Can the Right and Left Agree on What Families Need?

One of my coping mechanisms for handling the second Trump presidency has been to read more conservatives. Though not just any conservatives. I’ve sought out those who are thoughtful, respectful, have clearly articulated ideas with a through line, and hold themselves to a standard of decency when it comes to the way they engage with the other side. (I hold my favorite writers and thinkers on the Left to the same standards.)

As I wrote about recently, I wish we spoke more about how folks communicate when discussing freedom of speech. I know the content matters, too—but my ability to tolerate ideas different than mine expands exponentially when the deliverer of such ideas presents them with some humility as opposed to the cocky, aggressive certainty that seems to dominate these days.

One of the conservatives whose work I’ve come to read regularly, and appreciate, is Patrick T. Brown. While I do not always agree with him, I find that he comes by his ideas honestly and with sincerity and, in doing so, he has helped me shed some of the knee-jerk defenses I had against conservative big ideas around family policy. More importantly, he has helped me understand that the Right and the Left agree on a lot more than I thought they did.

Below, I asked Brown to explain his positions on some of the issues that matter most around care. This was not a debate, mind you, but rather a chance for me, and you, to listen to how he views the state of America’s families. We spoke about paid leave, child care, income equality, abortion, and how the Right and Left’s approaches to family policy have converged and diverged.

Overall, I think family policy is an arena in which there is tremendous capacity for more bipartisan dialogue and, hopefully, ultimately, action. I hope this conversation moves us closer.

Before you dive in, a little about Brown: He is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where his work with the Life and Family Initiative focuses on developing a robust pro-family economic agenda and supporting families as the cornerstone of a healthy and flourishing society. He writes the Substack Family Matters.

Elissa Strauss: What’s the big picture, as you see it, of the source of the challenges facing American families today?

Patrick T. Brown: We’re entering into an era where the fundamental economics of family and childbearing have changed.

For a long time, children were sort of your implicit retirement scheme, right? You had to have enough kids to make sure that you’re not gonna be in poverty in your old age. We’ve sort of flipped that on its head as a society now. We’ve socialized the benefits associated with childbearing, while the costs are still borne by individual families. So now since there isn’t an economic benefit to it, the decision to have a child is almost seen as just another form of consumption, or an individual choice. It’s just one choice among many, rather than something with an economic rationale or social expectation.

I think that what that leads to, if I can sound like a total soulless economist for a second, is a systemic under-provision of family and opportunities to care, because we’re not building a culture and an economic system that allows people to experience family life. If family no longer has an economic benefit, and parenthood is solely a choice for individuals to make that society has no obligation to support, it’s no wonder why having a family feels harder than it has to, and fertility rates continue to drop off.

Parents are being asked to take on the burden of raising kids, and having a family, and all the expenses. Both the out-of-pocket expenses, but also the opportunity costs which you have to give up to have a kid. They’re having to take that on as individuals or as a couple, because we’re not subsidizing young families in the same way that we’ve chosen to subsidize old age through Social Security and Medicare and that sort of thing. And so I think we need to figure out a way to address that sort of generational imbalance that recognizes that parents bear costs and burdens and sacrifices that non-parents don’t.

ES: So, to clarify, you see a feeling of economic precarity as influencing people’s decision to have families, and how well they care for them?

PTB: Yeah, oh, for sure. And it’s not to say that we’ve gotten poorer. In some respects, it’s because we’ve gotten richer. I think as our economy has grown, and the opportunities that are out there have grown, what people have to give up in order to start a family has grown. So it’s only natural that people would say, “man, you know, I can live a pretty good life without kids, it’s a big risk to start a family,” in terms of what they have to give up. I think affluence is as much driving some of these crises of family, crisis of care, as anything else. It’s uncomfortable to talk about, because the solution can’t be, well, we should just make ourselves poor.

I’m a conservative. I think it’s good to have economic growth—hot take. What’s happened in the last 40 or 50 years, sort of on a macro level, is that everyone’s gotten better off, but the rich have gotten really better off, and they’re able to afford consumption patterns that are just astronomical compared to middle-class families. But what that does is that sets the cultural bar where everybody feels like they can keep up with the Joneses, right? Travel sports and private tutors and all that sort of stuff makes it feel like if you’re just a canonical middle-class household, you are not enough.

