Modern Family Comes to Washington

Imagine this Twilight Zone scenario: You come into work one day, and discover your office is stripped of all modern technology: no Internet, Google, smartphone or Microsoft Office Suite. You have plunged back to the 1950s – but must still somehow do your job in the 21^st century economy.

That’s a little bit like a day in the life of your average American family. Most no longer resemble the 50s-era Cleavers: Less than one-fifth of American children today live in a “traditional” family with a sole male provider. Yet this male-breadwinner model remains the kind of family that most social policies were designed to serve or reinforce.

Two factors created this chasm between policy and reality. The first is that family policy in America has generally failed to address or even acknowledge the effects of several social and economic megatrends that we’ll dig into shortly. The second factor is that family policy in United States today is often poorly designed technically. The result is that families today often don’t have the tools they need to thrive.

Who gets ahead and who doesn’t in American life has come to depend, arguably more than ever, on the strengths and weakness of one’s family network.

To take the first step toward helping to solve this problem, New America’s Family-Centered Social Policy Initiative released a paper this week to make the case for a major overhaul of our family policies.  It starts by answering the fundamental question: Why do we desperately need this policy upgrade?

At the highest level, deepening inequality, along with other broad economic and social changes, has elevated the importance of family. Who gets ahead and who doesn’t in American life has come to depend, arguably more than ever, on the strengths and weakness of one’s family network. Perhaps because this reality tilts against the bedrock notion that ours is an up-by-the-bootstraps country where anybody with pluck and determination can get ahead, regardless of family resources or background—our social policies have hardly begun to adjust to its implications.

Even the small subsets of programs that we conventionally frame as part of “family policy” are often based on long-defunct assumptions about the actual structure of modern families, including the evolving roles of men and women, the advent of families headed by same-sex couples, and the increasing class-based disparities in marriage and divorce rates. In designing and implementing social programs, policymakers routinely fail to account for the enduring impact of the family, its fast changing composition, or the pressures created by economic and technological change.

This wouldn’t be the first time policy structures are having trouble catching up to change in the real world. And, as often happens, this mismatch results in policy “silos” (built on the old reality), which prevent the strategic coordination of support systems and social programs.

Today, policymakers are beginning to recognize this fractured reality.

Take, for example, the emphasis on “work first” in our welfare policies, which often force mothers back into low-quality jobs with erratic schedules. Workforce training is often provided without simultaneously offering child care, or with child care that does not take into account the staggered part-time schedules many parents work.

Today, policymakers are beginning to recognize this fractured reality. Last June, the White House convened a Summit on Working Families to address the modern challenges that are either exacerbated or ignored by existing policies (or a lack thereof). In his State of the Union Address, President Obama introduced his “middle-class economics” plan, a key part of which “is helping working families feel more secure in a constantly changing economy.”

Of course, change takes time – especially with a sclerotic and deeply partisan Congress. But the first step to that change – and helping working families feel more secure, is to understand the megatrends that are core to their instability. These, after all, are the changes that are upending our conventional ideas of what a family looks like and how it behaves.

To name a few: The numbers of both women entering the paid workforce and female breadwinners are rising, while men’s earnings and the male labor force participation rate are falling (especially when we include incarcerated men).

More and more families are headed by a single parent. Costs of education, health care and child care have surged. Mobility is trending downward – in other words, many Americans’ standard of living is not rising from one generation to the next as it did before the 1950s. This makes inherited wealth, and the importance of “family ties” even more important.

Parallel to those economic and social changes, there’s the transformative impact of digital technologies, which have created intense pressures and opportunities for families.

There are fewer formal jobs than in the 1970s, and these jobs pay less than before. Increasing numbers of employees either freelance or work two or more part-time jobs, often at odd hours and on weekends. They serve as “contractors” without any employer-provided benefits and sometimes without the benefit of a regular paycheck. Amidst this upheaval, we’ve also seen mounting evidence that it is getting much harder for families to start, build, and maintain small businesses.

Parallel to those economic and social changes, there’s the transformative impact of digital technologies, which have created intense pressures and opportunities for families. Digitization makes them more vulnerable to surveillance and discrimination in the marketplace. But it can also provide important connections, as families scattered across the globe stay connected and engage in “remote caregiving.”

The effects of new technology vary widely across socio-economic and other divides – children from low-income families, for example, spend more time with TV and videos than children from affluent families. Parents in low-income families struggle to acquire digital literacy and often do not have access to computers or the Internet.

The failure of policymakers to address these megatrends is compounded by the flawed way that existing policies are crafted and implemented. We’ve identified four types of common structural challenges in family policy:

The silo challenge: Interventions focus on distinct areas (housing assistance, food, income, workforce training) without coordinating and integrating support systems.

The diversity challenge: Families are diverse (number of adults, relationship of caregivers to children), but many non-traditional family arrangements are not supported by policy.

The intergenerational challenge: Policy interventions often focus only on either children or adults, even though they may be more effective if they supported the family as a whole across generations.

The gender challenge: Even when policies are designed to support parents and children together, many focus only on the relationship between the mother and the child, and offer little or no support to fathers, despite the fact that research confirms the positive impact that fathers can have on children’s emotional and even language development.

This may seem like a bleak picture. But we’re confident that the problems of the American family are solvable. We view the problems facing the family as matters of political economy, of being wholly within the power of humans and human institutions to mold and shape.

Over the next few months, our plan is to explore innovative family-centered projects and interventions across the country, which we hope will inform a new social policy framework that both recognizes the centrality of the family in American life and addresses the needs of the family as a whole. Goodbye, Cleavers. Hello, brave new family policy world.

This piece is an edited and condensed version of the original FCSP position paper, which you can find here."