My new book, Fractured Generations, engages several questions: Why has the family emerged in the early 21st Century as a central cultural and political issue?  What is the nature of modern family policy?  And:  What are the family policy imperatives for America in this new century?

THE CENTRALIZING STATE

Answers to these questions lie embedded in our history.  In one sense, the family has always been at the center of political concern.  It is true that the U.S. Constitution, unlike the basic laws in many other lands, makes no reference to family relations.  Even its language is cast in remarkably “gender free” terms, using words such as “person” where the generic “he” would have been expected.  Indeed, the Constitution often reads as though edited by the staff at Ms. magazine.  This was not due, however, to a remarkably early outbreak of feminism among the Founders or to an assumption by them that the family is irrelevant.  In fact, the family was deeply rooted in what we might call the unwritten Constitution of these new United States, in the cultural and social assumptions about the social order that must be present to sustain a free republic.

The Founders agreed with the ancient Roman statesman Cicero that the family household was the seedbed of virtue and of the political state.  Historians underscore how the colonists had left the Old World, hoping that America would be a better setting in which to raise their true and precious “Tender Plants”:  that is, “a good place to train up children amongst sober people and to prevent the corruption of them here by the loose behavior of youths and the bad example of too many of riper years.”[1]  Historian James Henretta underscores how late 18th Century Americans raised children to “succeed them,” not merely to “succeed.”  Rights and obligations bound together the generations: “The [family] line was more important than the individual; the patrimony was to be conserved for lineal reasons.”[2] 

In his provocative book The Myth of American Individualism, political historian Barry Shain shows that “Americans in the Revolutionary era embraced a theory of the good life that is best described as reformed Protestant and communal.”  The American Revolution, he asserts, had more to do with the defense of “familial independence” than it did with quests for personal liberation.  Americans of the founding era, Shain insists, were rooted in agrarian, religious, family-centric communities.[3]  These Americans saw family households as the common source of new citizens, the places where the character traits necessary to free government would be shaped, the foundation stones of ordered liberty.  Defense of this society of households lay with the states and the people.  The U.S. Constitution assumed a nation of families.  This rested, in turn, on the spirit found in the Bill of Rights, especially in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments which affirmed the rights of the people and the powers of the states as bulwarks against centralized social experimentation.

Since the late 19th Century, however, the Federal government has grown massively.  The doctrine of parens patriae, “the parenthood of the state,” spawned the first examples of the interventionist state.  And the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, initially intended to protect newly freed slaves from retribution at the state level, became instead a legal wedge for the steady expansion of Federal authority at the expense of the states, and potentially of the families they had sheltered.  A detailed list of court cases would lead to this simple conclusion:  the last 125 years might be written as the steady surrender of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the growing sweep of the Fourteenth and to the exercise of parens patriae.  Today, the very size and pervasiveness of the Federal government—comprising as it does 25 percent of Gross Domestic Product and intruding into every aspect of American life—mandate attention to family relations in all Federal policy making.  The original American plan—leaving family issues to local communities and the states—no longer works in the age of the U.S. Department of Education, TANF grants, Social Security, the Federal Income Tax, the Department of Homeland Security, and Federal child care policies.  On the one hand, nothing has changed: the family household remains the only possible source of new citizens able to sustain a regime of ordered liberty.  On the other hand, new circumstances demand that the family perspective be a vital lens for federal policymaking.

“MODERNITY” AND FAMILY CRISIS

More broadly, that tangle of revolutions called “modernity” also mandates policy attention to the family.  Before the industrial revolution, before the rise of great cities, let us remember, virtually the whole of humankind lived in family-centered economies.  The family household was the center of most productive activity.  In the United States, circa 1800, about 90 percent of the free population were farmers.  Most of the remaining 10 percent were family-scale artisans and shopkeepers also maintaining home gardens, family cows, and flocks of chickens.  Each family raised most of its own food, made most of its own clothing, provided most of its own fuel, crafted most of its own furniture.

“Modernity” tore through this settled way of life.  The family household ceased to be the center of productive labor.  Centralized factories, warehouses, and offices displaced home workshops, gardens, and storehouses.  Cash exchanges pushed aside the altruistic exchanges of the family.  Industrialization destroyed the ancient unity of home and work, which had prevailed for a thousand generations.  Mothers, fathers, and children alike were pulled into the wage laborer ranks.  Family bonds, once the source of economic strength, now stood more as obstructions to the efficient allocation of labor.  The individual, unencumbered and alone, was the new ideal worker.  As the English essayist G.K. Chesterton, writing in 1919, summarized:

[The family] is literally being torn in pieces, in that the husband may go to one factory, the wife to another, and the child to a third.  Each will become the servant of a separate financial group, which is more and more gaining the political power of a feudal group.  But whereas feudalism received the loyalty of families, the lords of the new servile state will receive only the loyalty of individuals: that is, of lonely men and even of lost children.[4]

Advertising became another vehicle for implementing this economic revolution.  In whetting appetites for more industrially produced goods, it also implied that residual forms of family production were inferior and it drew family members deeper into the brave new world of consumerism.