ES: Let’s dive into some of the most widely discussed ways to build, as you put it, an “economic system” to support families. Your thoughts on a universal federal leave policy?

PTB: My thumbnail version of that is: I think childbirth is a unique time, especially for moms. They’re the ones who bear the physical burden of parenthood, and are basically incapacitated, recovering, all that kind of postpartum stuff. So I think there’s a sort of claim on justice, in a sense—moms bear the risk and the burdens and the physical demands of perpetuating the human race, so the rest of us owe it to them to give them the support that is necessary in a market economy. So when it comes to maternity leave in particular, I think we feel that very strongly—I think you see this support in polling, right? Including among conservatives.

The problems arise when you start to think about how you’re going to design this program. In addition to childbirth, are we also going to cover time off if someone needs to help a family member get to the hospital, or gets sick, or other similar things? And then it starts to have some mission creep. I think the more narrowly tailored a paid leave policy is, the easier it will be to get buy-in. Once it starts growing, then it gets more and more expensive, and also possibly indefinite. Who knows how long grandma is going to be in the hospital for, as opposed to a straightforward four weeks of maternity leave?

I’m more on the side of let’s do something that’s modest and achievable, rather than big-picture blue-sky kind of stuff.

ES: Where does having a universal paid paternity leave policy fit into this?

PTB: I think having dad there to support mom, especially right after birth, and get to know the baby is really important. I don’t know if it has to be the same length as mom—again, she’s the one who’s physically recovering—but he should be able to support mom and baby in those early days, for sure.

ES: Let’s dive into paid sick leave. Let’s say my husband has cancer, and I have to take a month off during an intense treatment period. Should that be universally covered?

PTB: I think that’s just a much harder benefit design to come up with. Scandinavian countries do it, so it’s not unsolvable. But in a country like ours, I think it’s probably harder to do through a government program, at least, you know, at any time in the foreseeable future. So I’m much more inclined to say we should offer tax credits for businesses that want to do this, or that sort of thing.

For example, the city of St. Louis recently scaled back their paid leave program because it was proving too administratively difficult. There were accusations of people abusing the system, and it was a nightmare to administer from a bureaucratic standpoint. So they said they’re just going to do this guaranteed paid leave for new parents, because that’s kind of a binary, right? It’s like, you either had a new baby or you didn’t.

Again, paid leave beyond parental leave can be done, it’s just not anywhere near my top priority.

ES: What are your thoughts on the child care affordability crisis?

PTB: Is it a crisis? Is it expensive? Like, yes—but also, it’s expensive in part because it should be, right? We don’t want 20 one year olds stuffed in a room with no one watching, right? It’s a labor-intensive service.

That said, there’s ways to do it that I think can reduce the out-of-pocket costs for parents. I’m looking at something like the tri-share model out of Michigan, where the state and the employer and the employee each take a third of the expense of child care. I think that’s a really innovative, interesting way to think about it. I think you can do that without having to usher in a grand, social revolution like we see proposed on the Left sometimes. I don’t think that’s necessarily even what parents want.

If you look at public opinion polling, especially among those with lower levels of education, including the working class and below, they, especially moms, say they prefer to have something that’s more flexible, less formal than center-based care.

Overall, I’m a big child tax credit guy—that’s my preferred approach. I think expanding some of the tax credits we got in the One Big, Beautiful Bill can make child care more affordable, even if it isn’t the Elizabeth Warren–style sort of sweeping change that some of the Left want.

ES: Just to clarify this point, you want tax credits for families so they have more money in their pockets to spend on child care, so it becomes less of a financial burden?

PTB: Right, and the nice thing about the child tax credit is that way, if you want to have a parent work part-time and stay home part-time, like I do, or have grandma watch the kids or something that’s not like KinderCare, Bright Horizons–type child care, you have much more flexibility when you’re getting a cash-like benefit, like a child tax credit, rather than a universal child care system that only covers formal, center-based care.

ES: So you work part-time? You are what we might call the primary parent?

PTB: Yeah, I make sure everybody gets fed. We’ve got four kids—three in elementary school, one toddler in preschool, so the house is never really quiet. It’s only quiet because they’re all at school right now.

ES: Where is your youngest right now? What kind of toddler care do you rely on?

