A polarized family policy is the last thing America needs

In recent weeks, much of the internet discourse has been dominated by arguments over the value of parents versus non-parents. This is largely thanks to Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s now-infamous comments about “childless cat ladies” and whether parents should get additional votes to proxy for their children.

As incendiary and ill-advised as Vance’s cat lady remarks may have been (he has since asserted they were sarcastic), all American families — on both sides of the political aisle — need family policy to avoid the negative polarization trend that has made so many other issues difficult to resolve.

It is possible to talk about how parents provide a service to the nation through child-rearing and should thus be met with a degree of societal recompense without turning the conversation into a zero-sum game that insults or disadvantages non-parents, especially women.

In fact, we should say this loudly: Our society needs childless adults. We would be worse off without a cadre of loving aunts, uncles and neighbors with the flexibility to help, or the priests, nuns, monks and ascetics in religions like Catholicism, Buddhism and Hinduism who devote their lives to serving a unique spiritual purpose.

Moreover, no reasonable view of a free society involves shaming into parenthood those who truly do not prefer having children — nor those who have difficulty conceiving or bearing children.

At the same time, parenthood is a great service.

In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt declared to the National Congress of Mothers, “There is no other society which I am quite as glad to receive as this,” calling them the single body “that I put even ahead of the veterans of the Civil War.”

He added: “When all is said and done it is the mother, and the mother only, who is a better citizen even than the soldier who fights for his country.”

We can update Roosevelt’s language into a modern context, allowing for multiple family formulations and fathers, but his overall point remains salient.

As Angela Garbes wrote in “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change,” using “mothering” to refer to caregiving in general for men and women, “Raising children is not a private hobby, not an individual duty. It is a social responsibility, one that requires robust community support. Garbes said the pandemic showed that “mothering is some of the only truly essential work humans do. Without people to care for our children, we are lost.”

In America, however, far too many individuals are not meeting their self-defined family-size goals, and far too many caregivers are struggling to make ends meet.

A 2023 paper from demographer Lyman Stone and economist Clara Piano noted that “the average woman in the U.S. believes she would be happiest having about 2.5 children. Yet, the total fertility rate is 1.7 children.” Family planning choices are, of course, complex and deeply personal. The question of abortion access is highly relevant.

That said, one’s position on these issues does not preclude a belief that the nation would be better off if more people could meet their personal family goals. Concerns over the birth rate are not inherently partisan, either.

In 2004, demographer Philip Longman, then with the left-leaning New America Foundation, wrote in “The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity,” “population growth underlies our modern concept of freedom” because so many social and economic systems rest on that assumption.

So, what is a better path forward? As the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) once argued, America should have a national family policy, but it need not be prescriptive. Instead, we ought to proceed from the premise that government should “promote the stability and well-being of the American family.”

On this, we have a chance to forge a cross-partisan consensus. We were recently part of the Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families, which brought together thinkers from across the political spectrum and produced a report exploring opportunities for collaborative action to bolster families.

It is worth recalling that many major family policies, from the Child Care and Development Block Grant to the child tax credit, were originally passed in a bipartisan fashion.

Once the rhetoric is turned down, one can even see glimmers of opportunity today. Newly minted Democratic vice-presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz (Minn.) told the New York Times he agrees with Vance about prioritizing a national paid family leave law.

“JD Vance is right about this,” he said. “We should make it easier for families to be together, then make sure that after your child’s born, that you can spend a little time with them. That’d be a great thing.”

As we work and travel across the U.S., we talk to many people from different family types. In our experience, most Americans are less judgmental about their neighbors’ choices than the most extreme voices in our politics suggest.

Republican, Democrat, or otherwise, we aspire to have families and communities that bring us joy, hope and peace. And if we have children, for them to grow up to be good, healthy people and citizens. Rather than letting parental status become yet another battleground, let’s strive for a commitment to stable, quality family life for all.

Joe Waters is the co-founder and CEO of Capita, a nonprofit focused on children and families. Elliot Haspel is a child care policy expert and senior fellow at Capita.