The status of marriage changed.  In the pre-industrial order, husbands and wives had specialized in their labor according to their respective strengths and skills, so that their small family enterprises might succeed.  This natural complementarity reinforced their need for each other, uniting the sexual and the economic functions and giving real strength to marriage.  Industrial managers, in contrast, preferred the androgynous individual, sexless, interchangeable.  In this new order, men and women needed each other less than before.  As an institution, marriage weakened.

The status of children also changed.  In an agrarian and artisan economy, children—even small ones—were economic assets, parts of small family enterprises.  Accordingly, fertility on the family farm and in the artisan’s shop tended to be high.  However, in the new order, children were either pulled away into an early—and often dangerous—economic independence (such as little girls tending the spindles in textile plants) or the children became liabilities, left at home by working parents to fend for themselves.  Fertility plummeted, as actual or potential parents avoided taking on these new little burdens.  Indeed, two leading analysts of modern fertility decline, Kingsley Davis writing in 1937 and John C. Caldwell writing in 2003, have both concluded that “the family is not indefinitely adaptable to modern society, and this explains the declining birth rate.”[5]

EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN MODELS

Indeed, these common products of urban-industrial “modernity”—weakened marriages and low fertility—are another reason for the contemporary need to build “family policies.”  As Davis and Caldwell imply, the natural family is not an institution capable of drastic change.  Rather, it is a set of relationships rooted in human nature: “natural,” in the sense of being biologically grounded; and universal, for being found in every healthy human society.  In modernity’s wake, the critical tasks became—and remain—the defense of this natural family from certain pressures of “modernity.”  Specifically, family policy has meant constructing barriers around the home, to limit the spread of the industrial principle, to preserve some domaine of family autonomy in the modern industrial order.

Early on, somewhat different approaches were tried in Europe and America, although both were tied to a common family ideal that would bring at least the mother and children back home.  Starting around 1900, Europeans consciously set out to build family policies that would protect marriage and raise fertility.  The first intellectually consistent efforts to lay out a family policy drew inspiration from Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (The New Age).  Leo argued that “the present [industrial] age handed over the workers, each alone and defenseless, to the inhumanity of employers and the unbridled greed of competitors.”  Rejecting the wage theories of both laissez-faire liberalism and socialism, Leo called instead for an economy based on “the natural and primeval right of marriage” and “the society of the household.”  This family-centered economy would recognize the “most sacred law of nature that the father of a family see that his offspring are provided with all the necessities of life” and that women were “intended by nature for the work of the home…the education of children and the well-being of the family.”  This meant that any just wage must enable the father “to provide comfortably for himself, his wife, and children.”  This goal of a “family wage” received more direct affirmation in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (Forty Years After).  Pius declared that “[e]very effort must be made” to insure “that fathers of families receive a wage large enough to meet ordinary family needs adequately.”  He gave “merited praise to all, who with a wise and useful purpose have tried and tested various ways of adjusting the pay for work to family burdens.”[6]

Inspired by Catholic social teaching, lay political leaders in France, Belgium, and other European lands proceeded to build family policy systems that would shelter families from the negative consequence of industrial organization.  The favored approach became “family allowances” that would recognize the disproportionate burdens carried by laborers with wives and children at home.  Christian businessmen began introducing family allowances on a private basis in 1916.  The French government passed laws in the early 1920’s creating “equalization funds” within industries, which eliminated any incentive employers might have to avoid hiring workers with families.  Besides paying generous allowances on a per child basis, these funds also provided families with marriage loans, pre-natal care, midwives, visiting nurses, birth and breastfeeding bonuses, medical care for children, layettes, and fresh milk.  During the late 1930’s, these quasi-private funds and programs were absorbed into the French government’s emerging Social Security program.  In Belgium, a similar system provided child allowances in a manner favoring larger families: 15 francs per month for the first child; 20f. for the second, 40f. for the third, 70f. for the fourth, and 100f. per month for the fifth and additional children.  The government also crafted large tax deductions and credits for families with children, built a network of pre- and post-natal child health centers, and provided subsidized housing loans and rent rebates for larger families.[7]

In America, policy construction to protect families took a somewhat different, and more successful course.  To begin with, the label “family policy” was rarely used in a direct way; “child welfare” was the preferred moniker.  Nor were there many open appeals to “pro-natalist” goals.  Still, the ideal of a “family wage” also came to govern American policy formation.  And the results of the American model relative to family formation and fertility soon surpassed the achievements of France, Belgium, and other European lands.

