Families carry out a variety of functions critically important to society. They share resources, economically support their members, and care for the elderly, the sick, and the disabled in ways that no other institution can do or do as well. Increasingly a variety of state and national commissions recognize the need to support families, including the White House Conference on Families, the National Commission on Children, the Committee for Economic Development which included 200 CEO's of the country's leading corporations, and The Governor's Task Force on Family and Children's Issues right here in Wisconsin. Recent changes in families and households have spurred a growing interest in family issues. For example, policies and programs usually focus on the specific needs of children, youth, women, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor with little or no attention to the families in which these individuals live.
Teenage pregnancy has obvious repercussions beyond the teenager.
The parents of a pregnant daughter can do much to lessen the detrimental effects of pregnancy. The 1981 legislation for Adolescent Family Life Demonstration Grants Program of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was clearly ground-breaking legislation because programs were required to involved family members in their services. However, no guidelines were given about how to involve families nor was information gathered about whether they were successful in doing so. Now this evidence of the lack of a family focus in policy-making is not intended to suggest that the government is totally uninvolved in or neutral to families. A wide range of public policies deal with family issues, but the government's image of its client is most often the individual, with families only an afterthought.