A Liberal-Democratic Case for the Two-Parent Family. An exchange of complimentary notes about what the other had written in early 1990s, between a former assistant secretary of education in the Reagan Administration, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and the man who would turn out to be one of President Clinton’s major advisers, William A. Galston, was illustrative of a this then-emerging, very rough consensus about family failure.

Republican Finn, in an essay about endangered families and children, had written in 1990:

We know that a well-functioning society must condemn behavior that results in people having children who are not prepared to be good parents. I find it astonishing that, in the fact of that knowledge, today we seem to attach more opprobrium to dropping out of school, experimenting on a cat, or uttering nasty remarks on campus than we do to giving birth to what, not so many years ago, were called “illegitimate” children. . . . Children fare better in some circumstances than others, and no decent society will remain silent when it comes to pointing out which circumstances are which.

Democrat Galston wrote similarly at about the same time:

A healthy liberal democracy, I suggest, is more than an artful arrangement of institutional devices. It requires, as well, the right kinds of citizens, possessing the virtues appropriate to a liberal democratic community. A growing body of empirical evidence developed over the past generation supports the proposition that a stable, intact family makes an irreplaceable contribution to the creation of such citizens, and thus to promoting both individual and social well-being. For that reason, among others, the community as a whole has a legitimate interest in promoting the formation and sustaining the stability of such families.

In the exchange of letters, Finn essentially told Galston that he liked his paper, and Galston returned the salute. This was an encouraging symbolic event given the extent to which leading Democrats and others on the political left were still muffling themselves on “traditional” family questions.

Galston’s paper was very much a breakthrough. As we will see below, a slightly different version of it was key in persuading Democratic members (plus staffers) of the National Commission on Children, in 1991, to endorse unusually direct language on the importance of two-parent families. Similarly, if not the paper itself, then certainly Galston himself and his circle of colleagues, were influential in shaping candidate Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign rhetoric about paternal responsibility and welfare reform, among other things. At root, “A Liberal-Democratic Case” gave essential and welcome cover to men and women on the left side of the continuum who had perhaps long shared the paper’s ideas, but who had been reluctant for all the aforementioned reasons to speak out. In addition to the just-cited paragraph, what else did Galston, a political theorist, say?

Of poverty, he argued that “after a decade-long economic expansion,” the poverty rate for children was almost twice as high as it was among elderly Americans, and that it was no overstatement to say that, “the best anti-poverty program for children is a stable, intact family.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Yet if the “economic effects of breakdown are clear,” he wrote, the “non-economic effects are just now coming into focus.” Here, Galston noted that while “scholars over the past generation have disagreed over the consequences of divorce, work done during the 1980s has on balance reinforced the view that children of broken families labor under major non-economic disadvantages.” He quoted Karl Zinsmeister (who was to serve as a senior policy adviser to President George W. Bush) on this “emerging consensus”:

There is a mountain of scientific evidence showing that when families disintegrate, children often end up with intellectual, physical, and emotional scars that persist for life. . . . We talk about the drug crisis, the education crisis, and the problems of teen pregnancy and juvenile crime. But all these ills trace back predominantly to one source: broken families.

Of the “education crisis,” more specifically, Galston contended that “recent studies confirm” what many educators had suspected for a while: “[T]he dis-integrating American family is at the root of America’s declining educational achievement.” (Emphasis in the original.)

In light of all this, Galston was nonetheless and appropriately compelled to caution that a “general preference” for two-parent families does not mean that all marriages ought to survive, or that “endorsement of the two-parent family” be confused for “nostalgia for the single-breadwinner ‘traditional’ family of the 1950s.” His left flank thus partially protected, Galston went on to say the following in perhaps the essay’s most important passage:

Having entered these disclaimers, I want to stress that my approach is frankly normative. The focus is on what must be a key objective of our society: raising children who are prepared intellectually, physically, morally, and emotionally— to take their place as law-abiding and independent members of the community, able to sustain themselves and their families and to perform their duties as citizens. Available evidence supports the conclusion that on balance, the intact two-parent family is best suited to this task. We must then resist the easy relativism of the proposition that different family structures represent nothing more than “alternative life-styles”—a belief that undermined the Carter administration’s efforts to develop a coherent family policy and that continues to cloud the debate even today. (Emphasis again in the original.)

This takes us to the previously mentioned National Commission on Children, more commonly known as the “Rockefeller Commission on Children,” after its chairman, Sen. Jay D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia.

The National Commission on Children. It should not constitute anything remarkable to declare that fathers matter. But it was remarkable—which is to say it was big news on television talk shows and the like—when a 34-member federal panel, with more liberal than conservative members, unanimously endorsed language like this in 1991: “Children do best when they have the personal involvement and material support of a father and a mother and when both parents fulfill their responsibility to be loving providers.” 

Suffice it to say that chances would have been slim for such a straightforward proposition to have been included in any similar federal report any time earlier in the period under review. Also suffice it to say that few report writers would have ever considered the need for such a statement any time prior to 1965, as no one had yet seriously proposed that fathers were superfluous. But along with a recommendation to allocate $40 billion in the first year for a refundable child tax credit, the report’s most noted portion was its strong endorsement of two-parent families. “There can be little doubt,” it said,

that having both parents living and working together in a stable marriage can shield children from a variety of risk. Rising rates of divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing, and absent parents are not just manifestations of alternative lifestyles, they are patterns of adult behavior that increase children’s risks of negative consequences. Although in some cases divorce is the least harmful outcome of a troubled marriage, today’s high rate of family breakdown is troubling.

Naturally, the report also said that the nation “must never fail to reach out and protect single-parent families as well,” and that, “Many single parents make extraordinary efforts to raise children in difficult circumstances.” Yet such boilerplate—necessary and gracious as it was—could not subtract from the significant step forward represented by the unambiguous as well as culturally and politically pregnant passage right before it: The one about two-parent families being important.