Link without paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/heritage-paper-on-families-calls-for-marriage-bootcamp-more-babies/ar-AA1TOjQX
A conservative think tank tied to the architects of Project 2025 is rolling out a sweeping set of policy proposals aimed at reshaping American families and promoting marriage and childbearing between heterosexual couples, according to a report obtained by The Washington Post.
A report from the Heritage Foundation, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family,” urges President Donald Trump and lawmakers “to save and restore the American family” through massive tax credits for families with more children while capping alimony payments, enacting strict work requirements on social benefit programs, discouraging online dating, creating marriage “bootcamp” classes and more.
The report suggests public-private partnerships to honor and provide monetary awards for every decade a couple remains married. It calls for a 16-year-old age limit on social media and certain AI chatbots, and further age restrictions on access to pornography, and it argues that “climate change alarmism” demoralizes young people and dissuades them from having children.
Heritage’s full plan, which builds on an executive summary obtained by The Post in September, represents a sharp pivot for the organization away from its tradition of promoting small government and free-market conservatism toward an ideology that embraces government intervention in affairs as private as procreation.
“We surveyed domestic experts, digested the literature, and travelled to multiple countries to learn everything we could about what is holding the industrialized world back,” Roger Severino, Heritage’s vice president of economic and domestic policy and one of the report’s lead authors, wrote in response to written questions from The Post. “And it always came back to having healthy families, which depends on stable, fruitful marriage.”
In its paper, though, Heritage casts the declining birth rate as a larger problem for the country that points to a more existential loss of national character, what the group calls “a profound cultural malaise in which a growing share of adults feel that they should not or cannot, and therefore do not, form families.”
“This is not just a harbinger of budget crunches for government entitlements,” the report states. “It is a mark of a culture that has lost hope for the future.”
Some of the paper’s conclusions drew criticisms from across the ideological spectrum.
“We have this new program that has misdiagnosed the causes of declining marriage rates and fertility rates in the United States and then proposes massive new spending and an expansion of middle- and upper-middle-class entitlements to rectify the problem,” said Griffith, who was a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation from 2018 to 2024.
Severino said the paper was “consistent with Heritage’s long standing principles” with recommendations to reduce the size and scope of government and that the “innovative solutions” in the report would “take the government off the sidelines” and “recognize the unique benefits that working families are providing to our nation.”
Numerous ideas in the report appear to clash with constitutional protections around free speech or Supreme Court precedents on a right to privacy. Others test boundaries between federal and state power.
Many of the recommendations align with the growing “pronatalist” movement among conservatives concerned with falling U.S. birth rates.
Supporters say they want to create more family-friendly policies broadly and produce more children to avert societal collapse. But critics say the movement reflects an overreach that seeks to restrict reproductive freedom and the autonomy of women, reinforcing traditional gender roles and dismissing the economic challenges and social realities associated with childbearing.
“The federal government generally doesn’t control family law, and so to the extent the idea is we’re going to use the federal government to ‘restore the American family’? That’s a very bold claim,” said Joanna Grossman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law.
Heritage has been wrapped in controversy for months after the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, defended former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who routinely espouses antisemitic views.
Some of the proposals in the family report are part of the upheaval that’s shaken Heritage, an august institution with offices on both sides of the U.S. Capitol. Policy experts clashed over ideas that some staffers felt eschewed traditional conservatism or ventured so far into new territory that they made others uncomfortable, according to three people familiar with the paper. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
Heritage executives have cautioned employees against communicating with journalists and have said that leakers will be disciplined, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by The Post.
The document calls for a new tax break to incentivize larger families, pitching a credit worth more than $4,000 for married joint filers with children and widowed parents as long as they meet work requirements. The credit would increase by 25 percent for a “large family bonus” for parents with at least three children. The credit would grow by another $2,000 for each eligible child younger than 5 years old to encourage a parent to stay home and to provide child care.
The Department of Health and Human Services could offer couples “marriage bootcamp” sessions that include training on parenting skills and conflict management.
“In sum, government policies should encourage and protect the formation of families, not mere fertility,” the paper states. “The country should not seek a mere boost in the number of children born or in the monetary support that parents receive. 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.”
A previous draft obtained by The Post, dated in October, also included an appendix of ideas that Heritage did not endorse but said were offered “in the spirit of furthering debate and innovative thinking on family policy.”
The appendix was not included in the final version of the paper. Severino said “it should surprise no one” that some of the items were dropped as Heritage authors “hash[ed] out ideas,” and that “not everything makes the final cut.”
