Needed: A White House Summit on Family and Fertility

How the Trump-Vance administration could use the bully pulpit for good

Welcome back to Family Matters, where everyone in or around D.C. should be making plans for our Child Tax Credit event Tuesday, Feb. 11 - details below!

• The Main Event: A proposal for the Trump-Vance administration

• Putting Families First: Capitol Hill event on the CTC

• Flowers of Fire: Co-hosting virtual book club on South Korea and the “4Bs”

• Parting Shots

The Main Event

Donald J. Trump was sworn in as President for the second time this week, putting a punctuation on his campaign slogan: Make America Great Again. MAGA, of course, is a slightly truncated version of a slogan from President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, “Let’s Make America Great Again” (master’s theses could be written on what it means to have turned the slogan from an invitation into a command.) Reagan’s successful second campaign was pegged to the theme of “Morning in America:”

The text, read by longtime ad exec Hal Riney:

“It's morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon, 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It's morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?” (emphasis mine)

Reagan’s ad puts the economic battle against stag- and inflation into the context of what matters - young couples, starting out, looking to buy a home. Could a second-term Trump administration manage the same trick — finding ways to stress the successes its economic policies are having not just for retirement accounts and businesses, but for young families, would-be parents, and children? One way to approach that would be to host a White House Summit on Family and Fertility.

Photo via The White House/Flickr

The pitch is pretty simple: Take a day or two, block off some conference rooms in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, draft some brief remarks from the President and Vice-President, and fly in some combination of big names and deep thinkers to cross-pollinate ideas and bring some media attention to the nation’s falling marriage rates and declining birth rate. It isn’t just moderates and liberals who need to understand the social ramifications, either: Just 30 percent of Republicans told YouGov last year that they were worried that there weren't enough children being born in the U.S.

As I — and others — have written previously, you can’t solve America’s fertility decline without addressing a major underlying cause; the decline of marriage. The biggest change in today’s America compared to the one today’s high schoolers were being born into is that single motherhood is on a downwards trajectory. But single women aren’t going on to get married and have kids later; they’re increasingly likely to avoid marriage and fertility entirely.

Getting basic facts like this out into the general media ecosystem would be a much bigger service to the cause of increasing the number of healthy marriages and happy babies than obnoxious tweets or the musings of obscenely wealthy and socially awkward spokesmen with an unhealthy interest in IQ. We could add in the fact that the apparent rise in infertility is directly related to delayed marriage and later-in-life attempts to conceive; that the academic consensus continues to coalesce around the fact that two parents are, in fact, better for kids than one on any number of social and economic dimensions; that something’s gone wrong in our culture, be it smartphones, pornography, or excessive global warming fears, to make too many young people view the act of having kids as an opt-in expression of selfishness, rather than an act of solidarity and shared humanity.

And the guest list could be expansive and a little eclectic; of course social scientists like Nick Eberstadt, on demographic decline, and Brad Wilcox, on marriage and the role of the family, should have a featured speaking role. But so, too, could pro athletes that have used their platform to point to the importance of family, from retired NFL quarterback Phillip Rivers, father of ten, to Olympic gold medalist Allyson Felix, who successfully fought Nike over their lack of support for pregnant female athletes. Find media figures, like Fox News’ Dana Perino, who led off a GOP debate this cycle with a question about working families, who have a track record of caring about parents for a sit-down with the vice president. Bring in

Peachy Keenan

and other right-wing online influencers to talk alongside liberal centrists who will quietly admit that they, too, are concerned about declining birth rates (Ezra Klein, we’ll get you sunglasses and a fake mustache so no one in the Bay Area knows its you.) Gathering a variety of politically varied (and apolitical) voices who care about the importance of family and children could be a way to bring a defter touch to issues that have, at times, been political baggage for the GOP ticket.

The idea of a White House Summit on the Family isn’t a new one. The late Jimmy Carter promised evangelical voters during his successful campaign that he would host a summit on cultural issues bedeviling parents. But by the time he was sworn in, the promise of a White House Conference on the American Family had been made more “inclusive,” becoming the White House Conference on Families. Its emphasis from supporting parents to fighting poverty, and it became a cautionary tale of intra-team in-fighting rather than leveraging the bully pulpit in a helpful way.

The Trump-Vance administration could avoid that mistake with a little more definition around common-sense principles many share around family life, avoiding the tendency toward nebulous everything bagelism avant la lettre that scuppered the Carter Summit. It would take the position that children are good, that declining birth rates are a real concern, that children do best when raised by two parents, and that empowering parents to raise their kids according to their values, rather than those of bureaucrats or corporations, is true pro-family policy.

