What Is a "Family"? Conflicting Messages from Our Public Programs

Families are changing, and law is slowly adjusting in response. Some public programs, like food stamps and public housing, acknowledge that families now come in an enormous variety of forms and formally offer aid to all who qualify on the basis of need. But other public schemes, like Social Security and tax law, are caught in something of a time warp. Their structure continues strongly to favor the "ideal" family of the 1950s in which the husband earns the money and the wife stays at home caring for their children. Welfare and immigration law fall somewhere in between these extremes, although both aspire to promote traditional family arrangements. This article examines the uneven willingness of this range of public programs to accept today's more diverse family types, with special emphasis on two-earner couples and unmarried cohabitants, both gay and straight. In the end, a disheartening conclusion is that while programs aimed at the poor are more tolerant of family variety, they also have become more miserly at a time when the old-fashioned programs aimed at the financially better off have become more generous. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]