Getting Family Policy Wrong
Those advocating for a do-it-all family policy approach risk causing further harm while accomplishing few objectives save the accumulation of greater debt.
You could be forgiven if you thought “family policy” was something new and exciting in Republican politics. A recent essay by Emma Green in the New Yorker speaks of “the family turn” in the Republican Party: “Social conservatives within Trump’s coalition have been workshopping a new playbook… overhauling the way Republicans think and talk about family.” American Enterprise Institute’s Tim Carney sees this as the thinking of a new generation: “the younger crowd of conservatives doesn’t have the instinctual libertarianism that Reagan-era and Bush-era conservatives do on these questions.” In his new book, Dawn’s Early Light, Heritage President Kevin Roberts writes, "family policy needs to be at the heart of everything the New Conservative Movement does.” By Green’s account, Roberts and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance (who wrote the book’s foreword) appear well-positioned to lead the hailed realignment.
But family policy is old, even older than the welfare state. While the phrase first came into general use in the United States in the 1960s and 70s, the idea that the government should be actively involved in the affairs of the family is as old as the idea of government itself—though not always implemented effectively or laudably. To promote the common good of the polis over other claims of loyalty, boys in ancient Sparta were separated from their families and raised by the state. Long before Vice President-elect J.D. Vance excoriated childless cat ladies, Rome imposed taxes and other restrictions on its childless citizens. Throughout history, nation-states have tried to boost their population by giving citizens a holiday for procreation.
Without families, governments cannot long exist—a lesson that totalitarian governments from ancient Sparta to modern China often had to learn the hard way, as each faced their population crises because of costly policymaking decisions. It is fair to say, then, that government needs to take an interest in how their policies affect families, lest the family fall apart and stop producing future generations of laborers, taxpayers, and soldiers. “Family,” as Roberts correctly contends in his book, “is the most important thing for the future of the nation.”
There is, no doubt, a need for course correction. Independently of Roberts, I have called for a “family-focused fusionism” that put “social-conservative values — not the business wing of the party — in the driver’s seat” (incredibly close to Roberts’ call for “family-first fusionism”). But, in politics, as much as in driving, it is important to remember that overcorrection can be its own kind of disaster.
In Dawn’s Early Light, Roberts heaps misguided praise on Hungary: “they use massive public expenditures to send the explicit message that the family is the most important thing for the future of the nation. Today, Hungary, the world’s leader in family policy, spends up to 6 percent of its GDP on measures to encourage family formation and the raising of children.”
Such a claim fails to give America its due credit. Despite the massive family support spending discrepancy between the two countries, the U.S. outperforms Hungary in baby births. According to the latest data from the World Bank (2022), American women have about 13 percent more babies than their counterparts in Hungary. That U.S. numbers still fail to reach the replacement rate (the amount necessary to prevent the population from collapsing without mass immigration) is a serious political problem, but it is worth noting that other high-spending nations don’t fare much better.
Family support spending should not be the main tool for achieving or measuring family policy success. Contrary to what Roberts argues in his book, we do not “need to pull every plausible lever, economic and cultural; local, state, and federal; public sector, private sector, and civil society.” More so, because many of these levers tend to be incredibly expensive, doing the one thing that credible family policy ought not to do: passing the problems of one generation along to the next generation. There’s nothing pro-family about that.
Many of the levers that family policy advocates insist that we pull, moreover, do not seem to address the actual aggravating factors. How would expanding the Child Tax Credit (CTC) help if, as we are told, Americans put off childrearing because of wage stagnation? After all, tax transfers do nothing to address wage growth and only benefit those with children. Or, again, why should the preferred intervention be expanding federally mandated paid leave for new parents when the problem is getting men married in the first place? And J.D. Vance has ably explained the problems with direct attempts to provide or subsidize childcare for working parents.
If there’s any country to be taking cues from, it’s Israel, which dramatically outperforms both Hungary and the U.S. It is true that Israel has many generous family benefits, like baby bonuses and paid family leave, but these aren’t sufficient explanations for Israel’s unique status. Israel’s spending on family support is rather ordinary: higher than the U.S. but about average for the developed world. And yet, despite this, Israel is the only country in the OECD that exceeds the replacement rate, which it accomplishes handily with an average of 2.9 babies born for every woman in the population.
What makes Israel different is what Carney calls a “family friendly” culture that’s caught up in Israel’s religious identity. It’s not reducible to mere religiosity. After all, America outperforms Israel (and Hungary, for that matter) on metrics like daily prayer and weekly attendance at a house of worship. But the values of religious communities like the ultra-Orthodox function like a “social contagion” in Israel. “Ultra-Orthodox Jews average more than 6 babies per woman,” explains Carney. As a result, this small subsection of the population (just 13 percent of Israelis) drives even typically low-performing atheists and secular Jews to have higher birthrates than they do in the rest of the world. It turns out that raising a family is far easier and more desirable when everyone is doing it.
Carney rightly warns that “all the countries that have deployed subsidies, free daycare, or other policy fixes have failed to pull their birthrate above replacement.” The problem is too deep to be fixed with most public policy levers. The one country that pulled itself out of the birth dearth, Georgia, seems to have done so due to a commitment from the leader of the Georgian Orthodox Church to “personally baptize every third, fourth, or higher-order child born to a married Orthodox couple in Georgia.” I do not think a similar promise from Vice President Vance would have the same effect, but we will never know if he doesn’t try.
In all seriousness, I am not advocating that public policymakers embrace “the grace of doing nothing” (as one theologian once described it). Instead, I am questioning the wisdom of Roberts’ “pull every lever” approach.
The problems that family policy seeks to address are urgent, emergencies even, but panic often multiplies problems rather than mitigates them, as my grandfather once learned. Training aspiring helicopter pilots at a small airport in South Carolina, he taught them to calmly navigate simulated engine failure and avoid a catastrophic collision with the ground. On one occasion, however, the trainee panicked, pulled the wrong lever, and transformed the situation from simulated to actual crisis. Fortunately, the crash failed to kill the pair of them, though still leaving my grandfather with a painful back break and an extended hospital stay.
Policymakers should proceed under the same principle that guided the doctors attending to my grandfather post-crash: first, do no harm. Sound policymaking, like good medical practice, requires sober-minded realism. If policy levers never worked for other countries trying to reverse the birth dearth, we shouldn’t think it might work for us. Moreover, we should be alert to the serious tradeoffs that arise from many of these seemingly apparent levers. Simply because one of them is nominally about “children” or “family” does not make them the automatic best way to advance the cause of families. Even the most cautious version of CTC expansion—updating and indexing the credit’s value to compensate for Bidenflation—could conceivably leave families worse off if paired with aggressive tariffs as pay-fors, as has been repeatedly suggested for tax reform in 2025.
Family policymaking would do well to adopt more modest goals. If increasing workers’ wages and addressing offshoring industries is the goal, then there is an obvious blueprint in cutting corporate taxes and making the U.S. more competitive through deregulation. If Carney and others like Catherine Pakaluk are right that marriage and religion are the keys, then the government should bend over backward to avoid impeding these things with penalties and artificial disincentives.
On marriage, beyond the obvious outstanding items in the tax and welfare system, conservatives do well to look for constitutional means to reduce childhood exposure to pornography (a known acid to marital stability). Many such advocates have produced an impressive set of amicus briefs in the Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton case. Reforming states’ divorce laws might also be a fruitful end, as even liberal scholars like Melissa Kearney have suggested, but could ultimately backfire by making marriage appear too serious for the unmarried to contemplate pursuing.
Pakaluk provides several suggestions on religion: “make it easier for churches and religious communities to run schools, succor families, and aid the needs of human life.” This would certainly include expanding school choice, protecting the right of religious institutions to receive the same benefits as non-religious institutions, and upholding the conscience rights of Americans.
These policy proposals might not seem particularly exciting—after all they are what many conservatives have been proposing for decades, including Roberts in Dawn’s Early Light—but when you’re trying to navigate a helicopter or the federal government safely, boring is good.
John Shelton is the policy director for Advancing American Freedom.