What are the proper ends, or purposes, of government?  One intelligent answer came from the British author, C.S. Lewis, who wrote:

It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects — military, political, economic, and what not.  But in a way things are much simpler than that.  The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life.  A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden — that is what the State is there for.  And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.[1]

The source of this reflection is Lewis’ remarkable Christian apologetic, Mere Christianity.  (Now, lest I be accused of showing dangerous, unconstitutional, theocratic tendencies here, I should add for the record that Lewis himself rejected appeals to God to justify state actions.  “I believe in God,” he wrote, “but I detest theocracy.”)

Back, though, to the main point:  I like Lewis’ view of government being in service to the husband and wife chatting before a fire, to gardening, to “ordinary happiness.”  This latter phrase actually should hold a special resonance with Americans; after all, our own Declaration of Independence commits our nation to the advancement of certain inalienable rights, notably “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

What a curious and novel idea: a nation devoted to the pursuit of happiness.  What did the Founders have in mind here?  In her fine book examining the origin and meaning of this phrase, historian Jan Lewis — no relation to C.S. — found that “it was within the family circle that men and women [of Jefferson’s Virginia] told each other to look for happiness, and there, if anywhere, that they found it.”  She added:  “Virginians who rhapsodized about the family were creating and reinforcing an article of faith for their society, a belief perhaps more central to their lives than any other.”[2]

In short, it appears that for the Founders, happiness meant domestic happiness, the life of the family.  In this sense, the purpose of the new American nation was to serve family happiness.  Despite this record, however, many Americans are bothered today by public attention to the family, especially by the concept of “family policy.”  Some catch again the faint whiff here of the dreaded “theocracy,” a veiled attempt to impose religious “family values” on a diverse populace.  Others are troubled by the specter of government meddling in private family life. 

My purpose today is to answer both concerns, to argue for what I call “the necessity of family policy,” and by inference, of the necessity of government engagement in social research on children and youth, wisely done.  To do so, I will focus on three questions: 

• Why has the family emerged as a central cultural and political issue? 

• What has been the nature of family policy?  And: 

• What are the family policy imperatives for America in this new century?

The Centralizing State  

Answers lie in our history.  In one sense, as both the C.S. Lewis and Jan Lewis books remind us, the family has always been at the center of Anglo-American 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 neutral” terms, using words such as “person” where the generic “he” would have been expected.  Indeed, our 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 was irrelevant.  Rather, 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, according to one Quaker writer, “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.”[3]  Historian James Henretta shows how late 18th-century Americans raised children to “succeed them,” not merely to “succeed.”[4]  In his provocative book, The Myth of American Individualism, political historian Barry Shain shows that the American Revolution 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-centered communities.[5] 

These Americans saw family households as the source of new citizens, the places where the character traits necessary to free government would be forged, the foundation of ordered liberty.  Defense of this society of households lay with the states, local communities, and the people.  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 authority.

Since the late 19th century, however, the scope of government — state and federal — has grown massively.  Relative to the family, there were two important changes.  First, the legal doctrine of parens patriae — literally “the parenthood of the state” — spawned early examples of interventionist government in movements such as the “reform school” campaign.  Federal programs such as Social Security would also pass Constitutional muster through appeal to parens patriae.  Second, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution became a legal wedge for the steady expansion of federal authority at the expense of the states and local communities and of the families they sheltered.  A detailed list of court cases affecting family life could lead to this conclusion:  With only a few exceptions, the legal history of the last 125 years can be written as the slow 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 over 25 percent of gross domestic product and involved in every aspect of American life — mandate attention to family relations in all federal policy making.  Whatever our theoretical preferences, the original American plan — leaving family issues to the states, local communities, and the people — is not a real option in the age of the U.S. Department of Education, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) grants, Social Security, the Department of Homeland Security, and federal child care policy.

The federal tax code, to choose another example, also mandates close attention to family questions.  Once a tax of any sort claims more than about five percent of income or assets, it ceases to be a mere nuisance and starts to influence behavior.  Both the federal income and payroll taxes fall into this category.  Important issues arise: Should marriage be treated as an economic partnership?  Should the unit of taxation be the household?  Or the individual?  Should children be treated as a consumption choice?  Or should the appearance and nurture of children enjoy recognition and special treatment?  Should taxation treat “human capital” the same as “physical capital”?  Should parenthood be recognized?  Neutrality here is not possible. 