That would also help it avoid the pinched approach to family policy that can sometimes characterize efforts that focus on professional-class hobbyhorses. You’d be forgiven if you’d forgotten about the gathering led by the President's daughter, Ivanka Trump, during the first Trump administration, which focused specifically on expanding access to child care and family leave.

The current occupant of the Naval Observatory happens to be someone well-versed in and passionate about family policy matters, and has proven effective at speaking about them in ways that avoid interest-group narrowcasting. As he carves out a policy niche (with an eye on 2028) and the Trump team looks to make the most of their remaining three years, a soft-focus effort to bring in a panoply of voices, all focused on improving life for families, could bolster that reputation.

In 1984, there was an average of 6,786 weddings per day in America. In 2022, we averaged 5,660 per day, even as the U.S. population grew by roughly 40 percent over that timeframe. The initial week of the Trump administration has focused on overturning the excesses of his predecessor. A summit like I’m proposing could help draw the connection, like Reagan’s ‘84 ad, between what the administration is trying to accomplish on the economic and cultural front, and what those efforts actually mean — the wedding bells and baby showers that are a big part of what make life worth living. That kind of focus would be much needed, and much welcomed, in a second Trump administration.

Putting Families First

If Congressional Republicans were interested in holding their own summit on families, they could do much worse than to attend our upcoming event, to be held on the House side of the U.S. Capitol complex on Tuesday, Feb. 11.

Register here

As you can see, we’ll be approaching the topic from all angles: Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, who recently introduced the Family First Act, a bill that would expand the Child Tax Credit; Tim Carney, whose recent book on a more family-friendly America touches on support via the tax code; Ramesh Ponnuru, one of the leading lights of the ‘reformocon’ movement that helped popularize Child Tax Credit expansion as a key part of the GOP agenda, and Bethany Mandel, a mother of six, conservative author, and proponent of seeing the Republican party truly assume the mantle of the “party of parents.” And me!

Register here to guarantee your spot on Feb. 11:

Flowers of Fire

As a reminder - I’ll be co-hosting a virtual book club with

Leah Libresco Sargeant

under the auspices of

Fairer Disputations

. We’ll have four discussion prompts/essays, one for each week in February, while reading through Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights, by Hawon Jung.

South Korea’s poisoned gender relations portend a future the West should desperately want to avoid. Women in South Korea are pledging to uphold the “4Bs”:

• no sex with men (비섹스; bisekseu),

• no giving birth (비출산; bichulsan),

• no dating men (비연애; biyeonae), and

• no marriage with men (비혼; bihon).

Does this have relevance for gender polarization in the U.S., and if so, what can we learn? We’ll explore this question and much more through weekly essays, online comments, and a closing Zoom discussion. Grab your copy and plan to join us for the first dialogue, coming in February. Our full schedule is available at Leah’s Substack, Other Feminisms.

Parting Shots

• In Spain, a regional court has ruled that single parents should receive the same total of paid parental leave that couples do; or, to put it another way, twice as much paid leave as any individual married parent receives (New York Times)

• Tim Carney writes that Republicans should boost and simplify family tax benefits as part of their 2025 tax negotiations (Washington Examiner)

• Leah Sargeant and Dan Darling also write that Republicans should prioritize benefits for families and new parents as part of their 2025 tax negotiations (National Review)

• As Jason DeParle writes, the ongoing political realignment means that some of the new voters on the right could be hit by some traditional GOP pushes for safety-net cuts (New York Times)

• Gov. Mike Braun of Indiana is seeking to eliminate the remaining eligibility restrictions on his state's educational choice program, and set aside $362 million to eliminate the waitlist for the state's Child Care Development Fund (WISH-TV)

• Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers declared 2025 would be the "Year of the Kid" in the Badger State, proposing free school lunches, additional money for school mental health services, create a state-level 4K program, and increase state child care funding by $480 million (Wisconsin Examiner)

• A bipartisan group of state lawmakers in Nebraska unveiled a slate of bills to provide universal school lunches, home visiting for new moms, increase child care reimbursement rates, a young child tax credit for low-income families, expand the state EITC, and other ideas (Nebraska Examiner)

• Veering outside my lane slightly, but my EPPC colleague

  Ed Whelan
  has a sober and informative exploration of the Trump administration’s executive order on race- and sex-based preferences (National Review)

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.