Politics and the Family
Making Politics Serve the Family

by Richard M. Eyre

In the last column, I made the case for the fact that the family has always and must always remain the basic unit of society.  But families need help!  The most basic institution deserves more help from the larger institutions of society, and parents, who have the most important (and most difficult) job, deserve more help from the people we elect and appoint to serve us.

A political focus on creating stronger families is the most practical kind of public preventative medicine.  If all families function ideally (caring for each other - extended families included), there would be no homelessness, no poverty, no institutional child care or elderly care, no neglected mental illness, etc.

Schools, government, and the whole public sector needs to be thought of (and to think of itself) as the support, the supplement, and the servant of the individual families and households that make up our neighborhoods, our school districts, our towns, our counties, and our state. Households are like the factory workers who turn out the actual product.  The only reason there are shift supervisors, production managers, vice-presidents or CEOs is to help the basic worker do his job.  If any of these larger positions become too focused on their own preservation or prosperity and lose track of the basic workers they are to support, the company will fail.

The problem in our society today is that the basic worker - the households, the parents, the individual families who do the ground-level work of owning and maintaining the homes, feeding and raising the children, caring for the grandparents and paying the taxes are being neglected and forgotten by the very institutions and individuals that were created and elected to serve them.  Too many public institutions try to substitute for families rather than supplement them.  Too many politicians want to focus on "big" government rather than "small" family issues, and too many parents feel that the big bureaucracies of government and the lack of character and competence at schools make it harder rather than easier to raise families.

Just as it once took the organization of labor unions to get big business and robber barons to focus on the situation and the needs of individual workers, it may now take the motivation and mobilization of some kind of family union or parents' coalition to get our politicians, our government, and our schools to focus more on the situation and needs of individual families.           

We must simply put our money where our mouth is, or more precisely, put our politics where our priorities are.  We must demand, in this coming political season, that candidates tell us what they propose to do for families, that they bring issues down to our level and relate everything to the basic unit, to the plight of parents, to the challenges we face in raising our children and keeping our households strong and together.

We need to train ourselves and our politicians to think differently, to look at every issue and every option and every idea and say, "How will that affect families?"  "What is the 'family way' of approaching that problem?"  "What will benefit and empower families rather than weaken them or substitute for them?"

Ask the Hard Questions

As society's basic unit, as families, let's ask politicians the hard questions:

1.  What are they going to do for families economically? Where are they going to simplify and streamline government and reduce our taxes?  What are they going to do to increase the child exemption or in some other way compensate us for the difficult and expensive job of raising children?

2.  What are they going to do for families educationally?  Why aren't there more character education and family life courses in our schools?  What about more volunteers in our schools?  What about educational vouchers to give parents real choices about where their kids go to school and to promote more private school alternatives?  What about alternative certificates for teachers that qualifies practical experienced individuals to teach certain subjects?  How about more teamwork with business and a state tax check off for a Teacher's Education Fund?

3.  What will they work for to help families in areas of morality and character? What about a community "value of the month" campaign and other positive initiatives to go with stronger DUI laws and pornography penalties and more streamlined adoption policies to promote alternatives to abortion?

4. What will they do to help families socially?  How will they make social services more efficient?  What about encouraging and catalyzing more help from the voluntary sector and recognition and assistance to churches, service clubs, and private sector initiatives that positively impact social problems and seek to strengthen families? What about a family-to-family volunteer program where strong, functional families are paired up one-on-one with dysfunctional or in-trouble families.

5.  What will they do to help parents find the illusive balance between the demands of work and the needs of family? What will they do to promote flex time, job sharing, home offices, paternal and maternal leave time, and other ideas for work-family balance?

6.  What will they do to be sure families have the wholesome recreation, clean environment, and open spaces they need?  How hard will they work to keep polluters out? What about our winter inversions?  What will they do to support and sustain the arts?  To keep rural Utah environmentally and economically healthy for family recreation as well as family residence?

7.  What will they do for families in terms of transportation and freedom of movement? What about one way systems and car pooling incentives and more HOV lanes to move traffic more efficiently and get working parents home to their children a few minutes earlier?

8.  How will they help families with health care and insurance?  What about health insurance reform, cheaper, high-deductible catastrophic options, caps on malpractice damages, and new or creative ideas to make insurance more accessible and more affordable?

9.  What will they do about the safety and physical protection of children and families?  What about stronger drug laws and penalties for users and better parent-involving drug education programs.  How about innovative ideas for gang breakup and control; and better school safety programs?

10.  How will they work to clean up politics and to make the political process more accessible to families and more attractive to children?  What about more extensive campaign finance reform and more complete disclosure in political fund raising?  What about shorter campaigns and free air time and print space for primary and general candidates to lessen dependence on big money

It's not so much the exact questions or answers but the orientation of candidates to the priority of stronger families.  When family becomes the framework and the lens through which we view politics and candidates, we begin to hold the whole system, even the whole society, accountable for taking care of its most basic unit. Political issues that seem impossibly complex seem to clear up when we try to see them in the perspective of how they will help or hurt families. Join me next column for another, deeper look at how the public sector can and should serve parents and their families.

This is the second of a multi-part column on politics and the family by New York Times #1 best selling author Richard Eyre.  The column will be ongoing at this site with a new article posting every fortnight.  Richard welcomes feedback at eyres1@comcast.net and at www.eyre04decision.com