In 2023, the Utah Legislature expanded access to full-day kindergarten in Utah by passing HB 477. Kelsey, a mother of four whose two older children had already completed half-day kindergarten, didn’t initially think this amendment was necessary or important. Half-day kindergarten had worked just fine for Kelsey, who only works part-time and lives close to her children’s school. She enjoyed the extra time with her kids and had honestly felt a bit self-righteous about her willingness to absorb the minor inconveniences of half-day kindergarten. However, after talking with her daughter’s kindergarten teacher and some friends, she realized that full-day kindergarten was extremely beneficial for many families. She realized that her personal experiences may not always be reliable metrics for what will help families and societies.
In The Family: A Proclamation to the World, church leaders have asked members and “responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society” (Ensign, Nov. 1995, 102). Kelsey’s experience with HB 477 was a turning point for her with regard to what constitutes good policy. She realized that her personal experiences may not always be reliable metrics for what will help families and societies, and the best measures we can support are often those that broadly strengthen families while also allowing for individual preferences and circumstances. Our shared values as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, particularly those outlined in the Family Proclamation, are also vital in our quest to understand and support good family policy.
As Latter-day Saint values and behaviors have become outliers in Western culture, Latter-day Saints’ views on the family and the standards that protect it are increasingly held in derision. As a result, people with power seek to change laws and cultural norms to favor policies that harm rather than help the traditional family. In general, the press holds the same liberal views. Recent articles about Utah’s employment pattern bemoan the fact that so many Utah women work part-time compared to women in other states—with 36.4% of Utah women working part-time, compared to 28.7% nationally—and ignore the possibility that women with families might desire part-time work. Many “progressive” policies actively demean wifehood, motherhood, “old-fashioned” sexual standards, and even the value of men and fatherhood.
Conservative policies not based on science or common sense also endanger women and families. Immigration policies that separate parents and children create both immediate and generational family trauma. Conflating contraception access with abortion or morality can restrict healthy family planning and ignores evidence that when contraception is widely available, elective abortions decrease. An ectopic pregnancy is a death sentence for both the mother and child—a medical emergency which many emergency doctors are concerned about treating in states with radically conservative abortion laws. Additionally, portraying the demise of the family as simply the result of a failing culture or poor individual choices ignores the economic difficulties that contribute to familial instability.
In her book The Two-Parent Privilege, Melissa Kearney demonstrates that “marriage is the most reliable institution for delivering a high level of resources and long-term stability for children.” Yet 40% of American children currently do not live with married parents and are part of a demographic shift that primarily affects the most economically disadvantaged Americans. Marriage is now an economic metric in the United States, and college education has become one of the biggest precursors for marriage. While Kearney argues that marriage is vital to the stability and success of children, she also notes that “helping children [in America] will require … addressing the widespread economic and social challenges that hold back millions of adults—challenges including joblessness, mass incarceration, untreated mental illness, and the opioid epidemic, among others.” The institution of marriage is often ignored or dismissed in secular conversations of larger societal ills.
Add to this the increasing pressure on youth, as Gen Z is more depressed than any generation before them. This is not only due to social media. The liberal sexual agenda pursued in Western countries introduces the idea that children deserve and can manage sexual autonomy, while children are also increasingly exposed to pornography. Currently, the UN is considering a treaty to combat cybercrimes that would actually allow child pornography if it is created by AI (though this would still be considered illegal in the US). This shocking allowance and unwillingness of the global community to fight or condemn porn is terrifying.
Additionally, according to Stanford sociology professor Michael Rosenfeld in Bloomberg, many young adults in the U.S. have given up on marriage and family, and have become even slower to develop “the ability to form and sustain romantic relationships.” These shifts—paired with dissatisfaction with dating apps, now one of the most common ways to meet someone—have disrupted the world of dating. As Pew Research Center found in 2020, “Fully half of single adults say they are not currently looking for a relationship or dates,” which creates an opportunity for companies like Replika, which offers lonely adults a relationship with an “AI companion who cares.”
Failing Societies Fail Families
While families in the United States face significant cultural and economic struggles, family disintegration is a global concern. Families from war-torn or economically struggling countries face particularly overwhelming challenges. Kelsey’s friend Luz* is a member of the Church from Honduras, a country where almost 80% of the population lives in extreme poverty and where gang violence and government corruption are rampant. Luz never knew her birth father, and after her stepfather abandoned her mother and her three younger half-brothers, Luz had to provide for her family as her mother slipped deeper into alcoholism and other destructive behaviors. Luz became a mother herself in her early twenties, feeling that it was the “only way to leave home and have a better future.” Her then-partner had completed his bachelor’s degree, something “that amazed me because I thought it was something very distant for me to achieve … [so] I felt that I had to settle for giving someone children who had achieved what I hadn’t.” Unfortunately, Luz’s relationship turned abusive, and while her ex still provides occasional child support, Luz is now a single mother.