Or consider the U.S. Army.  Our standing army of 1895 — 30,000 strong, mostly scattered in military posts out West — could rely on a largely bachelor enlisted force and avoid issues of wives and children.  A standing Army of 800,000 men and women, however, cannot avoid family questions.

 So, our situation is this:  On the one hand, a fundamental truth has not changed.  The stable family household remains the most reliable source of new citizens able to sustain a regime of ordered liberty.  (Indeed, viewed a different way, our prisons today are dominated by young adults who grew up in unstable homes, commonly without fathers; there’s little prospect for ordered liberty here.)  On the other hand, new historical 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.  For hundreds of human generations, 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.  Mothers, fathers, and children alike were pulled out of their homes 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. 

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 sometimes dangerous — economic independence 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.”[6]  Indeed, no developed nation today can claim even replacement level fertility.  In many lands, ranging from Russia to Italy to Singapore, fertility levels are perilously low, children are disappearing, threatening even national survival.

European and American Models  

And so, 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 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.  It is also the only proven source of citizens suited to ordered liberty.  In modernity’s wake, the critical task became — and remains — the protection of the natural family from certain pressures of “modernity.”  Specifically, family policy has meant constructing selected barriers around the home, to limit the spread of the industrial principle, to preserve some domain 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 built 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).  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.”  Any just wage would 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.”[7]

Using these principles, lay political leaders in France, Belgium, and other European lands proceeded to build family policy systems.  The favored approach became “family allowances” that would recognize the disproportionate burdens carried by laborers with wives and children at home.  Business leaders 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, prenatal 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 were absorbed into the French government’s emerging Social Security program.[8]

In America, policy construction to protect families took a somewhat different, and arguably 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. 

Inspired by “Maternalist” reformers such as Julia Lathrop, Josephine Baker, and Florence Kelly, the U.S. Congress created the Children’s Bureau in 1912.   Lathrop, named the Bureau’s first Chief, laid out 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.[9]

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, I note, was the first federal education program.  The Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, the first true federal entitlement, provided federal funds to the states for prenatal 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 sex-defined job categories (that is, “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs”) with large pay differentials favoring men.  The Social Security Amendments of 1939 provided homemakers pensions to women married to eligible men and “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 99 percent of these government-backed mortgages targeted on young married couples.  Tax reforms in 1944 and 1948 extended the marriage-friendly benefits of “income splitting” to all American couples and substantially raised the real value of the tax deduction for dependent children.[10] 

The results, relative to family statistics, 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 marital fertility rate — after falling for 100 years — nearly doubled.  Following the turmoil of World War II, even the divorce rate declined between 1946 and 1957.  While certainly not wholly due to public policy, it seems true that family policy initiatives crafted between 1912 and 1948 affirmed, encouraged, and partly caused the remarkable “marriage” and “baby booms” of mid-20th-century America.[11]

The Sixties and Beyond  

And yet, starting in the mid-1960’s, 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.  Critics of this system suddenly dominated public debates.  Atheist, neo-Malthusian, humanist, feminist, socialist, Marxist, playboy philosopher: all agreed on a common foe, the breadwinner/homemaker/child-rich home.  Their joint assault had policy effects.  “No fault” divorce statutes weakened the institutional nature of marriage.  Civil rights regulations premised on gender-equality eliminated the 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 was ignored.  Housing policies came to favor so-called “new family forms.”  Pro-family tax codes disappeared in favor of individualized taxation, spawning “marriage penalties.”  Welfare systems came to favor out-of-wedlock childbearing and to penalize family intergenerational care. 

Not surprisingly, family statistics reversed course.  The marriage rate tumbled.  The divorce rate soared.  Marital fertility fell by 50 percent.  Out-of-wedlock births climbed sharply. 