Inspired by so-called “Maternalist” reformers such as Julia Lathrop, Josephine Baker, and Florence Kelly, the U.S. Congress created The U.S. Children’s Bureau in 1912.   Lathrop, named first Chief of the Children’s Bureau, laid out the guiding principles for current and future American policy:

The power to maintain a decent family living standard is the primary essential of child welfare.  This means a living wage and wholesome working life for the men, a good and skillful mother at home to keep the house and comfort all within it.  Society can afford no less and can afford no exceptions.  This is a universal need.[8]

Pursuing the goal of “Baby Saving,” the Children’s Bureau also set out to reduce infant and maternal mortality and to improve early child care.  The Bureau sponsored “Baby Weeks” to promote good mothering.  The Smith-Lever Vocational Training Act of 1917 provided Federal funds to school districts to promote education for girls in the “household arts”: This was the first Federal education program.  The U.S. War Department introduced child allowances into military pay in 1917.  The Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, the first true federal entitlement, provided federal funds to the states for pre-natal and child health clinics and visiting nurses for pregnant and post-partum mothers. 

The Great Depression of the 1930’s was as much a family crisis, as one strictly of economics.  Both American marriage and fertility rates fell sharply during the early 1930’s.  The New Deal, constructed in response by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, expanded the scope of the “family wage” ideal in Federal policymaking.  For example, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1934 codified wage scales that paid men up to 30 percent more than women for the same work and that affirmed sex-defined job categories (“men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs”) with even larger pay differentials.  The Works Progress Administration, the largest government relief program, “deplored” the employment on WPA programs of women with dependent children; denounced child day care; and retrained unemployed teachers to teach homemaking and maternal skills.  The Social Security Amendments of 1939 provided homemakers pensions to women married to eligible men and generous “survivors” benefits to the widows and children of covered male workers.  The National Housing Act created the FHA mortgage program featuring long-term amortization, a low down payment, and insurance protection for the lender.  Joined in 1944 by the Veterans Administration (VA) mortgage program, billions of new dollars were mobilized for home construction, with over 99 percent of these government-backed mortgages targetted on young married couples.  Tax reforms in 1944 and 1948 extended the marriage-friendly benefits of “income splitting” to all American homes and substantially raised the real value of the tax deduction for dependent children.[9]

The results, one can conclude, were impressive.  Between 1935 and 1963, the marriage rate rose by 30 percent, the average age of first marriage fell to historic lows (age 22 for men; age 20 for women), the proportion of ever-married adults reached a record high (over 95 percent), and the fertility rate—after falling for 100 years—rose by 75 percent.  Following the turmoil of World War II, even the divorce rate declined between 1946 and 1960.  While certainly not wholly due to public policy, it does seem clear that policy initiatives between 1912 and 1948 did affirm, encourage, and even cause the amazing “marriage” and “baby-booms” of mid-20th-century America.[10]

THE SWEDISH-AMERICAN WAY

And yet, starting in the mid-1960’s, these positive gains quickly disappeared.  The “family model” that had undergirded policymaking in both Western Europe and the United States—the breadwinner/ homemaker/child-rich family sustained by a “family wage”—entered into crisis.  More specifically, a rival view of human nature came to the fore, with a very different understanding of the human family.

One of the most systematic and influential advocates of this view was Alva Myrdal, a socialist and feminist theorist from Sweden, active from the 1930’s through the mid-1970’s.  Her influence even spread to America.  A philosophical atheist, she argued that human nature was not biologically fixed in a created order.  Rather, she believed that family structure was the product of material, environmental evolution.  As economic relationships evolved, so must social relationships.  A family structure inherited from agrarian times could no longer function in a modern urban environment, Myrdal said.  Marriage relationships founded on the biological differences between men and women were no longer relevant to an industrial setting.  The family and population crises of the early 20th Century, she insisted, were the product of a social and cultural lag behind economic change.  A new family model was imperative, Myrdal said.  “Paid work, productive work, is now a woman’s demand, and as such a social fact, which lies completely in line with general tendencies of evolution,” she wrote.  The so-called “traditional family” was an “abnormal situation for a child,” one “almost pathological.”  Instead, “a new parenthood” was needed, one that would be part of “the evolution toward a rationalization of human life.”  The “day-care center,” Myrdal wrote, not the disintegrating home, represented the new human order.  In the former, small children could be rescued from the shallow views of their parents, and reprogrammed for life in an androgynous, cooperative socialist order.[11]

