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How important is family to the commonweal of the nation?

It is essential, but it's quite striking that we pay relatively little attention to that fact. We are one of the very few advanced industrial democracies that has no family policy. Most European societies actually have a family ministry, concerned with all kinds of issues, such as taxation, the regulation of working hours, and legally mandated leave time for childbirth. There are many things public policy can do that will either strengthen or weaken family life.

For instance, our enforcement of child support is extraordinarily lax. In most European societies, that obligation is enforced by the state: you can't just walk away from your kids and not pay or their subsistence. But it is also supplemented by public support; most European societies and Canada have child allowances for everyone. And they are enough to make sure that a child is not wing to go hungry. We don't have any such thing in this society.

Of course, there is a considerable concern that if government becomes too involved in these areas, the family's status as an intermediate institution will be compromised or destroyed. How do you respond to that worry?

It's a very legitimate worry. The role of government has to be extremely nuanced and careful. But something I like child allowance is a kind of support that doesn't involve any interference. There are no bureaucrats to administer it; it just comes automatically. Most societies in this world have found that's a good thing; it would probably be a good thing for us.

And then, rather than having activist welfare bureaucracies taking over functions of the family, we need to think about institutional arrangements that will help families care for themselves. Tax laws, and other things that make it appealing for people to stay on welfare, need to be changed so that people can be freed from the welfare bureaucracy.

We don't want the government running our families, but it certainly is the case that in modern societies the family is simply too weak to sustain itself. It needs neighbors and church, friends and extended family—and it needs public policy. The economy is simply too volatile, making the family too vulnerable unless there is a government commitment to sustain enduring family relationships.

How threatened is what you earlier called the traditional or normative family?

For all the troubles—which will probably get worse before they get better there is such a deep human pull into this kind of relationship that I am not worried for the long run. I don't think we're coming to the end of the family. We are going through a tremendous period of transition and strain, and we haven't got a clear idea of how to get out of it.

Consider the fact that it is no longer possible for most families in America, in either the middle class or the working class, to make it on one salary. With so many working wives, women who are also mothers, an entire form of life that we took to be "normal" in the immediate postwar world, is gone statistically speaking. That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of families that still have a breadwinner and a homemaker, but they are the minority and their numbers are declining. This places a tremendous strain on everyone in the family. Institutions are not set up to provide a substitute for that woman who is no longer there, the mother who was the moral backbone of our neighborhoods.

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July (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46