Would changing the words used by policymakers and others bring Americans on the right and the left of the political aisle closer to agreement on the role that government can and should play in supporting family stability and ability to thrive?
That question came up in a discussion as part of the release of the 10th American Family Survey Thursday afternoon, hosted by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. The theme was “Opportunities to a Broad-Based Political Coalition for Families.”
American family life has been changing for some time, marriage and fertility both falling, to the chagrin of researchers who deem both to be important for family stability and having a country that does well not just economically, but in terms of happiness and on other measures.
Christopher K. Karpowitz and Jeremy C. Pope, both political science professors at Brigham Young University and the survey report’s authors, were talking about the challenges families face and the fact the majority of survey respondents believe that government could do more to help families. But they noted that against a partisan backdrop, it’s hard to get much agreement on what form those supports should take.
“Family in our view is in a little bit of danger at the moment,” said Pope, who noted that any potential coalition that supports families is “split in an interesting, problematic way.”
The nationally representative survey, conducted Aug. 22-29 by YouGov for Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute, BYU’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy, and Deseret News, found that majorities on both the left and the right agree that “raising children is one of life’s greatest joys.” And they agree that children do better financially when they are raised by married parents.
But just 23% think government should be encouraging people to have more children. Most don’t want government to do that, though they are generally in favor of programs that support marriage and do deem helpful a number of programs to benefit families.
Pope, who like Karpowitz is also affiliated with BYU’s institute and its center, said that creates pretty broad approval of a number of would-be government goals, from helping low-income families to boosting education and bolstering other programs like housing.
Democrats are fairly keen on many types of supports for families, though there’s no majority support for programs specifically to encourage two-parent homes for kids, marriage or having more children. Republicans are less keen than Democrats on providing more support to parents who are unmarried or to low-income families, among other differences.
How do you bring the two groups together to support families in a full spectrum of policies? Karpowitz and Pope wondered. Not doing so means fewer people will marry, more will delay marriage and people will drift, as Pope put it.
Galena K. Rhoades, a research professor at the University of Denver and director of the Family Research Center, noticed that when the survey used the word “encouraging,” the Republican response was higher. When “support” was used, the Democrat response was higher.
Could a coalition succeed if the terminology was different?
Who should be helped?
Words matter to those who might benefit from programs, too, Rhoades said. People don’t want to be told what to do but do want to be supported. Her experience working with low-income women is that they do want to get married, but would “like not to hear that they should get married,” she said.
Rhoades also noted that often people don’t know what marriage is supposed to look like because they haven’t seen healthy, functional marriages.
Brad Wilcox, a nonresident senior fellow at AEI, said he believes the upper middle class is “doing quite well” and that the working middle class needs to be strengthened. Low-income families are “getting lots of things from the government,” he said. Those in the middle are not being helped.
Melissa S. Kearney, economics professor at the University of Maryland and author of “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” said the focus needs to be on supporting families and children in general, recognizing that families in the lower income groups need help, too. Children in two-parent households have more resources and do better. Single parents often have more struggles and barriers and their children struggle, so the focus needs to be on “breaking cycles of disadvantage,” she said.
She agrees that Democrats don’t want to seem judgmental, but said facts are facts and people should be aware of them. We should acknowledge that marriage and having two parents provides more resources and stability.
Two views that don’t meet
Both Karpowitz and Pope fear families will suffer if partisanship gets in the way of coalition-forming. “We talk about this idea a lot,” Karpowitz told Deseret News.
According to Pope, since the public isn’t interested in the government encouraging births, “If it’s going to be done, it needs to be done in a way that’s more subtle than the government saying we need to have more kids.”
He said that the “U.S. Constitution demands something that it never explicitly says:” a coalition that is “sizeable and sustained.” He said we tend not to have good coalitions in government right now because party control flips back and forth and sides don’t meet in the middle. So a real coalition would have to involve both parties. If government is going to have any effect on families through programs, it can’t start and stop them all the time.
To have a coalition that truly supports families would require getting together two groups that “aren’t that interested in getting together,” right now, he said. “They’re not going to want to play well together, but our point today is if you want to support families, you need to figure out a way to get these two groups to come together and support a full spectrum family policy that talks about not just that families are good,” he said, but that the two-parent advantage is real for families.
He warned that failure to do that will lead to fewer and fewer families that are married, more people putting it off and drifting. They might never form the families they want.
Moderates in both parties and church-attending people in both parties in higher numbers are more apt to be in favor of governments providing supports for both marriage and having more children, the survey found.
About the survey
Now in its 10th edition, the nationally representative American Family Survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
The survey looks at how families live, views of marriage and family, attitudes on topics like abortion and social media bans, as well as what concerns families, among others. This 10 edition to some degree focused on political divides — and found that regardless of where you sit in relationship to the political aisle, the economy and financial pressure on families is a very big deal.
The survey report can be found at deseret.com/Americanfamilysurvey.
