Has Family Policy Come of Age? A Decade Review of the State of U.S. Family Policy in the 1990s

Family policy has come of age in the 1990s, yet it has not achieved a status commensurate with that of economic or environmental policy. Because family policy has been difficult to define, this review proposes an explicit definition of the term family policy and a companion implicit term, a family perspective in policy making. It updates the rationale for family policy, arguing that family commitment at its core is particularly consequential in an individualistic market economy with a small social safety net. It chronicles recent developments including philanthropic commitments, state and federal policy initiatives, and the use of research to inform family policy making. Selected family policy issues including family and work conflict, long-term care, family poverty, and marriage, are overviewed. The paper concludes with developments during the decade in theory, methods, and dissemination that hold the potential for capitalizing on the current popularity of families as a theme in policy making. Key Words: family perspective in policy making, family policy. The field of family policy was conceived in the 1970s and has come of age in the 1990s. A watershed event in the field's formative years, the 1980 White House Conference on Families, was instrumental in putting families on the political agenda, but it proved so politically contentious that it stymied any federal development for almost a decade, With its reemergence in the 1990s, family policy is much like an adolescent on the cusp of adulthood, its future hanging in the balance. Was family policy in the 1990s a futile endeavor with a short life expectancy, as prophesied by doomsayers in the early 1980s (Steiner, 1981), or did it mature into "a full-fledged adult in the policy world" (Jacobs & Davies, 1994, p. 290)? At the dawn of the decade, family policy was a concept without a consistent definition, a perspective lacking a solid rationale, a field in need of legitimization, and a rhetoric in search of grounding and guidance from theory and practice. This article reviews progress on each of these fronts by addressing six fundamental questions: First, has the field reached consensus on definitions of family policy to guide research and action? Second, what evidence has emerged in the decade in support of the rationale that policy making should aim to strengthen families? Third, given that families have historically been considered primarily a private matter, have family issues been a legitimate focus of policy making during the decade? Fourth, what family policy issues of the 1990s are likely to be debated in the new millennium? Fifth, has research been used to inform the design and implementation of family policies? Finally, what developments during the decade in theory, methods, and dissemination hold potential for advancing the field? Reviewing 10 years of research in a field that spans as many disciplines as family policy does is clearly an impossible task, so this review is necessarily selective. Specifically, I focused on child, adolescent, communitarian, family, psychology, and sociology journals and paid less attention to ethics, family law, family history, or political science journals. Moreover, foundations, government agencies, public interest groups, and think tanks issue a huge number of policy reports, and I have drawn from some of these, but clearly not all. HAS THE FIELD REACHED CONSENSUS ON DEFINITIONS? Defining family policy has proven so difficult that it has been likened to "swimming in molasses or nailing Jell-O to a tree" (Blankenhorn, 1990, p. 5). This issue, raised in the 1990 decade review (Aldous & Dumon, 1990), is still not resolved. Scholars have been unable to agree on definitions but have agreed that an essential first task in moving the field forward, in terms of research or action, is to reach some consensus on what family policy means (e.g., see Moen & Jull, 1995; Wisensale, in press). …