Without the formation and stability of families, America will not survive.
That is the dire message from the Heritage Foundation’s recent report, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.”
Will America heed this warning for the family and the free nation? The report begins with what America’s founders knew: without families, a nation — and a civilization — will fall.
The report’s authors are Roger Severino, Jay Richards, PhD, Emma Waters, Delano Squires, Rachel Sheffield, and Robert Rector.
Americans must understand the national implications of turning our backs on marriage and family. According to the Heritage Foundation’s report, the family “is the seedbed of self-government. The home is where fathers, mothers, and their children cultivate virtue and practice cooperation, responsibility, stewardship, and self-reliance. Without families, a country cannot create meaningful work and prosperity.”
The authors wrote that the welfare state “kick-started the current crisis by punishing work and marriage.”
The authors said that we must actively support marriage and working families, and included recommendations to Congress and the Trump administration to accomplish these goals. The authors discussed the history of the crisis of the family, with a focus on the American family.
“Fertility rates in the United States dropped below replacement level in the early 1970s and have remained below that threshold nearly every year since,” they wrote.
Everything is connected. Children need both parents to flourish, and America needs families to survive.
We all know that children are better off on any measure economically, physically, and socially when they grow up with their married, biological parents. Children from intact families are less likely to be disciplined in school or drop out. They are at lower risk for abuse and unwed pregnancy. Children who grow up in the same house as their married parents are less likely to get caught up in the juvenile or adult court system and less likely to end up in prison.
“Anyone who claims to care about social and economic outcomes for Americans should be promoting a culture where men and women commit to one another and the families they build together, not creating fatherless (or motherless) children for the fulfillment or convenience of adults,” the authors wrote.
Marriage protects children, and family formation protects the nation. The report includes policy recommendations for achieving those goals. This recommendation is particularly relevant in our present era:
Policies “should favor natural marriage over same-sex and polyamorous relationships, cohabitation, or intentional single parenthood. Fathers and mothers are not generic and interchangeable ‘parents.’ It is not discrimination to acknowledge the differences between them.”
Read the full report here.