Alva Myrdal’s arguments actually represent an early and relatively coherent version of the general intellectual assault mounted against the family system prevailing in Sweden, America, and elsewhere through the early 1960’s.  Atheist, neo-Malthusian, humanist, feminist, socialist, Marxist, playboy philosopher: all could agree on a common foe, the breadwinner/homemaker/child-rich home.  And their assault produced policy effects.  In these nations, new “no fault” divorce statutes weakened the institutional nature of marriage.  Gender-role engineering eliminated the virtually important family wage.  Population policy refocused on the so-called “population bomb,” with calls for dramatic reductions in family size.  Day care subsidies grew; “at home” parenting drew scorn.  Schools became “substitutes” for the family.  Housing policies shifted to favor so-called “new family forms.”  Pro-family tax codes disappeared, in favor of individualized taxation.  The virtues of the home economy stood ignored.  Welfare systems began to penalize family inter-generational care.  These stories are told in some detail in the chapters of Fractured Generations..

A NEW FAMILY POLICY

So, in sum, we need family policy today: (1) to insure protection of the family as an institution in the context of the modern centralizing state; (2) to shelter the integrity and the necessary functions of the family from intrusion by “modernity”; and (3), to counter the “post family” ideologies that have dominated policymaking from 1965, through the 1980’s, and into our own time, as well.

It is also true that any coherent attempt at the making of family policy must derive from a clear definition of “family.”  In Fractured Generations, the definition used comes from a preliminary session of the World Congress of Families II, held May, 1998, in a Second Century B.C. room in the ancient city of Rome.  That definition reads:

The natural family is the fundamental social unit, inscribed in human nature, and centered around the voluntary union of a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant of marriage for the purposes of: satisfying the longings of the human heart to give and receive love; welcoming and ensuring the full physical and emotional development of children; sharing a home that serves as the center for social, educational, economic, and spiritual life; building strong bonds among the generations to pass on a way of life that has transcendent meaning; and extending a hand of compassion to individuals and households whose circumstances fall short of these ideals.

This definition provides firm measures against which one can chart progress or retreat, success and failure.

A new 21st Century Family Policy must also overcome the weaknesses of the family policy scheme of the last century.  The model of the breadwinner/homemaker/child-rich household sustained by a “family wage” seemed impressive in 1957, the peak year of the American Baby Boom.  Yet, not ten years later, this model was in massive retreat.  Weaknesses left it vulnerable to attack, and so something of a one-generation wonder.  These flaws included:

• The new Suburban Family rested on promotion of the “companionate” model of marriage, which emphasized psychological tasks such as “personality adjustment” and exaggerated gender roles, to the exclusion of true complementarity and meaningful household functions.

• Homemaking women and adolescents were increasingly isolated in suburban communities without viable central places for the building of healthy community.

• Breadwinning men engaged in long commutes and were too often only occasional figures in their homes.

• Public education, despite accepting funds for homemaker education, retained a latent, deeper hostility toward family autonomy.

• After 1948, with the Maternalists moving into retirement, policy making elites had ever-diminishing respect for America’s mid-century family policy achievements, leaving them vulnerable to the siren’s song of the Swedish model. 

• African Americans never successfully entered the family model of the 1950’s, a failure ably dissected in Daniel P. Moynihan’s 1965 report, The Negro American Family: The Case for National Action.[12]

• Certain “internal contradictions” within the Social Security system also emerged, including new disincentives to bear children and a hostility to direct intergenerational care.

Accordingly, a family policy fit for the 21st Century should not try to recreate the framework of 50 years before.  We need to do better.  Instead, it should aim at:

• Bringing both mothers and fathers as well as their children home, through the rebuilding of function-rich, vital home economies;

• Transforming all forms of elementary and secondary education into a system focused on true homecomings;

• Embracing all American ethnic groups in the scheme; and

• Reshaping “social security” programs to strengthen intergenerational bonds within each family.

Fractured Generations concludes with an Appendix laying out “An American Family Policy for the Twenty-First Century.”  Toward the ends cited above, specific proposals include:

Regarding Marriage:

•   The states should re-introduce "fault" into their laws governing divorce. 