Some of the excluded ideas included studying “child-proxy voting,” where parents could cast an extra half-vote on behalf of each of their children; dramatically increasing the cost of divorce proceedings while making marriage licenses free; legally punishing adultery and “homewrecker[s]”; banning pornography; and making Election Day a half-day or holiday to promote family-based civic activity. Many of the recommendations were directed at both federal and local officials.
“What they’re really getting at,” Grossman said, “is they want to change the way people think and behave.”
argues that “climate change alarmism” demoralizes young people and dissuades them from having children.
Heritage casts the declining birth rate as a larger problem for the country that points to a more existential loss of national character, what the group calls “a profound cultural malaise in which a growing share of adults feel that they should not or cannot, and therefore do not, form families.”
Motherfuckers, please allow me to explain something to you as a cis white Christian woman who has been “dissuaded” from having more children:
“Climate change alarmism” is not to blame for fewer people buying homes and starting a family (sidenote: although, to be clear you are also almost entirely to blame for climate change thanks to your policies inserting the oil industry and other corporations directly into U.S. government. So if you give yourself credit where credit is due, maybe we can call this a half truth).
Over half a century of brilliant policies created by the Heritage Foundation (established in the early 70s as a direct fucking response to fears on the right following the civil rights movement) are to blame for absolutely destroying standard of living in the United States. Since re-invading the White House in 2025, you have somehow taken a broken system which never fully recovered from the assault of your first “intervention” that began on day 1 of Reagan’s administration over 40 fucking years ago, and made it so much fucking worse in just one year!
I have a reeeeaaalllllyyy easy solution for this:
Make it possible to raise a child comfortably on a single income that doesn’t require anything longer than a 32 hour work week.
Why would my wife and I have a child when we:
- both work
- have to have two incomes to afford our house
- have about 4-5 hours a day for anything that isn’t work and traveling to and from work
100% implementing something like this would be so much more helpful. Or, even if you don’t want people to work less hours or let people to work fully remote, just allowing people to have a more flexible or hybrid schedule can make such a huge fucking difference.
have about 4-5 hours a day for anything that isn’t work and traveling to and from work
This is one of the shittiest parts of standardized American life. Not only does it kill morale and productivity, but especially when kids are younger, it forces you to lose out on so much important quality time together.
•If your kid has to be up by 7am to eat breakfast, get ready and be at school by 8am, that leaves you 1 hour of time together. And that 1 hour feels chaotic and stressful as fuck like you’re working the kitchen in the fucking Bear
•The recommended hours of sleep kids are supposed to get between the ages of three to five is 10-12 hours, and 9-12 hours for ages six to twelve. So if your goal is to start getting your kid ready for bed around 7pm, but you don’t even get home until after 6pm, that leaves you with almost no time together 5 days a week. That’s usually the best case scenario if you have a “normal” M-F job and don’t have a second job at night or have to work on the weekends.
It fucking sucks.
I remember talking to somebody about this after the pandemic when things were beginning to open back up. We were talking about feeling kinda guilty in some ways for just enjoying the break from routine, society just coming to a screeching halt, and the world feeling like it might end any day. She said something along the lines of “You know, you only get a few years together before your kid eventually hates you, then by the time they start to come out of that phase, it’s time for them to leave.”
It really stuck with me, because it was such an honest and harsh truth. The work week is one of those dumb societal expectations that no longer really makes sense, but we’re just expected to conform and keep doing it because we’ve been doing it this way for so long/we should be grateful because it used to be so much worse before we started doing it this way.
Heritage Foundation is a terrorist organization
legally punishing adultery and “homewrecker[s]”
that would have the most hilarious results coupled with MAGAs other obsession of not allowing women to no-fault divorce their husbands. Heck let’s make it retroactive so all divorces are nullified and first marriages are the only ones recognized.
And of course depending on your wealth and color YMMV
$2000 tax credit per child to encourage a parent to stay at home…am crazy or do they really not know how expensive it is to live?
They really have no clue. I think it’s at least partially a consequence of the bizarre American tradition where wealthy people are given additional benefits for no reason other than the hope they’ll be more likely to spend more money over the long run. Like when people are offered a discount, reimbursement, or fees waived entirely for traveling or attending an event just because they also own a business or nonprofit.
I get that nobody wants to spend money if they don’t have to, but I get that because most people have a finite amount of money available and actually have to make ends meet each month. So it’s a bit irritating when you have all these weird random day to day transactions where financial aid seems to be offered only to the people who need it the least.
I can’t really blame people for taking it when it’s offered, but it definitely seems to add to this inability to comprehend the reality of finances for most people. Not to mention the very smug idea that when they take advantage of these discounts, they view it as no different than plebs clipping coupons. That then leads to this belief that being so money savvy is what makes them deserving of the luxuries they allow themselves vs. the idea that if you see a poor person eating anything other than gruel and wearing an off brand potato sack, that single luxury you witnessed them indulging in, is not something they worked to deserve. It’s just frivolous spending and an example of the reason poor people always stay poor.