As you can probably tell, my own sentiments — in general — do not lie with the idea systems just noted.  All the same, I can see internal weaknesses that left vulnerable the restored American family system of the mid-20th century.  Specifically:

The new Suburban Family of the 1950’s rested on an assumption of the “companionate” model of marriage, which emphasized psychological tasks such as “personality adjustment” and exaggerated gender roles (for example, the role of the “glamour girl” for wives) to the exclusion of true complementarity and meaningful household functions.

Homemaking women and adolescents were increasingly isolated in suburban developments 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.

After 1945, with the old Maternalists moving into retirement, policy making  elites showed confusion over America’s mid-century family policy achievements, leaving them vulnerable.  Specifically, when the “family wage” concept came under challenge, few were able or willing to defend it.

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

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

And the “family wage” scheme of the 1950’s proved too rigid to accommodate complex human circumstances.

So where are we left?  We need family policy today:  first, to insure protection of the family as an institution in the context of the modern centralizing state; second, to shelter the integrity and the necessary functions of the family from excessive intrusion by “modernity”; and third, to respond to the “post family” ideologies that dominated policymaking from the mid-1960’s into the 1980’s, and that damaged the only institution capable of sustaining “ordered liberty.” 

It is also true that any coherent attempt at making family policy must rest on a clear definition of “family,” against which one can chart progress or retreat, success or failure.  The definition that I recommend comes from a working group of the World Congress of Families, crafted in May, 1998, in a Second Century B.C. room in the ancient city of Rome.  It is informed both by the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by the findings of social science.  This 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.

In addition, as implied above, a family policy fit for the 21st century should not try to recreate the framework of 50 years before.  We need to do better.  Specifically, I believe that an American family policy should aim at:

• First, embracing all American ethnic groups in the scheme. 

• Second, affirming marriage as a public good and the marital couple as an economic partnership.

• Third, balancing the equality and the complementarity of men and women.

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

• Fifth, valuing the birth of new children in married couple homes and honoring the special gift to society of the large family.

• Sixth, expanding the child care choices of all Americans, including support for the care of preschool children in their homes.

• And seventh, valuing the intact home as the best insurance against abuse, neglect, and delinquency.

Endnotes:

1  C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster Touchstone, 1996): 169.

2  Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia  (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 204-05.

3  Barry Levy, “‘Tender Plants’: Quaker Farmers and Children in the Delaware Valley, 1681-1735,” Journal of Family History 3 (Summer 1978): 117.

4  James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentality in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (Jan. 1978): 20-21.

5  Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

6  John C. Caldwell and Thomas Schindlmeyer, “Explanations of the Fertility Crisis in Modern Societies: A Search for Commonalities,” Population Studies 57 (2003): 241-63.

7  Two Basic Social Encyclicals (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of American Press, 1943): 5-11, 15, 55-59, 133-35.

8  See: Hubert Curtis Callahan, S.J., The Family Allowance Procedure: An Analysis of the Family Allowance Procedure in Selected Countries (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1947): 3, 68.

9  Quoted in Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994): 91.

10  On the arguably “pro-family” nature of the New Deal, see: Allan Carlson, The ‘American Way’: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003): 55-78.

11  Evidence for the direct positive effects of these innovations on family formation can be found in:  Harvey S. Rosen, “Owner Occupied Housing and the Federal Income Tax: Estimates and Simulations,” Journal of Urban Economics 6 (1979): 263-64; D. Laidler, “Income Tax Incentives for Owner-Occupied Housing,” in A.C. Harberger and M.J. Bailey, eds., The Taxation of Income from Capital (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1969): 50-64; Leslie Whittington, “Taxes and the Family: The Impact of the Tax Exemption for Dependents on Marital Fertility,” Demography 29 (May 1992): 220-22; and L.A. Whittington, J. Alms, and H.E. Peters, “Fertility and the Personal Exemption: Implicit Pronatalist Policy in the United States,” The American Economic Review 80 (June 1990): 545-56.

12  The full text of this report can be found in: Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancy, eds., The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).