Luz’s situation is not unique in Honduras. In Adrienne Pine’s book, Working Hard, Drinking Hard, she explores the high violence and poverty rates in Honduras. She notes that in recent decades, “Honduran women are increasingly taking on the role of primary wage earners of the household, yet they are still expected to fulfill ‘traditional roles, including child-rearing. In the face of a very changed family … [this] has led many Hondurans to argue that the ‘breakdown’ of the family, rather than the social and economic forces behind this transformation, is responsible for the growth of gangs” (33).
Pine’s conclusion demonstrates what we are missing as a global community when we dismiss the importance of the family to society. While Pine rightfully acknowledges the complex social and economic factors that Honduran families face, both things can be true: there are social and economic forces driving the destabilization of families, and the breakdown of the family also contributes to this societal instability. We do ourselves no favors by overlooking the family’s importance in society or when we oversimplify complex problems by ignoring the social and economic concerns that affect families. As Luz thoughtfully observes,
… [the suffering in Honduras] is heartbreaking to witness, and there’s a deep sense of impotence in seeing people—especially children—suffer the consequences of something they had no control over. When the family unit weakens, people look for belonging and security elsewhere. While there are many factors contributing to societal unrest, I personally believe that strong, stable families provide a foundation that can prevent a lot of these issues … [and] strengthening families requires both structural changes and individual commitments.
A Spiritual Problem
So, what are the structural changes and individual commitments we should support? What measures and policies effectively strengthen families? Currently, all OECD countries except Israel face population implosion because of declining childbirth. Many of these countries have been trying to pay women to have more babies, but even the most generous policies are not working. In Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, she examines why children are undervalued or not prioritized even in countries with welcoming family and childcare policies. She demonstrates that, despite popular notions that favorable government policies can bring about increased births, births and child-rearing need to be informed by beliefs that bearing children has greater purpose or worth: “Cash incentives and tax relief won’t persuade people to give up their lives [to have children]. People will do that for God, for their families, and for their future children.” While government policies supporting families are positive, people will only have children if they believe children and life are worthwhile—even divinely sanctioned. To enact policies that support the family, hearts must change to see the ultimate, shining value of families as the anchor of society. Both things can be true: there are social and economic forces driving the destabilization of families, and the breakdown of the family also contributes to this societal instability.
Members of the Church would do well to bravely (it will take bravery!) lift the Proclamation as a standard for the world. At the very least, we can become involved in community efforts to strengthen the family with the Proclamation as our guiding light. We can help support church initiatives that strengthen families within the Church, as well as the Church’s global initiatives that look at broader economic challenges families face. We should also look for ways to research and support measures proffered by other governments and organizations. As Elder Oaks has reminded us, “Despite all that our Church does directly, most humanitarian service to the children of God worldwide is carried out by persons and organizations having no formal connection with our Church. And as Orson F. Whitney observed: “God is using more than one people for the accomplishment of his great and marvelous work. … It is too vast, too arduous, for any one people. As members of the restored Church, we need to be more aware and more appreciative of the service of others.” We also need to motivate ourselves and others in the Church to participate broadly in the community and be open to dialogue and problem-solving that transcend differences in religion, political party, and even personal family circumstances.
Kelsey and her husband are monthly donors to The Fistula Foundation, an organization that helps women in the poorest areas of the world recover from devastating childbirth injuries that leave women incontinent, isolated, and sometimes infertile. Gale has taken many young adults into her home over the years as they have gone through rough patches, helping them mature into potential responsible spouses and parents themselves. As her family lived abroad for years, they encountered people who cited them as the only happy family they had ever met. These are small things, but they are still lights in a world where the family is struggling. What can you do?
In Doctrine and Covenants, Section 101:42–63, the Lord presents us with a parable, wherein the Lord of the vineyard instructs his workers to build a tower and set a watchman in place to protect the vineyard. Since it’s a time of peace, the workers never get around to finishing the tower, and the enemy breaks through the hedge and destroys the vineyard. Bemoaning the situation, the Lord of the vineyard says, “… the watchman upon the tower would have seen the enemy while he was yet afar off; and then ye could have made ready and kept the enemy from breaking down the hedge thereof, and saved my vineyard from the hands of the destroyer.”
As Latter-day Saints, we have a vineyard, a hedge, a tower, and a watchman, while the world is becoming increasingly self-involved and blind. The world is inviting the destroyer into our countries, our states, our communities, our homes, and our families. The enemy is no longer afar off but is breaching the wall. Our personal abilities or means may be small, but we can all find ways to support measures and policies that strengthen the family.
