The Rhetoric of “Family Values”

The discourse of “family values” has long functioned as an ideological substitute for collective care. Critical theorists like Nancy Fraser expand this analysis by situating “family values” within neoliberal political economy. For Fraser, the emphasis on families as the natural site of care and moral responsibility conceals the state’s retreat from welfare and social provision. Dependency is privatized: instead of healthcare, childcare, or housing support, citizens are told to rely on family networks that are themselves destabilized by economic precarity. In this sense, “family values” becomes a discursive shield for the systematic offloading of social risk onto households.

Even when families are valorized, the evidence shows that inequality fractures them. In Our Kids, Robert Putnam documents how affluent families can buffer their children against precarity through enrichment, stability, and social capital, while poor families experience heightened instability and diminished opportunities. Inequality thus widens the gulf in what families can actually provide, undermining the very values invoked rhetorically.

Here the link to Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism becomes visible. “Family values” discourse reinforces the sense that no alternatives exist: if the family is both the only safety net and the central site of social failure, then individuals are doubly trapped. They are abandoned by public systems while being told that their suffering is the fault of their own household. The rhetoric thus creates the very depressive landscape Fisher describes: a privatized world where responsibility for survival is displaced onto fragile and unequal domestic units, and the horizon of collective care is made unthinkable.

As bell hooks reminds us, real family values would mean cultivating love, care, and justice within households, rather than enforcing rigid hierarchies under conditions of abandonment. What passes for “family values” in political discourse is therefore not a defense of care but its opposite: an alibi for the erosion of the social and economic conditions that make genuine care possible.

---

Family, Inequality, and the Numbers Behind the Rhetoric

The discourse of “family values” often ignores the structural data that reveals just how precarious family life has become under conditions of inequality and austerity. A few figures illustrate the gap between rhetoric and reality:

• Childcare Costs vs. Wages
  In the United States, the average cost of childcare is $11,582 per year per child (Child Care Aware of America, 2022). In many states, this exceeds the cost of public college tuition. For a single parent earning the median wage, childcare can consume more than 30% of income, far above the federal definition of affordability (7%).

• Single-Parent Households
  About 23% of U.S. children live with a single parent—the highest rate in the world (Pew Research Center, 2019). These households face far greater risks of poverty: the child poverty rate among single-mother families is nearly 31%, compared to 7% for married-couple families (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021).

• Wage Stagnation vs. Household Costs
  Since the 1970s, productivity in the U.S. has increased by over 60%, but real wages for typical workers have risen by only 17% (Economic Policy Institute, 2020). Meanwhile, housing, healthcare, and childcare costs have skyrocketed, leaving families squeezed regardless of “values.”

• Family Instability and Inequality
  Robert Putnam’s Our Kids documents a widening “opportunity gap”:

  • Children from high-income families are now four times more likely to graduate from college than those from low-income families.

  • The proportion of children living with continuously married parents has dropped sharply for the working class (from 95% in the 1960s to around 30% today), while remaining relatively stable among the affluent.

• Parental Time and Stress
  Despite “family values” rhetoric, American parents work among the longest hours in the OECD. U.S. full-time workers average 1,791 hours per year (OECD, 2021), compared to 1,349 in Germany. Long hours reduce parental time at home and increase stress, which correlates with poorer outcomes for children.

Taken together, these figures demonstrate that the supposed crisis of the family is not cultural decline but structural abandonment. Families are tasked with providing stability and opportunity while facing economic pressures that make this impossible. Far from supporting “family values,” state policy and market dynamics erode them, leaving households to absorb the costs of inequality.