Republicans and Democrats could hardly have more starkly different ideas for family policy. Take care and education: the Republicans’ Project 2025 would zero out Head Start, costing over 750,000 low-income children and families their childcare and wraparound support, and move toward a deeply privatized version of public education modeled after the now-cautionary tale in Arizona. Meanwhile, presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has suggested that she wants to finish implementing the Biden administration’s care and education policies, which include enormous infusions of funds to build out an affordable childcare system and shore up public schools.

Yet in a deeper sense, both parties are missing the point. Public policy on its own does not resonate with individuals’ sense of identity or place in society. There is little question that many Americans today are craving meaning but not finding it: trust in neighbors and the government is down, while loneliness and despair are sky-high. What is the good life to which we should aspire, what is the role of family in that vision, and how do the proposals on offer bring us closer to that promised land? Without that call to values, policies — even those that make a meaningfully positive difference in people’s lives — ring hollow.

Family policy questions must therefore be put forth in a larger context, but this happens too rarely. Take childcare. Republicans like Ron Johnson and Kristi Noem express doubt the government has any role to play in helping parents find and afford quality childcare. In contrast, Democrats frame their childcare proposals in narrow terms that focus mainly on licensed programs and almost exclusively on economic impacts; commerce secretary Gina Raimondo has gone so far as to assert that “anyone who thinks child care is social policy is deeply misguided and doesn’t know how to run a business.”

These positions are not the same, and we should resist bothsidesism. That said, neither of these positions has anything to say about childcare policy in terms of values of family freedom or community vibrancy. Good childcare options — whether from licensed programs, relative caregivers, or stay-at-home parents — are essential to ensuring that families can live where they want to live, invest in their communities, and even have the number of kids they desire. Childcare centers, like schools, act as social infrastructure where parents make new friends and gain valuable social networks. In other words, childcare is very much social policy, and government very much has a role to play — but if taken purely as a work support, that color fades.

Moreover, considering issues like childcare, paid leave, or the child tax credit (CTC) in isolation misses the chance to tell a bigger story. This is likely one reason why even passed policies like the expanded CTC, which literally put money in parents’ pockets every month during the pandemic, failed to generate much public outcry when it expired. Left-leaning activists and scholars Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, and Harry Hanbury have written an eye-opening account of that failure. They conclude in part that

progressive policymaking must take identity, emotion, and story much more seriously. We should care not only about the details of the policies we pass, but also about how we fight for them. Policies that deliver economic benefit without speaking to, reinforcing, and constructing a social identity are likely to have little political impact.

Such a story and identity must surmount proposals around childcare or public schools or any other specific family policy question. Families do not exist in a vacuum, nor do they experience needs and preferences in a vacuum. For instance, family policy and economic policy are deeply connected. The quality of one’s job, whether one has predictable or “just-in-time” scheduling, whether one can make ends meet without having to cobble together multiple gigs — all of these have indelible impacts on the ability of parents to spend time passing on stories and values to their children, to say nothing of the stability of marriages or other relationships. There is a story here with heroes and villains: the hard-working parents versus the greedy oligarchs pulling constraints off a ravenous free market, forcing families into exhaustion, into competing through scarcity not for items like cars but for someone to partner in the healthy development of their child.

Democrats, for what it’s worth, used to talk this way. The political philosopher Michael Sandel recently noted in a New York Times op-ed that, when it came to the New Deal,

Franklin Roosevelt understood the need to highlight the big picture. He persuaded the public that the agencies he created and policies he enacted offered the American people a way to check the corporate power that threatened to deprive them of a meaningful say in how they were governed.

None of that suggests leaving specifics out entirely — the New Deal was, ultimately, a series of concrete, detailed policies and laws — but rather nesting the specifics beneath a compelling vision.

Importantly, this deeper story of how American family life should look and feel does not have to be so partisan — and can even offer a partial antidote to the politics of grievance and distrust that plague so much of the national discourse. For example, the conservative Institute for Family Studies has published an article about how to adapt cities to be more family-friendly; I have been partnering with a conservative thinker on research around better incorporating stay-at-home parents in childcare policy. Starting with values and vision, and debating on those terms where there is inevitably disagreement, is the only way to turn the boat around.

American families deserve better than a mere litany of programs, and they certainly deserve better than an attempt to blow up the meager safety net that exists. They deserve a country that helps all families thrive.