- Deseret News asked family policy experts what Congress, legislators should consider to help families in 2026.
- Suggestions were divided between helping parents and helping children.
- Some perennially debated ideas were mentioned, like paid family leave and child care subsidies.
When a new year approaches, the gathering of both local and federal lawmakers isn’t far away.
Deseret News asked a variety of family policy experts and researchers what state legislators, Congress or others could do to ease challenges and help families flourish. Often — and in varied form — the answer revolved around money.
How to earn more without hitting a benefit “cliff.” How to afford family life. How to work and pay for child care. How to take time off work to care for a sick child or parent without breaking the bank.
There were other suggestions, as well, on hot topics like managing the online lives of minors, remote work, mental health and helping men thrive.
Deseret News didn’t ask about specific policies on a curated list, but rather asked an open-ended question about what kind of help families could use. The answers covered a broad range of topics, most of them debated in the last few years and in some cases acted on at a state or local level, depending on where you are.
It’s worth noting that when the latest American Family Survey was released last month, the issue most worrisome to families was their economic well-being. Inflation and the economy outscored everything else on a 12-item curated list.
Here are some suggestions, presented in a totally random order, for policies these experts deem family-friendly and say could help in 2026 and beyond.
Fix the ‘benefit cliff’
Angela Rachidi of American Enterprise Institute believes policymakers should solve the “benefit cliff” problem. Some safety net programs are poorly designed, she said, and while the emphasis is on work, families that work are penalized because benefits decline too fast as they earn more, often to the point that they lose money by working.
As she and Matt Weidinger, who, like Rachidi, is a senior fellow and Rowe scholar at AEI, wrote: “In other words, getting a raise, accepting a promotion or working more hours can trigger an abrupt reduction or complete loss of benefits — that is, falling off a benefit cliff. In some instances, the loss in benefits can outweigh the additional earnings, leaving the household financially worse off than before. Many adults logically ask why bother working more when faced with this scenario."
Child care support
Barbara J. Risman, a distinguished professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that the cost of child care pushes mothers out of the labor force and “into economic dependence on husbands and makes families poorer.” She said she hopes policymakers will realize that providing some financial help on the child care front makes it possible for women to work.
Work is seen as the key to independence and upward mobility for families that struggle financially and may depend on safety net programs for survival.
Child care should be treated as “essential infrastructure,” in the view of Galena K. Rhoades, a research professor at the University of Denver. She said it could be done through subsidies, public options or expanded pre-K and would support child development while letting parents work.
“The current system is prohibitively expensive and uneven, particularly for infants and low-income families.”
Richard J. Petts, associate dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities and a sociology professor at Ball State University, agrees that the rising cost of child care has “made it increasingly difficult for families — especially low-income families — to maintain employment while also raising young children.”
Besides that, there’s a child care worker shortage, he adds.
“Providing subsidies for families to increase access to affordable child care would have tremendous effects on parents’ labor force participation and financial stability. Furthermore, investing more in the child care industry may help to address the labor shortage in this sector,” he said.
Tame social media and online lives
Jean Twenge has a list of ideas that center around young people and online lives. The author of “10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World” would love to see a minimum age for social media set at 16 and verified by the apps. She believes school districts should block access to streaming services and allow parents to control settings on school laptops for things like shutting down access after bedtime. Phones should disappear from school “bell to bell” and social media companies should block access from midnight to 5 a.m. for minors, she told Deseret News.
Aimee Winder Newton, director of the Utah Office of Families in the governor’s office, supports banning social media for children under 16, which Australia has done. Additionally, she said she “would love to see Congress implement guardrails on AI chatbots for kids.”
Jason S. Carroll, family initiative director at the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, said age verification should be mandatory for pornography websites and that parental supervision features should be required for social media accounts and app downloads for minors.
