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The Social Meaning of Family Benefits

No-strings-attached cash through a child allowance does not sever social ties or lead to the commodification of parenthood. It maintains expectations and parents will earmark for their child’s needs.

For Pregnant Mothers, Make Payments Lump-Sum

Lump-sum payments will decrease the incentive for fraud while eliminating the inequity regarding length of pregnancy.

Family Policy for the Working-Class Majority

A pro-worker agenda must treat families, not individuals, as the basic units of public policy.

Making Young Men Marriageable

With few “marriageable” men employed in the kinds of decent-paying occupations that make them attractive as potential husbands, marriage has slipped out of reach for far too many poor and working-class Americans.

Taxing Families Like Companies

If families are people, and corporations are people, it stands to reason that families should be allowed to incorporate and file their taxes accordingly.

Setting a Goal for Family Support

It is time for conservatives to look beyond discrete proposals and to approach family policy as an orienting goal that can enable other political goals and as an investment in the nation’s long-term prosperity.

Insuring Health Care for Working Families

The American health care system is far from family-friendly. One feature stands out: employer-sponsored health insurance.

Making Room for Families to Live

Where do families want to live? Urbanists will point out that the high price of housing in walkable, city neighborhoods indicates that demand is especially high. Suburbanists will note that Read more…

Creating Flexible, Family-Friendly Schools

K-12 education is the single greatest family policy lever at our disposal.

Building Better Foster Homes

Regularly lost in the debate over family policy are those children separated from their families or without a permanent home—namely, the hundreds of thousands of American children in the nation’s child welfare system.

Fitting the Fisc to Social Security

Oren Cass and Wells King have added their proposal, a parenting supplement they call the Fisc, to a list of ideas designed to reduce the fiscal burden on parents relative Read more…

Seeing Like a Pro-Family State

Addressing our fertility and family-formation crises will require us to push the boundaries of family policy and embrace a whole-of-society approach.

7 Proposals to Make America More Family-Friendly

Writers and analysts from across the right-of-center apply a family-focused lens to contemporary policy challenges.

Reactions to a New Social Compact

Commentators and policy analysts react to our proposal for a Family Income Supplemental Credit.

A World Tour of Family Benefit Programs

American enthusiasm for a per-child family benefit has grown, but details matter and proposals differ widely—as do the programs already established in other nations.

Support Families Because They Are Families

Conservatives have a persistent problem: they often don’t know what it is they want to conserve. This bears on the burgeoning discussion of family policy.

Is a New Entitlement Program the Solution for Working Families?

How does the Fisc stack up? Better than a universal child allowance, though I still have concerns.

Friendly for Which Families?

The experience of “family-friendly” policy abroad makes one lesson clear: no policy is friendly for all families.

New Conservative Proposal to Provide Generous Per-Child Benefit to Working Families

PRESS RELEASE—A new proposal from American Compass provides a conservative case for a benefit to working families that functions as a form of reciprocal social insurance, addressing major flaws of a universal child allowance.

Home Building Survey Part II: Supporting Families

American attitudes about family structure vary widely, but most families see a full-time earner and a stay-at-home parent as the ideal arrangement for raising young children.

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