Key Points
- American birth rates have hit record lows, but Americans still say they want children. Family formation seems unattainable to many parents.
- There is no single federal policy that will reverse our baby bust, and affordability isn’t the only obstacle to family formation, but there are steps Congress can take that may help.
- The child tax credit, housing, and marriage penalties are three specific areas of interest to lawmakers who want to make America more family friendly.
Introduction
America is in a baby bust, with birth rates hitting record lows and still falling. Young Americans are getting married later and less. Meanwhile, parents face rising stress, and children suffer an epidemic of anxiety.
The family is the fundamental building block of a society, as the cell is of an organism. A nation with increasingly fewer families has less social cohesion and less of a future.
Americans say the ideal family has 2.7 children, but American women are having about 1.6 children each.1 This is a serious deficit in a crucial area.
Congress should not engage in social engineering or try to set the birth rate. Most of the work to be done on this front is cultural or even spiritual. But Congress could enact, amend, or repeal plenty of policies to make America more family friendly.
In this compilation, various AEI scholars offer a small sampling of such policies. AEI, of course, does not take institutional positions, so some of these policies do not agree with each other—or they even clash. Nevertheless, Congress should do what it can to support families, and these policy ideas could help.