“Unprotected from Porn,” a collaboration of Wheatley and the Institute for Family Studies, reported that “given the evident insufficiency of parental controls and filters and given the all-encompassing nature of digital childhood — parents should not be left to safeguard their children from an unregulated industry of sexual media, pornography websites and social media platforms, which have been given de facto impunity to capture a spellbound audience of underage children.”
Paid family leave
Paid family leave in the U.S. is a patchwork — and policies related to it were lauded by a number of experts Deseret News consulted for this article. Cynthia Osborne, a professor of early childhood education and policy and executive director of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University, called paid family and medical leave “one of the most pro work policies we have, and also does more to support family health and well-being across a range of indicators than any other effective state policy.”
She said that it’s cost-neutral to states because workers pay a little into a fund that reimburses wages for those who have a baby or deal with a serious health condition. And she added that families want it. “Approximately 80% of those polled say that they are supportive of paying a small premium for this benefit.”
Petts said studies show that families that have access to paid leave have better health outcomes for both children and parents, stronger parental relationships, greater parent-child involvement and more equitable division of household labor.
With leave, he said, mothers are able to stay attached to jobs and “evidence shows paid family leave is good for businesses as well.”
Another important aspect, per Petts, is that it helps the growing number of adults who are caring for grandparents and other aging relatives “due to inadequate eldercare in the U.S.” In some states, paid leave is available, but in others it isn’t.
Cash assistance
“Money” is the simple answer for Nicholas Wolfinger, co-author of “Thanks for Nothing” and a professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah. “I think of myself as a Moynihan Democrat and think that redistribution is the thing the government can best do to help families.” But he adds he doesn’t have “strong opinions about the best way to deliver this money. Child tax credit? Wage subsidies? Repeal of Taft-Hartley and re-unionization of the workforce? Bidenesque industrial policy, to support national priorities? All good by me.”
He concludes as the book does, with a plea to quit going on about “dependence” and pay attention to studies that show that even in the “heyday of cash welfare, all showed that the majority of recipients didn’t spend a long time on the rolls.” He cites evidence that raising women’s incomes increases the likelihood they will marry and programs are, after all, designed to benefit children and give them a strong start. “Dependence” might seem more tolerable if it produces a generation of healthier, better-adjusted American citizens.
Help dads flourish
The American Institute for Boys and Men promotes several policies designed to help males who are struggling “at school, at work and in their families and communities.”
Communications director Raman Preet Kaur told Deseret News by email that the institute would like to see programs specifically include men to encourage positive father involvement. Many programs, like home visits, target women, but families benefit, too, when men are actively involved in child-rearing and other family-focused tasks.
She said they would also like to see paid leave programs expanded and fathers encouraged to use the time to bond with family.
Mental health
Rhoades works extensively with soon-to-be moms and new moms and said that universal screening and treatment for perinatal mental health is badly needed.
“Mandating and funding routine screening for postpartum depression and anxiety, paired with access to evidence-based treatment, would address one of the most common — and most under-treated — complications of childbirth,” she said.
Mental health was also top of mind when Robin Gurwitch, a psychologist and Duke University professor emerita, was asked about policies to help families. She said when mental health care is offered, especially after a crisis, its availability often ends far too soon.
After a crisis like a mass shooting or a disastrous weather event, she said, people need psychological first aid, which is different from therapy and not usually available. And we need to stop doing “less and less and less” too soon as time after an event passes, she said.
“Long after the news teams have disappeared, those communities continue to hurt and there will be a percentage in every community that need additional or continued services and those sometimes are not as easy to come by,” said Gurwitch.
Speaking of disasters, she added, animals are very important to well-being and to mental health. She said that addressing animal well-being should be part of helping communities after disasters.
Bring back some COVID-19 policies
Risman said she thinks some of the COVID-19 policies were very good for families. “Research has shown how useful remote or hybrid work is for parents, and yet, the mostly male executives at the top of the American companies appear to be ignoring that and going backwards in terms of family friendly workplaces,” she said by email.