lower wages over the long run.  The state of Utah is hurt, as well.  And the company abandons human and community loyalties in favor of an elusive bottom line.

I repeat, “pro-business” legislation is not necessarily “pro-family.”  Capitalism itself needs true “family friendly” policy to protect its own long term interests.