The welfare state has done more than provide assistance. It has helped change what Americans expect from marriage, parenthood, and family itself.
What happened to the idea that family comes first?
There was a time when raising children, supporting a spouse, and caring for aging parents were understood as basic duties. A father worked to provide for his family. A mother sacrificed to raise her children. Adult children understood that when their parents grew old, their turn to provide care would come. Families were not always perfect and happy, but there was a clear expectation that family members were responsible for one another. Today, that expectation has weakened.
People increasingly organize their lives around personal fulfillment, careers, and convenience. Government programs provide income, medical care, and other necessities that families once had to provide more directly. When a relative needs help, there is often an institution ready to take responsibility. We call this progress. But progress toward what?
The welfare state has helped create a society in which people can meet their needs without depending as much on their families. In doing so, it has helped change the meaning of family itself. When the obligation to sacrifice for one another disappears, family becomes less a shared responsibility and more a personal relationship that people maintain when it suits them.
A family is not simply a group of people who love one another. It is a group of people who owe one another something. Parents owe their children food, shelter, protection, guidance, and years of sacrifice. Children owe their parents gratitude and, when circumstances demand it, care in their old age. Spouses owe one another loyalty and a willingness to put the marriage ahead of selfish desires. Siblings should be willing to help each other through hardship. These duties are not always convenient. That is precisely why they matter.
It is easy to love your mother when she needs nothing from you, but it is harder when she is sick, cannot live alone, and needs you to rearrange your life. It is easy to love your children when they are happy and successful, but it is harder when raising them means years of financial pressure and personal sacrifice. But these are not interruptions to family life. They are family life.
When a daughter leaves her aging mother entirely to professional caregivers despite being capable of helping, the mother may receive competent medical assistance. Yet something important has been lost. She may still want her daughter beside her, not simply someone paid to perform a service. The daughter, meanwhile, loses the opportunity to repay some of the care she received as a child.
The government can provide a service. It cannot provide the relationship. A family that never expects sacrifice from its members will eventually struggle to explain why those members should feel obligated to one another at all.
The modern welfare state did not invent individualism, but it has helped reinforce it. When the government assumes more responsibility for people’s basic needs, individuals have less practical reason to depend on relatives. Over time, this can change not only what people do, but what they believe they owe one another.
Consider the history of American welfare policy. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, established under the Social Security Act of 1935, provided assistance to families with children that lacked support from a parent. The program evolved over subsequent decades. Its rules and incentives became part of a long national debate about marriage, work, and single parenthood.
Before the 1996 welfare reforms, federal rules generally restricted funding for cash assistance to families without two able-bodied parents. Critics argued that these rules could discourage marriage or make it financially disadvantageous for two parents to live together. Congress eventually replaced the program with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which gave states greater flexibility and explicitly included promoting marriage and two-parent families among its goals.
The history is complicated, and welfare policy alone did not cause the decline of marriage. But the underlying concern is real. Government policy can shape family decisions, sometimes in ways its designers never intended.
The deeper cultural effect is just as important. When public programs make it possible to raise children without a spouse’s financial support, or to meet an elderly parent’s needs without direct family involvement, they can weaken the expectation that relatives must step forward. What once required a family to organize itself around a responsibility can become something handled through public benefits and outside services.
We have increasingly treated independence from family as a sign of freedom. But independence is not always a virtue. There is a difference between escaping a destructive relationship and deciding that our own plans matter more than the people who depend on us.
There is evidence that public assistance can replace some support previously provided by relatives. Economists call this crowding out. A study of public pensions in South Africa found that each additional rand in public pension income was associated with a reduction of approximately 25 to 30 cents in private financial transfers from children living elsewhere.
The point is not that every government benefit damages every family. It is that public assistance can change how much family members contribute to one another. Yet we rarely consider the value of the responsibility being removed. We count the money provided and the hours of care saved. We do not count the gratitude that may never develop, the sacrifices that are no longer made, or the family bonds that may weaken when relatives become less necessary to one another.
A family that works together to buy a home, pay for an education, or care for a sick parent has something to take pride in. The achievement belongs to everyone who worked hard to make it possible. Parents remember the long hours they worked. Children grow up knowing what their parents gave up for them. Later, those children may feel a genuine obligation to help their own parents. That is how family traditions are built. One generation sacrifices for the next, and the next learns to do the same.
When responsibility is increasingly transferred to institutions, these contributions can become less visible. Children may take their education and material comforts for granted without understanding what it took to provide them. Adults may enjoy the benefits of a family while feeling little obligation to maintain it. We should not be surprised when gratitude weakens in a society that makes sacrifice less visible and responsibility less necessary.
In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, sociologist Philip Rieff examined the movement away from traditional moral obligations toward a culture increasingly concerned with individual fulfillment and psychological well-being. His argument offers a useful way to understand the modern family. If the purpose of life is primarily personal satisfaction, then duties that require sacrifice become obstacles. Why should a parent give up opportunities for a child? Why should an adult son spend his time caring for his father? Why should marriage require loyalty when leaving is an option? The answer should be simple: some obligations are greater than our immediate preferences.
A society cannot survive on individual freedom alone. It needs people who understand that they have duties to others, even when those duties are difficult. The family is where many of us first learn this lesson. We learn that we are not the center of the world, that other people depend on us, and that love means more than saying the right words.
When government policy and cultural attitudes encourage us to shift every burden onto someone else, we risk forgetting that lesson. We become consumers of services rather than members of a community bound by mutual obligation. This does not mean we should abandon those who need assistance. It means assistance should not become an excuse for families to abandon their own responsibilities.
The answer is not to pretend that every family is healthy or that government has no role in helping people. There are circumstances in which public assistance is necessary. But we must stop treating the removal of responsibility as an unquestioned good.
Your parents did not simply provide a service when they raised you. They gave years of their lives to you. They worked, worried, sacrificed, and put your needs ahead of their own. When they grow old, your responsibility does not disappear because the government can help pay for their care. The same is true of children, spouses, and siblings. Family means that we accept obligations that extend beyond our own comfort. It means that we show up when it is difficult, give when it costs us something, and recognize that we belong to something larger than ourselves.
The welfare state has helped make independence from family more practical. An individualistic culture has helped make it more desirable. Together, they have helped create a society that increasingly treats the duties once central to family life as optional. We should ask ourselves what we are gaining and what we are losing.
A family is not held together by blood alone. It is held together by loyalty, sacrifice, gratitude, and responsibility. Remove those things, and all that remains is a collection of people who happen to share a name. The purpose of family is not simply to make life easier. It is to teach us that we are responsible for one another. When we forget that responsibility, we do not merely weaken the family; we forget what it is.
Christian Gleba is an Accounting and Finance double major at Grove City College with minors in Financial Planning and Political Science. On campus, he serves as a tour guide and is the Vice President of CCI, the college’s finance and investing club. Outside of his academic work, Christian works as a ride mechanic at Kennywood. His interests include corporate finance, financial planning, and public accounting, and he plans to pursue a career as a Certified Public Accountant after graduation. In his free time, Christian enjoys aquarium keeping, fishing, and golf.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer alone and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Grove City College, the Institute for Faith and Freedom, or their affiliates.
Cover Image: Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash (Cropped)
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