Once they’re already at that level of removed from the reality of just living day to day for most people, it’s probably not that hard to just kind of brush aside the fact that somebody making the same amount of money you were making 30-50 years ago, is going to have much higher cost of living.
When somebody points out $2k/child you just shuffle back step to, well if one parent is staying home, they should be taking all that extra free time to be clipping more coupons. And if that’s not enough, maybe they can grow their own vegetables in a garden. If that’s not enough, maybe take up pickling and canning as a fun family hobby to help you all survive the winter.
And if that’s not enough maybe the kids can find jobs and labor after school. It might be good for them, and teach them the value of a dollar. If that’s not enough maybe they can labor during the day too. Do they really even need to go to school at all, when we’re banking on them joining the army the day they turn 18? They owe it to us for the $36,000 we invested in each of them.
This sounds real Nazi adjacent. Not far from Russia’s more conservative swing, either.
…I will acknowledge this is a issue. Since we’re apparently going to blow up immigration (which skews young), the US now has real “aging population” problem like South Korea and Japan are facing, and that are coming for China and Russia soon.
In other words, it’s not all made up.
I’m speaking as a guy, so my perspective isn’t the most relevant, but… to me, everything in that document sounds like a great way to turn off women that aren’t already steeped in this nuclear family culture anyway. Like, I have a couple in the family that’s literally the exact target of this campaign, and they won’t like that one bit.
I’m speaking as a guy, so my perspective isn’t the most relevant
It’s absolutely relevant when it comes to speaking out against this bullshit. They came to power because they relied on people believing them when they claimed to hold the “moral majority” in a cultural war boiled down to in-grouping and “us vs. them.” The way we will defeat them is by remembering who we really are and who they really are.
As of now, they hold the power of military, they hold the majority of the money, but there has never been anything moral about them, and they have never held the majority. They’re just really good at being manipulative little shit stains, liars, cheaters, and con artists.
This is and should be a great way to turn off literally anyone who realizes who these people really are, who they always have been, and what they really mean when they talk about “making America great”
If you’re interested in how modern day Russia came to be modern day Russia (far right “Christian” Nationalism and a “free market” that entirely consists of state protected monopolies owned by Oligarchs) you might be interested in what members of the Heritage Foundation were doing in Moscow right around the time the Soviet Union collapsed: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/22863824
Tldr: The phrase “it’s a feature, not a bug” has been the disgusting truth about everything these people have been involved in since day 1.
YThe headline parts actually sound good, before they take a left turn down crazy lane
- require some training before marriage. We did that and i it was helpful.
- Tax break for working parents - it’s a good start, definitely needed
- climate change alarm - people here agree but this is where they go off to la la land. This is where we need to double down on doing something about it. Ignoring the problem or actively making it worse is where the alarm is coming from
Immigration has been our salvation here and is the only quick answer: I’m sure they’ll encourage more, right? So the obvious answer is to ensure a better education with less debt - a new stronger department of education and free college ay public schools would help. Doing something about housing would help. Reducing income inequity would help - tax the rich. And health care …. Are they going for single payer? Perhaps they’ll focus on peace and the rule of law, both inside and outside the country?
married joint filers
Not with these student loans out here, bruh. But I don’t think the student loan crowd are your main supporters.
Sounds like things that won’t work.
Everybody knows the best chance at making a relationship work when you’re having problems is
A. Involving people who don’t know either of you to tell you what you should be doing to make it work, based on what sounds like (bootcamp) a standardized and identical plan for all couples that attend
B. Throwing a baby into the mix. Not because either of you want to or because you’re even in a position to afford to (or even prepared for everything else unrelated to finances that’s required to raise a child), but once again because strangers who know neither of you, are telling you that it’s what you need to do.
I can see why they pay themselves the big bucks.
Heritage Foundation fucks are free to have as many children as they want. Well, those who aren’t hung for treason.
Fuck the Nazi scum
Groups like the Heritage Foundation are part of the reason people don’t want to have kids in this massively class divided, hostile culture. Maybe they should put some effort into something as basic as making healthcare affordable.
Seems to be queer exclusive, ignorant of climate change, ignorant of the economic reasons people aren’t having children, and (knowing the villainous Heritage Foundation) probably based strictly in prescribed gender roles.
Aside from all that, this is in theory a really good idea. Get people prepared for marriage and children, probably improving their own lives and the life of their kids. If this is done in a way that is cognizant of different cultures and queer families, it could be great. Maybe pay people a token amount to be there, too, just as a motivator.