THE PARENTS’ TAX RELIEF ACT OF 2005

On June 23, Howard Center President Allan Carlson participated in a news conference held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC, marking introduction of the “Parents’ Tax Relief Act of 2005” in the U.S. Congress.  This measure draws on policy ideas articulated in Dr. Carlson’s book, Fractured Generations: Crafting a Family Policy for Twenty-first Century America, published this year by Transaction-Rutgers University.  These are his remarks.

A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt remarked: “It is in the life of the family, upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the Nation rests....The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its borders.”1  He added that “everything” of value in American public life “rests upon the home.”2

Today, members of Congress — led by Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Representative Lee Terry of Nebraska — reaffirm these truths and put forward a set of new policy ideas to strengthen the autonomy of the family in America.  The “Parents’ Tax Relief Act of 2005” is, in my opinion, the most important piece of pro-family legislation to be introduced in decades.  It recognizes the value of the parental care of small children and expands the child-care choices of all new mothers and fathers.  It affirms marriage as a public good and restores recognition of the marital couple as an economic partnership.  The bill properly affirms the value of children to the nation and responds to the extra economic burdens faced by young parents.  This measure seeks to reduce conflicts between workplace and home by making it easier for the home itself to be a place for market labor.  And the measure recognizes the full-time mother or father as doing publicly valued work, deserving recognition within the Social Security system.

These approaches are distinctly American.  Most other developed nations provide state child allowances to parents as offsets to the costs of rearing children.  However, this method tends to make families wards of the state and to weaken marriage.  In contrast, the “Parents’ Tax Relief Act of 2005” uses carefully targeted tax policy measures to enable families to retain more of their own earned income while children are in the home.  The record shows that this approach supports family formation and strengthens homes.3

Viewed from another angle, this bill would also eliminate problems and inequities that have crept into federal tax policy.  For example, federal law currently gives a generous tax credit, or subsidy, without income limit to parents who purchase day care.  However, existing policy gives no recognition at all to full-time parental child care which, social science shows, is predictably better for young children.4  The “Parents Tax Relief Act of 2005” would begin to set things right by granting a tax credit of $250 per month for families that make the financial sacrifice to have one parent serve as the full-time, at-home caregiver for children ages six and under.  On the one hand, this measure creates a level playing field; on the other hand, it expands the child-care choices of all qualifying families.

Second, the infamous “marriage penalty” remains alive and well.  The tax cut of 2001 removed this penalty only for the 15 percent tax bracket.  The “marriage penalty” still afflicts the majority of Americans affected by the middle and high tax brackets.  Today’s new bill would fully eliminate this penalty by making all tax brackets twice as wide for married couples, as compared to singles.

Third, the per-child tax relief provided by the existing personal exemption and the child tax credit are inadequate, well below the relief delivered by the exemplary, pro-child Tax Reform of 1948. Today’s bill would raise the personal exemption for children to $5,000 and would make permanent the $1,000 per child tax credit and index it to inflation in order to protect its future value.

Reflecting old assumptions about the need for industrial centralization, federal tax policy still favors large central offices and factories over market labor in the home. This bill would simplify and expand the availability of the deduction for business use of the home and also encourage telecommuting.  These are progressive ideas designed to increase family-friendly, home-centered work opportunities in the new information age. 

Finally, the Social Security system fails to recognize the full-time care of small children as real work (even the existing “homemakers” pension has no linkage to children).  This is troubling, for there is strong evidence that existing incentives within Social Security discourage the birth of children,5 while such new children are in fact needed to maintain the system in the future. Today’s bill boldly faces this problem by granting employment credit toward future Social Security benefits to those parents who make the sacrifices to raise their children, full-time, at home. 

Near the end of his Presidency, Ronald Reagan said:

[T]he family is the bedrock of our nation, but it is also the engine that gives our country life....It’s for our families that we work and labor, so that we can join together around the dinner table, bring our children up the right way, care for our parents, and reach out to those less fortunate.  It is the power of the family that holds the Nation together, that gives America her conscience, and that serves as the cradle of our country’s soul.6

Today, Senator Brownback, Representative Terry, and their colleagues here lead the way to a rekindling of that spirit.  They transform pro-family rhetoric into policy ideas that can make a real difference for American families.  I am most grateful to them and, as our Nation’s Founders would have said, I wish them Godspeed.