A Community-First Family Policy Agenda

One of the key insights about government organization since the industrial nation-state emerged is that entities between families and the distant central government are essential to human flourishing and societal health. These groups—neighborhoods, parishes, charities, fraternal associations, towns, states—form us, support us, provide a sense of belonging, preserve culture, offer ways to serve, contribute to our identities, and more. Without such close-to-home, caring groups, humans feel less secure and end up looking for meaning and belonging in faraway, impersonal entities or abstractions. This insight should inform our thinking about the government’s role in solving today’s family problems, including low birth rates, low marriage rates, falling two-parent-family rates, and more.  

The relationship between the government and mediating bodies is at the heart of some of the most valuable approaches to policymaking. For instance, what I call “evolutionary classical liberalism” sees free people organically creating and adapting an array of associations to meet community needs. These products of liberty deserve state protection.

Communitarian and social-capital thinking understand humans’ impulse to form and participate in small, community-oriented groups; this line of thought expects the government to work through these entities. America’s constitutional design and historical practice protect space—via federalism, localism, the freedom of association,private actors in the state action doctrine, the ministerial exception, and more—for closer-to-home bodies. American conservatism—through its commitment to decentralization, social variety, civil society, and tradition and its opposition to collectivism and technocracy—prioritizes the constellation of community-based groups. Subsidiarity, from Catholic social teaching, understands such mediating institutions as having inherent powers and duties that may not be delegated to or assumed by the government. 

Though distinct, each of these approaches understands that for individuals and families to thrive, the government, when aiming to solve a problem, should often work to strengthen communities. As such, America needs a policy agenda that aims to help families by helping voluntary associations, neighborhoods, and towns. To put it a different way, when we see too few families forming, too few children being born, and too many kids and parents engaged in unhealthy behavior, we should immediately ask, “Are our communities healthy?” 

Unfortunately, many prominent family-related proposals have been more state-centered of late. They have sought to create a direct link between individuals and the central state (e.g., through universal basic income, work-free refundable child tax credits, federal child-care subsidies) or to engage the state in manipulating the economy (e.g., industrial policy). Some argue that when the central state helps individuals and the economy, it indirectly helps communities. Community-first approaches to governing, however, understand that when the central state engages directly with individuals and the economy, the central state is often helping itself. 

What would a community-first family-policy agenda look like? Leaders should consider focusing on two categories: community power and community health. 

Community Power

Community power involves ensuring small geographies can control the things that matter to them most (the opposite of this is when authority is located in larger entities farther away). State leaders can start by curtailing “preemption” policies that allow state governments to override democratically generated local decisions. Blue-state leaders often lean toward vacating the policy choices of red communities; the same can be said of red-state leaders and blue communities. But this undermines the power of towns, counties, and cities to protect their chosen ways of life related to schools, housing, social services, transportation, and so on. Similarly, state leaders, including courts, should shift away from the “Dillon Rule” of state-level authority and toward the "Cooley Rule” of local self-rule (see this excellent essay). In short, local power can be legally understood as merely delegated—existing only when state law explicitly empowers a municipality to do something. Or local power can be legally understood as inherent, emanating from the right of each small jurisdiction to self-govern. When conflicts arise between a state government and a locality, the fundamental question is often, “Who has control?” If we aim to elevate the close over the distant, we must recognize a substantial degree of inherent local power. And more local power means more families are able to create and maintain social conditions hospitable to their chosen ways of life. 

State leaders should also protect voluntary associations. The First Amendment’s five freedoms (speech, religion, petition, press, and assembly) can and should be understood as individual and community rights, i.e., the ability of groups of people to collectively discuss, worship, advocate, report, and convene. Family-oriented associations—whether focusing on matters related to education, child-rearing, health, faith, sports, or something else—often form because their members have views opposed by the majority. Such groups can find themselves at odds with the government; they need safeguards. Scholars like John Inazu and Luke Sheehan have described how state statutes and Supreme Court decisions can undermine private groups’ ability to choose their members and leaders, preserve their traditions, and more. State leaders should consider codifying associational protections; Sheehan’s draft language, based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, is a very good place to start.  

