A new report from the Heritage Foundation contends that the American family is in deep crisis and urges that rebuilding marriage and family formation become a central priority of federal policymaking.
According to Fox News, the conservative think tank is pressing for sweeping reforms to counter falling birth and marriage rates, including the creation of a $2,500 investment account for every newborn and a suite of other pro-family measures. The report insists that government policies "should encourage and protect the formation of families, not mere fertility."
The country should not seek a mere boost in the number of children born or in the monetary support that parents receive, the report says. "Yes, the country needs more children. But it matters how and to whom children are born. Society depends on men and women who want to form families, that is, who freely want to marry, and then freely bear and nurture children."
The authors argue that the current policy regime, shaped by decades of cultural liberalization and expansive government programs, has undermined the very institutions that once sustained civil society.
The think tank links historically low fertility and marriage rates, along with the rising share of children raised outside married-parent homes, to a broader pattern of social and economic dysfunction. In its view, the weakening of the family is not an isolated trend but a root cause of many of the nations most pressing problems, from poverty and crime to educational failure and civic fragmentation.
The report maintains that the traditional family structure remains indispensable, describing the family as "the foundation of civilization" and defining marriage between one man and one woman as the ideal environment for raising children. This framework reflects a conservative conviction that stable, married, two-parent households are the surest path to transmitting values, fostering responsibility, and limiting the need for an ever-expanding welfare state.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts warned that the United States is approaching a tipping point on family breakdown from which it may not recover. "The family is the foundation of every healthy society, and, tragically, the American family is on the brink," Roberts said in a statement. "We are dangerously close to being unable to reverse the decline. Our country will not survive if families continue to crumble at this rate."
Roberts stressed that the stakes reach far beyond private life and touch the survival of the American experiment itself. "If we want to secure the Golden Age of America, we must have bold solutions like those in this report that lay the foundation for stronger families," he said. "Strong families build strong communities, churches, schools, and businesses. Without them, freedom cannot last."
The report is sharply critical of the modern welfare state and related government programs, arguing that they frequently "punish marriage and family formation" by creating financial incentives that make marriage less attractive than cohabitation or single parenthood. It portrays the decline of the family not as an unavoidable byproduct of modernization, but as the predictable outcome of misguided policy choices and calls for a "culture-wide Manhattan Project" to restore pro-family norms.
To reverse these trends, the authors urge the elimination of so-called marriage penalties in welfare and tax programs and the requirement that federal agencies systematically review their rules for their impact on marriage and family. They further call for policies at every level of government that explicitly prioritize and strengthen traditional families, rather than treating all household arrangements as interchangeable.
On the economic front, the report proposes a series of financial incentives designed to help families build long-term stability, beginning with baby investment accounts seeded with $2,500 at birth. Other measures include expanded adoption and child tax credits, which the authors say would both ease the financial burden of raising children and signal that the state values family formation over dependency.
The Heritage blueprint also ventures into the cultural and technological arenas, advocating efforts to discourage online dating and to create marriage bootcamp classes aimed at preparing couples for durable, lifelong commitments. "Online has become the most common way couples meet in America today," the report says. "While there are plenty of dating app success stories, studies show that couples who meet online and subsequently marry are six times more likely to get divorced within the first three years of marriage than are those who meet through in-person methods. Beyond higher divorce rates, couples who meet online are also less likely to get married in the first place."
The report further calls for setting a minimum age of 16 for access to social media platforms and certain A.I. chatbots, contending that digital culture has helped erode the habits and expectations that once led young Americans toward marriage and childbearing. By tying family renewal to both policy reform and cultural change, the Heritage Foundation is effectively challenging lawmakers to choose between a future anchored in strong, traditional families and one in which government attempts to substitute for the institutions it helped to weaken.
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