•   All governments should treat marriage as a full economic partnership.  At the Federal level, this would mean reintroducing full "income splitting" in the income tax, as existed between 1948 and 1963.  Such a measure would eliminate the most notorious "marriage penalty." 

Regarding Population Policy:

•   The USA should recognize that strong families commonly rest on religiously-grounded morality systems, which deserve autonomy and respect as vital aspects of civil society.

•   The Federal government should welcome large families, created responsibly through marriage, as special gifts to our society, deserving affirmation and encouragement.

•   And the government should underscore that the demographic problem facing the 21st Century is depopulation, not overpopulation.

Relative to domestic policy, these population principles point toward:

•   A doubling of the real value of the personal income tax exemption for children (currently $3,250 per child to $6,500) and of the child tax credit (currently $1,000 per child under age 16 to $2,000) and the elimination of income-based restrictions on their availability.

•   The repeal of Title X of the Public Health Services Act, which subsidizes over 4000 birth control clinics across the nation.

Regarding Infant and Toddler Care:

Replace the existing Dependent Care Tax Credit with a universal, indexed tax credit of $2,500 per child, ages birth to 5.  This credit would be available to all parents of preschoolers, both those with a parent full time at home and those purchasing substitute care.  It should be refundable to those parents without the income to claim the full credit, allowing for a reduction in means-tested government daycare subsidies. 

Regarding the Education of the Young:

• Home education should be protected.  The states should reform their compulsory education laws along the model of Alaska, where any child is exempted who "is being educated in the child's home by a parent or legal guardian."  This law precludes registration, reporting, or curricular requirements.

• Educational diversity should be encouraged in ways that reinforce family autonomy and school independence.  "Tuition tax credits" are too narrow in their focus, giving no reception to home-educating families.  "Vouchers" tend to make private and religious schools dependent on state funds, open these institutions to potential regulation, and subtly erode the virtues of personal and familial sacrifice which are key to the success of independent schools.

Instead:

•   Per-capita child tax deductions and credits, without any link to schooling, should be preferred at both the state and federal levels; and

•   New tax credits on all forms of educational expense (including books, fees, tuition, and special lessons) should be created, with the Illinois law (allowing a credit of 20 percent on such expenses up to $500) as the model; or

•   All educational expenses (from preschool fees and homeschooling expenses to university tuition) could be treated as an investment in human capital, logically enjoying full income tax deductability.

To restore educational liberty and neighborhood integrity, all public school systems should be deconsolidated to single-school districts.  These public schools, moreover, should be "open."  Like a community college, they should offer their learning and extra-curricula opportunities to all families in the district, but would compel none.  These schools would again be able to reflect the values of local communities and would have strong incentives to serve the neighborhood and its inhabitants.

Regarding Suburbia as “Home” to the Nation:

The need is to refunctionalize individual homes, abandoning governmental biases toward the frail "companionate model" of family home-design and opening suburban life to a return of the "productive home."  Specific regulatory reforms would include:

•   At the federal level, abolishing FHA and other public underwriting rules that discourage the creation of home offices, home schools, and home businesses.

•   At the state level, ending those regulations of the professions--such as medicine, law, dentistry, and accounting--which favor giant institutions and prohibit decentralized learning such as apprenticeships.

•   At the local level, loosening or abolishing zoning laws and restrictive covenants to allow the flourishing of home gardens, modest animal husbandry, home offices and businesses, and home schools.

Regarding Elder Care and the Bonds of the Generations:

True "intergenerational" reform would rebuild incentives that favor both childbearing and family-centered elder care, by restructuring incentives within the Medicare and Social Security systems:

•   Taxpayers should be granted a credit of 20 percent against their total FICA (payroll) tax for each child born or adopted, a credit to be continued until the child reaches age 13.  This would mean that a family with five children, ages 12 and under, would pay no FICA tax in that year (but would still receive all due employment credit).

•   Taxpayers should be granted a 25 percent credit against their total FICA tax for each elderly parent or grandparent residing in the taxpayer's home.

•   For each child born, a mother should receive three years (12 quarters) of employment credits (calculated at the median full-time income) toward her future Social Security pension.

•   A person should also receive one year's employment credit toward Social Security, at the same median income level, if he or she served as the primary caregiver for an elderly relative residing in his or her home.

•   Base FICA tax rates could be raised to accommodate these reforms at a revenue-neutral level (so shifting the tax burden onto those without children and/or refusing to care for their own); or the OASDI tax could be applied to all income and no longer capped off at incomes over $90,000.

Taken together, I believe that this policy framework would undergird and encourage a stable, autonomous, child-rich, multi-generational family system for this new American century.

Endnotes: