The chance to drastically improve family life is here

We live in a diverse country, where people have a lot of different preferences about how to live. For example, a 2016 Pew Research Center survey found that 59% of Americans believed children with two parents were better off if one parent stayed at home, but 39% thought children were just as well off if both parents worked.

So which side was right? Well, obviously, neither. It depends on the personality, values and circumstances of the people in each particular family. Despite what Tolstoy wrote, happy families are in fact all happy in their own ways.

Our debates about family structure have been poisoned by people who can’t acknowledge difference without immediately rendering some judgment. Family pluralism is a source of strength for this country, not a weakness.

It should be said that people’s views on the ideal family form are powerfully linked to their class standing. As research by scholars at the American Compass think tank has shown, people in the working class and to a lesser extent the middle class are more likely to prefer the “breadwinner” model, in which one parent stays home, when children are younger than 5. Families making more than $150,000 are more likely to admire the “dual earner” model, in which both parents work.

The crucial question is this: In a society with such a diverse array of family forms, which kind of family structure should the government favor? My answer is, “None.” The role of government is to help people build the kind of family they prefer, not tell them what kind of family they should prefer. Government should be neutral about what kind of family is best.

President Joe Biden’s American Families Plan has one element that beautifully accomplishes this, by extending the child tax credit, or child allowance. If parents want to use the extra money from the credit to help pay for day care, they can. If they want to use it to reduce work hours time so they can spend more time at home, they can. The child tax credit will help millions of families do what surveys show they already want to do — have more kids than they can now afford, and spend more time at home.

But the Biden administration is not entirely neutral when it comes to family policy. When, during a conference call,I asked three administration officials Thursday about this, they mentioned two other social goals. First, getting people working. “We want parents to be in the workforce, especially mothers,” said Susan Rice, head of the Domestic Policy Council. Second, the administration wants kids in classroom settings, to extend the public school system down two years. The administration is aggressively expanding child care subsidies and pre-K programs.

These are understandable public goals, but I wonder about the emphasis. In the first place, direct parental subsidies — perhaps because they let parents cut back on work and cultivate their kids’ social and emotional skills — can be a powerful tool to boost kids’ educational attainment.

Second, when it comes to parenting there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Whether a child will be helped or harmed by professional child care experience depends an awful lot on the nature of the particular child, the particular care center and the particular parents. These are circumstances only the parents, who are right there, can know, so parents should be given maximum power and flexibility to make decisions.

The way to do that, the family scholar W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia argues, is to focus money on direct subsidies and go big.

“Because the Biden administration is trying to be all things to all people,” Wilcox emailed me, “it partially funds a number of initiatives, including the child allowance. I’d much rather see the administration cut out the money promised for pre-K and child care and fully fund a generous child allowance.”

We are living in a time of huge economic and educational inequalities, and seething populist resentments. I worry that the upper middle-class will be inviting a furious backlash if it is seen to be privileging its parenting preferences through the use of state power.

Over recent decades the economy has placed enormous strain on American families. A fully generous child tax credit would give some parents a chance to step back from the job market for a few years while their kids were young — if they chose.

The opportunity to drastically improve American family life is before us.