PTB: It’s funny, I once wrote a big policy report called “Child Care Pluralism” that focused on the fact that families use so many different types of care for young kids, and I feel like we’ve used them all at various points: center-based child care, part-time nanny, grandparents providing care, me staying home full-time, high school–age babysitters…one size definitely does not fit all! Right now our youngest is at a wonderful part-time preschool program at one of the local churches in our neighborhood.

ES: Any big trends you have noticed on the Left or Right when it comes to how we are talking about family matters?

PTB: For a long time, conversations around family policy on the Right tended to center on more cultural things. Sometimes it was good, sometimes bad, sometimes a little more inflammatory, but overall it was more like: How do we help parents protect their kids from influences we don’t want them exposed to?

None of that was bad, but I think where the Right went wrong was limiting its family policy conversations to that sort of culture-war stuff, rather than thinking about some of the economic forces that also make having a family really difficult. Housing, child care, that sort of thing.

To its credit, I think the Left has always been more willing to talk about the economic forces affecting families, and more willing to spend money on pro-family policies, than the Right has. But I think we’re starting to see more recognition from the Left that it also OK to talk about cultural issues, recognizing that different parents may have different opinions about whether to introduce these different concepts around gender or issues like screen time, family structure, pornography, school shootings—stuff that touches on how kids are being raised, not just strictly about income and poverty.

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ES: So here is a widely perceived point of contention between liberals and conservatives: Conservatives believe that pro-family policy should incentivize the creation of what is often called a traditional family unit—a married couple, heterosexual, with kids. Liberals believe that pro-family policy should support all types of families, in part because they believe that economic stability leads to relationship stability (which may or may not include marriage). How do you see this?

PTB: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because of the growth on what I would call, like, the Right-adjacent corners of Silicon Valley—this kind of tech bro conservatism, which is not really where I come from—and their emphasis on pronatalism.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what differentiates that from what I would consider to be my view of the world versus my progressive friends.

There is a pronatalism that cares first and foremost about increasing the birth rates, with the babies being born by hook or by crook. Tech billionaires who in casual conversation at cocktail parties offer up their genetic material, because that’s their way of, essentially, building an army of descendants. It gets creepy fast.

That is so different from my vision, and I think it is different from the Left’s vision, too. Which is good, I think, because we both agree to hem in some of those excesses.

A conservative like me doesn’t want to start with the spreadsheet. We want to start with the context in which a baby is born, or even before the baby is born. What can we be doing to build the structures and support in place to make sure that when the baby is born, it’s going to be set up for success? And, obviously, there’s always going to be variations, imperfections, but in an ideal world, as I see it, the baby is going to be raised by a mother and a father living in a two-parent home. This brings a stability and gives the baby the best shot at life—it’s classic conservative stuff you’ve heard before.

I think the Left has a more inclusive definition of family, including single parents by choice, polyamory, and, in doing so, this entails a stronger claim on the state as needing to redress imbalances created by the absence of a traditional household and provide more economic security. If you’re defining “family” in law, rather than seeing “family” as something timeless and inherited, that probably makes you more inclined to favor proactive policies than those of us on the more limited-government side. But I think these debates are played out on both sides, so I probably don’t need to rehash them too much.

ES: Would you mind elaborating on why it has to be a man and a woman in your opinion? What if, for example, a household has many of the conservative ingredients, married parents, religious observance, dedicated to their children and family, but it is two men in the couple or two women?

PTB: What conservatives tend to have more of a problem with is that we believe the relationship between a mother and a child is something that is…I don’t know if I want to say sacred, but it has this very deep meaning behind it. And so they get very uncomfortable when you’re talking about things like gestational surrogacy, or other practices where you’re taking the act of parenthood out of the context between the two adults who are producing the baby. Ultimately, we all have a mother and a father, and I think conservatives want to protect that bond to whatever degree we can.

We also think about the rights of the child to have a relationship with its biological sperm and egg provider, if I can be clinical about it, because of so much of what we know about inherited diseases and all the rest. And conservatives have always placed a strong emphasis on the importance of having a male role model in the home, particularly for boys, and likewise a mom there for girls. As I say, there will always be plenty of cases that don’t fit “the norm.” But for conservatives, lots of us anyway, the ideal is going to look like husband, wife, and a baby is the product of the love between them.

ES: And now to another widely perceived point of contention: reproductive rights. Do you see any workable compromise on abortion in this country?

