Making It Affordable to Raise a Family
Talk to young couples and you'll hear the same thing over and over: they'd love to have kids, or have more kids, but they just can't see how to afford it. That's not a values problem—it's a math problem. The cost of starting and raising a family has climbed far faster than paychecks, and it's quietly reshaping the country. A party that claims to be pro-family has to actually make family affordable.
This is where a lot of our other fights come together: housing, health care, wages. But the costs specific to raising children deserve their own honest look.
Child care is the one that stops people cold. The national average now runs about $13,000 a year—and infant care costs more than in-state public college tuition in 38 states. For a two-parent household that's roughly a tenth of income; for a single parent it can swallow a third of everything they earn. Parents routinely discover that a second paycheck barely clears the cost of the care that makes it possible.
And that's before the rest: the hospital bill for having the baby in the first place, health insurance for another dependent, a bigger apartment or house you already couldn't afford, and everything else that comes with a growing family. Each cost is real; stacked together, they add up to a wall.
This isn't only a family-budget story—it's a national one. The American birth rate has fallen to about 1.6 children per woman, well under the 2.1 needed to replace the population. A big share of that gap isn't people who don't want children; it's people who've concluded they can't afford the ones they want. A country that prices its own young people out of parenthood is, slowly and quietly, choosing decline—fewer workers, a heavier load on Social Security and Medicare, and a shrinking base holding it all up. Making family affordable is how a nation invests in its own future.
You don't need a sprawling new bureaucracy to do this. You need to put money and choices back in parents' hands and stop making the basics artificially expensive:
A serious, predictable Child Tax Credit. The most efficient pro-family policy is direct: a meaningful, reliable per-child credit that goes to parents to spend as their family needs—not to an agency. It's about as close to a bipartisan idea as exists, and it trusts families over government.
Make child care cheaper by making more of it legal. A lot of what drives child-care costs is a supply shortage worsened by rules that go well beyond safety. Ease the overly restrictive licensing and staffing mandates that shut down home-based, faith-based, and neighborhood providers, and support employers who want to offer care. More providers means real competition on price.
Paid family leave, done sensibly. No new parent should have to choose between a paycheck and a newborn—but the answer isn't an unfunded mandate that lands hardest on small employers. The model that actually works is social insurance: a small shared payroll contribution (well under 1% of wages) pooled into a state fund that pays the benefit directly to the worker—so no single business ever foots the bill for an employee's leave. It's already running in Washington and Colorado, both of which exempt small businesses from the employer share (employers under 50 in Washington, under 10 in Colorado) and even offer small-employer grants to help cover a fill-in. And because the benefit follows the worker rather than the job, it's fully portable from one employer to the next.
Bring down the cost of having the baby. Price transparency and real competition in maternity care (part of our broader health-care and drug-pricing push) can take a bite out of one of the largest one-time costs a young family faces.
And fix housing. You can't raise kids in a home you can't afford. Our housing plan is family policy too.
To be clear: this isn't about pushing anyone into having children, and it isn't the government's business how big your family is. It's about tearing down the financial wall standing in front of the people who do want kids and are being told, by the price tag, that they can't. Limited government doesn't mean a government that shrugs while raising a family becomes a luxury good. It means getting out of the way where it's inflating costs, and giving families the breathing room to make their own choices.