What Does it Mean to be Pro-Family?

Conservatives should champion a modern approach to supporting family formation

I was born and raised in an archetypical traditional family — two kids, a stay-at-home-mother, and a working father. Add to that we lived in the Midwest and attended Church each Sunday — the only things we were missing were a picket fence and a dog. But even in my idyllic Hallmark movie-esque hometown, my family’s arrangement was uncommon. Only a few of my peers also had a stay-at-home parent. My closest friends growing up were raised by teachers, authors, and receptionists.

And while in recent years there has been a slight increase in the number of stay-at-home parents, still only 25% of kids in the U.S. live in households with a stay-at-home mom.

New camps are emerging, however, with hopes of revitalizing the traditional family. Influencers like Ballerina Farm craft an idealized view into the life of a “Trad Wife” — making everything from scratch in beautiful dresses surrounded by beautiful children, all while making millions on TikTok and Instagram — that young women consume and crave en masse. Influencers like these paint a lovely picture of what life could be like for women: not a life of work, childlessness, and singleness, but a life where you make sourdough, look after well-behaved children, and dote on a devoted husband.

While different in approach, National Conservative (NatCon) politicos also peddle the “trad wife” archetype. They bemoan the cultural shifts that convinced women they would be happier working instead of raising children, while simultaneously pointing to the difficulty of raising a family on a single income.

While it’s easy to laugh off their claims as dubious and their methodology as flawed, their concern is a real one: What if young people can’t afford to live a life like my parents did?

This anxiety is not unique to NatCons. I hear it around the table at dinner parties with my friends and express it while discussing finances with my husband.

But the NatCons believe that the best way to combat the cultural and economic ills they see is through expansions in government. The rising tide of populism on the Right has thrown out the fiscally conservative handbook, and Conservatives are now more than comfortable spending taxpayer dollars to subsidize a 1950s vision of social thriving, with proposals including expanding child tax credits, offering marriage and baby bonuses, and providing tax cuts for single income families.

Vice President JD Vance summed up their position best: “We’re going to have to spend more money.”

But these policies miss the point. The NatCons’ policy agenda will do little to change the subjective, non-monetary cost calculations families face. Those who want to get married and want to have children will do so, regardless of the monetary costs, because they see marriage and children as valuable for their own sake.

For those who don’t want to marry or have children, policy will do little to change their hearts and minds. At best, government handouts will simply encourage couples who were always going to get married and have children to do so earlier than they originally planned. But even then, these policies do nothing to achieve their intended social revival. They just make our dire fiscal situation worse.

These policies will also do little to address real and frequently government-imposed hurdles to buying a house, starting a family, or other aspects of the American Dream that twenty- and thirty-somethings increasingly feel are out of reach.

This begs the question then: What does pro-family policy really look like?

A Different Vision for Pro-Family Policy

A truly pro-family agenda should address the needs of the 21st-century family, not the archetypical 1950s one. Real pro-family policy is pro-growth, pro-supply side reforms, and pro-working mothers.

The American Dream Begins with a Starter Home

When we first got married, my husband and I lived in a townhome community that was made for young families. The community literally centered around a pool and playground. There were so many kids in our neighborhood that four school buses came through every morning and afternoon just to get all of them to school. Kids ran free around the complex because, everywhere they went, there were watchful eyes of grown ups.

Neighborhoods of townhomes, duplexes, and starter homes are hard to come by, however. Strict zoning ordinances have created a “missing middle” of housing that have unintentionally reduced fertility and encouraged families to delay having kids until they can afford a house. Removing unnecessary hurdles to housing like single-family zoning can go a long way in making housing more affordable and accessible. It is far easier to picture raising a family in a two-bedroom townhouse than a one-bedroom apartment.

Work Should Serve Mothers

The view that work and motherhood are fundamentally incompatible is rooted in archaic views of both the role of a mother and the way work should be structured. But flexible work has demonstrated a capacity to help women balance their obligations at work and home and indeed, even to increase their fertility. During Covid, when large swaths of the workforce were sent home to work remotely, fertility for women under 25 rose because they felt that they had more time for the life changes that pregnancy and a new baby would bring.

Women value flexibility so much in fact, that many women would take a pay cut to have more flexibility at work. This is why dynamism in the labor market is key. Some women can choose to pursue higher wages, while others may choose flexibility. Not every business has to be flexible, but those that are may be more appealing for women. The solution to lower fertility rates isn't women working less — it's work evolving to better serve mothers.

Make Groceries Affordable Again

Americans spent an average of 11.2% of their personal income on food in 2022 — the highest percentage since 1991. While Americans in the poorest quintiles spend less absolutely on food, what they do spend makes up a much larger portion of their income than the average. Families in the lowest income quintile dedicate 32.6% of income to food. When incomes are constrained, the first thing families sacrifice are healthier food options.

Restrictions on where food comes from and what kinds of food are on the shelves harm families by making healthy food even more inaccessible. Food tariffs, for example, are merely a tax on families to prop up farms, no matter how hard populist economists try to ignore ECON 101. It’s hard to see how making it more expensive for families to access healthy options is Making America Healthy Again.

But tariffs are not the only regulation making our food more expensive. Farm subsidies and renewable energy mandates also raise prices for families. Deregulation is key to making America more pro-family. If a young person is struggling to feed themselves, it is difficult to imagine feeding someone else.

The Balance of Pro-Family Policy

The way I was raised will look different from how my future children will be raised. One notable reason is that I pursued graduate education, while my mother chose to pause her education to raise my sister and me. We made different decisions based on what was best for ourselves and our families, and that is as it should be. The government deciding that one path is better or more virtuous than the other is unfair to mothers, fathers, and children.

Giving families subsidies will do little to address the real hurdles young people face in building out their American Dream. It shouldn’t matter whether mom is a girl boss or a trad wife — genuinely pro-family policy should support families of all shapes and sizes by giving parents a cornucopia of options to make ends meet.

Susannah Barnes Petitt is a Policy Manager at an Economic Research Center in Washington DC. She received her MA in Economics from George Mason University.