PTB: My sort of pessimistic side says that we are kind of getting to one now, and it’s not necessarily one that I would like, and I’m not sure it’s one you like either.

The dust seems to be settling in the post-Dobbs era. We’ve seen state after state vote to liberalize their abortion laws, including Missouri, Arizona, and states that are pretty red. I don’t see many of those states coming back to try to ban it again.

I think what we have on the ground is going to be sort of the status quo for the foreseeable future. I can’t imagine the Trump-led GOP putting a lot of weight behind a national abortion ban of any type anytime soon. And, similarly, it doesn’t seem realistic that the Democrats could hold a trifecta and pass something the other way. So it is going to be kind of messy. You’re gonna have basically abortion with very little restrictions in blue states, and then increasing restrictions in red states.

Can we live like that? I don’t know. You know, it does seem like some of the political air has gone out of that balloon on both sides. The pro-life movement spent 50 years trying to overturn Roe because they said it’s a state issue. And then a lot of people, the next day, they said, no, no, we need to pass a national abortion ban. I’ve never been convinced that was the right answer. But also clearly the Harris-Walz campaign hoped Dobbs would be a bigger vote-getter last year than it was. So I think a lot of people are just exhausted.

ES: Any movement on making sure women in states without abortion access have access to more support in pregnancy and early parenthood?

PTB: It should be urgent—a siren, an alarm bell—to invest in supports and programs and that sort of thing for moms who do find themselves unexpectedly pregnant and low-income families and all the rest. It’s an uphill battle, but we’re slowly making progress, and I think that’s ultimately where some of these pro-life states will end up is more restrictions on abortions, but also more support and social safety net–type stuff for low-income moms.

ES: There are a lot of voices on the Right calling for a return to a “traditional” household in which women were out of the paid workforce, dedicated to domestic work and care (which is a meaningful path, of course!), and, sometimes, and less appealing, subservient to their husbands. Unpack this for me.

PTB: The first thing I would say is that many of these conservatives mean well. They think back to their life growing up, or what they saw in the 1960 sitcoms or something, and think, “Wow, that model worked really well. And that’s a model that everyone should aspire to.” And it is the case that it can work very well, and for people who want that life for themselves, I think we have an obligation as a society to make that possible. And polling suggests many want this.

But then there’s this tendency to say, “OK, dad should go to work, and mom should bake cookies barefoot in the kitchen” or whatever, and I think that is a mistake. That is a slip from “this worked for me” to “this is how it should work for everyone.”

Ultimately, the answers to the questions of how a family should work or balance their various responsibilities is going to be different for everyone, right?

ES: And the same family will want different things at different times, too.

PTB: Yes, exactly. And to go back to the universal child care discussion earlier, that’s why flexible benefits through the tax code or through some sort of tax benefit or a child benefit scheme is so appealing to me vs. anything that says: This is how all families should look.

ES: OK, the red elephant, or donkey, in the room: How does the family-focused Right reconcile Donald Trump and the history he has of divorce and misogynistic behavior?

PTB: He does? You’re telling me this for the first time.

But in all seriousness, as I’ve said since 2016 or whatever, he would not be my spokesman for a national revival of faithful marriage and involved fatherhood. He certainly has some qualities that a lot of people look up to. He also has a lot of bad ones, too. But at this point, he is who he is.

Beyond his personal qualities, I think the political impact is maybe more interesting. I think his influence on the Republican Party overall has been to push it in a direction where cultural conservatives who focus on issues like immigration, DEI stuff, the transgender debates, have dominated. And while I may agree with them on certain policy prescriptions, those are not the issues that get me out of bed in the morning. I’m more concerned about the stuff we’ve been talking about today like marriage, family and kids, how to build a more pro-family America.

There are some, like the late Charlie Kirk, who straddled both—the more populist cultural conservatism and the version of conservatism that is focused on helping people get married, start families, and have kids. But overall I think it’s an open question about what direction the Right will take. I think it’s going to be really important for us as conservatives to talk about not just the crisis of low birth and marriage rates, but really dig into why, say, young men are not marriageable enough, or why it is not OK to just say offensive things in the hopes of “owning the libs.” Part of a successful cultural movement means thinking beyond just this or that election cycle. And so I think we need to be better about talking about what it actually means to build a pro-family America—both on the economic and cultural dimensions.

This article was originally published on Made with Care. Read the original article.