An underappreciated contributor to the loss of local power is the loss of local news. Without sources of information dedicated to close-to-home happenings, the public’s attention, and then power, is drawn farther away. Families end up uninformed about their communities; over time they can feel disconnected from or antagonistic toward those nearby. If we want families to trust their neighbors, volunteer for community projects, and donate to local causes, we need to foster social bonds. Strong communities need strong local journalism. Howard Husock recently wrote of a wave of new newspapers and online sites. State governments should explore how to foster this movement because local news serves the public good. Though we must be careful to not make journalism a state function, there are ways for governments to catalyze action without unduly influencing coverage. States could offer tax credits to individuals and corporations that make philanthropic donations to nonprofit locally-focused news organizations. States could also offer tax benefits for entities employing local journalists or one-time start-up grants to new nonprofits launching local reporting efforts. 

When we see too few families forming, too few children being born, and too many kids and parents engaged in unhealthy behavior, we should immediately ask, “Are our communities healthy?”

A final element of local power relates to education. Communities need to feel like local K-12 schools are theirs—that schools share families’ principles and priorities. In America, this can be difficult because in a highly diverse continental nation of 320 million people, worldviews, challenges, and goals can differ dramatically. America had a partial solution in the early decades of our public school system: very small districts, each with only a handful of schools. This allowed small communities to deliberate about education and reach consensus. It also allowed different communities to make different decisions. But over generations, school districts have grown larger and larger. Today it is common to find districts with dozens of schools; some have hundreds. Often these mammoth districts are in highly diverse areas where citizens will naturally have different views—meaning school board meetings can host versions of today’s most heated political debates. And that means boards must make choices that will inevitably anger large groups of community members.

Unsurprisingly, in recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of families giving their local schools a D or F. Although the number is still relatively low (16%), it amounts to millions of parents who feel disconnected from these essential community institutions. As I’ve advocated elsewhere, one important solution is to break up America’s largest districts into much smaller units to increase the likelihood both that families feel heard and that community consensus can be reached. But in some instances, consensus will be impossible, and so families who disagree with the majority need help finding other options. This helps explain the recent expansion of school choice programs across America. Today, states are experimenting with various funding models—scholarships, scholarship tax credits, education savings accounts—that enable parents to choose from an array of education models, including traditional private schools, microschools, hybrid homeschools, tutoring services, and much more. In other words, a community-first approach to K-12 reform should couple support for small public districts with support for alternatives for dissatisfied families.

Community Health

In the category of community health, we should certainly think of access to medical care and fresh food—that is, things that enable individuals to be healthy. But we should also be mindful of collective health—whether the social environment fosters the good life. In recent years, a handful of states and localities have passed laws decriminalizing drugs and expanding gambling.

The abuse of drugs and gambling can harm community health. Though the zeitgeist seems to support both movements, we should prepare for the time when public opinion shifts. State leaders should commission studies on the social effects of these laws so new regulations can be crafted if and when the time is right. Similarly, many areas have recently experimented with criminal-justice reforms, including non-prosecution of ostensibly minor crimes. While some of these policies and the elected officials advancing them are currently supported by local majorities, it would be wise for state leaders to prepare for the future. This should include data collection on the social consequences of such reforms and legislative proposals for counter-reforms. 

State leaders should always bear in mind that the contributors (and harms) to social health can vary dramatically, community by community. One county might have a very low labor-force-participation rate and few fathers living with their children (both of which present challenges for communities), while the neighboring county might be at full employment and have predominantly intact families. Along these lines, state-level officials should be familiar with the Social Capital Project’s “The Geography of Social Capital in America.” It not only shows the differences in communities’ conditions; it also lists and provides measures for the indicators believed to contribute to social capital (see tables 1 and 2). Many of these variables can be addressed by policy.

Here, the guidance of subsidiarity can be extremely helpful because it suggests how distant governments should and should not engage. Three approaches must be avoided: 1) dismissing all local problems as not warranting state engagement; 2) creating inflexible statewide policies that treat all communities alike; and 3) implementing paternalistic state policies that permanently assume local responsibility. Instead, state leaders should find targeted ways to help specific in-need communities to get back on their feet and no longer need state-level aid. I have suggested such interventions elsewhere, but examples include competitive state grants that temporarily fund existing local nonprofits; state tax credits for individuals and businesses taking on challenges; and start-up funds for the creation of schools and social-service providers. 

In short, recent-vintage family-policy conversations have predominantly focused on governments working through the smallest and largest spheres of public life: individuals and the macroeconomy. Instead, we should see policy as a government tool for helping communities to help families. That means first, respecting neighborhoods, towns, counties, and cities, and the democratic institutions and voluntary associations that support them; and second, appreciating that families can only be expected to be as strong as the social environments around them. 

Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.