Bunched Up

To take a pop culture example of the rising material expectations for American families, the TV sitcom The Brady Bunch, which ran from 1969 to 1974, followed the lives of a family with six children—three boys and three girls. The Bradys were prosperous, upper-middle-class Californians who could afford family vacations to Hawaii. Yet the three boys shared a single small bedroom, as did the three girls. What is more, all of the kids shared a single bathroom!
Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years

As the quote points out, The Brady Bunch was a sitcom. It was neither a documentary nor reality television. The fact that the show was set in a relatively small home says nothing about the material expectations for American families at the time. By 1974, my parents had purchased their first home, and it had four bedrooms (which made perfect sense to me at the time... of course everyone would have their own room), and this wasn't understood as cutting-edge... it was the norm for pretty much the entire neighborhood where I grew up.

The Heritage Foundation brings up the example of The Brady Bunch primarily to push back on the idea that "the way to raise successful children is to have fewer of them and invest more in each one," which has generally been the case in developed nations as children have gone from, as I recall one economist phrasing it, economic necessity to expensive luxury good. But was a situation comedy that ended more than 50 years ago, really the best example they could find to make a counterpoint? After all, there were no real Brady children to have outcomes to be tracked.

And that's the thing about the Heritage report in general. It's a deeply ideological document that drifts between feeling deeply. profoundly, cynical and naïvely, childishly, earnest. But it never seems to make what strike me as effective policy suggestions.

This is perhaps due, at least in part, to its stated goal and outlook. The goal being to have people marry earlier in life, then have children younger and have more of them, and the outlook being that a lot of otherwise disparate factors (like people's understanding of "quality versus quantity") play into their choices if how many children to have. But factors all different then the incentives the report notes:

First, many of the past incentives to have large families are gone. For instance, far fewer Americans live and work on farms in 2025 than they did in 1825 or 1925. Few married couples now think of the labor potential of children on a farm or in the local coal mine. Infant mortality has also dropped to near zero, and life expectancy has more than doubled. Far fewer elderly Americans live with and depend directly on their children and grandchildren now than they did in the past—due in part to vast entitlement programs.

There's a bit of grousing about entitlement programs; the Heritage Foundation is, after all, a conservative think tank, but otherwise, there's nothing in the document that suggests the fix is a return to a largely agrarian society, with increased levels of child labor as standard, higher levels of child mortality and people's entire social safety nets being their children. And so it's swimming against the tide with a rallying cry of "Virtue!" But, as if often the case with fundamentally religious outlooks, it refuses to recognize that "virtue" is almost always the celebration of responses to necessity. Sure, the Bible calls on people to have large families. It also calls on them to respect one another's property, and we all know how well that turned out. So 100 or 200 years ago, large families weren't a response to the idea that this is what the universe wanted, or even demanded from people; they were a response to a material situation in which whatever comforts could be squeezed out of life depended on having as many children as was practicable.

The three policy prop0sals that the paper makes are all basically to throw money at it; give married couples who have (their own) children a tax credit, give married couples who care for their own children at home a tax credit and (wait for it...) set aside money for each child born to a citizen and allow for tax-advantaged withdrawals from this fund if the grown child marries between the ages of 18 and 30. (Granted, these are better than some of the suggestions from an earlier draft, like giving parents extra votes, seeking to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges or forcing the owners of "starter homes" to receive bids from families before they could legally sell.) I'm dubious that it would work, partially because I'm not sure they solve the problem the Heritage Foundation thinks it's attempting to solve, but also because I don't think that they're really geared at solving anyone else's problems. Sure, there are some people who think that it's too expensive to raise a child, but I don't see how Heritage plans to force the djinni of greater educational attainment and broader choices for women back into the bottle.