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Family & Community

The Institutions Closest to Home

Families, schools, congregations, fraternal lodges, volunteer fire companies and civic clubs: the institutions Americans build for themselves. This collection covers how law and policy have treated them and where Americans still disagree.

Families, congregations and voluntary associations are the first schools of citizenship. Conservatives have long argued that these institutions — not the state — do the primary work of raising children, caring for neighbors and forming character, and that public policy should strengthen them rather than replace them. The conviction runs from Edmund Burke’s “little platoon” and Alexis de Tocqueville’s portrait of American associations to modern debates over child tax credits, school choice and parental rights.

This section traces how federal policy toward families has changed, how the courts have defined the rights of parents, and how Americans have organized to serve their communities. Where Americans disagree — about the federal role, about schools, about marriage — the competing views are presented in terms their own proponents would recognize.

Chapters in every stateFaith & religious libertyFederalism

Family Policy in American History

From the joint tax return to the child tax credit, and from welfare reform to the marriage debates.

For most of American history, family law — marriage, divorce, custody and adoption — has been the business of the states, and federal family policy has worked mainly through the tax code and aid to the poor. In 1948 a Republican Congress, overriding President Truman’s veto, let married couples split their income on joint tax returns, a change that especially benefited single-earner families.

In the 1990s a Republican Congress, elected on the 1994 Contract with America, and a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, enacted several of the era’s signature family measures: the adoption tax credit (1996), welfare reform (1996) and the child tax credit (1997). Later laws expanded the child credit in 2017 and made a larger credit permanent in 2025.

Marriage law changed rapidly. The Defense of Marriage Act (1996) defined marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman; the Supreme Court struck down that definition in 2013 and in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) held that states must license and recognize marriages between two people of the same sex. In 2022 Congress repealed the Defense of Marriage Act through the Respect for Marriage Act, which also protects religious organizations that decline to take part in solemnizing or celebrating a marriage.

  • April 2, 1948

    Joint Returns and Income Splitting

    The Revenue Act of 1948, enacted over President Truman’s veto, cut income-tax rates, raised the personal exemption from $500 to $600 and allowed married couples to split their combined income on a joint return — extending nationwide an advantage that couples in community-property states already enjoyed.

    U.S. Government Publishing Office

    Primary Source

  • September 27, 1994

    The Contract with America

    House Republican candidates pledged votes on a Family Reinforcement Act — child-support enforcement, adoption tax incentives, stronger parental rights in education and an elderly dependent-care credit — and an American Dream Restoration Act offering a $500-per-child tax credit and relief from the marriage penalty in the tax code.

    The American Presidency Project

    Official GOP Position1994 Contract with America

  • August 20, 1996

    The Adoption Tax Credit

    The Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996 created a tax credit of up to $5,000 — $6,000 for a child with special needs — for adoption expenses, and barred entities receiving federal funds from denying or delaying adoptive and foster placements on the basis of race, color or national origin. Later laws raised the credit and made it permanent, and in 2025 Congress made up to $5,000 of it refundable.

    U.S. Government Publishing Office

    Primary Source

  • August 22, 1996

    Welfare Reform

    The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grants to the states, added work requirements and a five-year limit on federally funded assistance, and strengthened child-support enforcement. Its first congressional finding declared that “Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” President Clinton signed it after vetoing two earlier Republican versions.

    U.S. Government Publishing Office

    Primary Source

  • August 5, 1997

    The Child Tax Credit

    The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, negotiated between the Republican Congress and President Clinton, created a credit of $400 per child for 1998 and $500 per child in later years — the amount House Republicans had promised in the Contract with America.

    U.S. Government Publishing Office

    Primary Source

  • 2017–2025

    The Child Tax Credit Since 2017

    The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017) doubled the credit to $2,000 per child, made up to $1,400 of it refundable and raised the income at which it begins to phase out to $400,000 for married couples, through 2025. A 2021 pandemic-relief law enlarged it for one year and paid half of it in advance monthly payments. The reconciliation law signed July 4, 2025, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, made the credit permanent at $2,200 per child, adjusted for inflation after 2025, and created “Trump accounts,” with a one-time $1,000 federal deposit for eligible citizen children born from 2025 through 2028.

    Source: Internal Revenue Service

    Primary Source

  • September 21, 1996

    The Defense of Marriage Act

    Passed by large bipartisan majorities and signed by President Clinton, DOMA defined marriage for all federal purposes as “a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife” and provided that no state had to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in another. In United States v. Windsor (2013) the Supreme Court struck down the federal definition, 5–4.

    U.S. Government Publishing Office

    Primary Source

  • 2015; 2022

    Obergefell v. Hodges and the Respect for Marriage Act

    In Obergefell the Court held 5–4 that the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to license and recognize same-sex marriages; the majority said religious believers may continue to advocate their convictions, while the four dissenting justices argued that the question belonged to voters and legislatures. The Respect for Marriage Act — passed 61–36 in the Senate, with 12 Republican votes, and 258–169 in the House, with 39 — repealed DOMA, required federal and interstate recognition of lawful marriages and protected nonprofit religious organizations that decline to provide services for the solemnization or celebration of a marriage.

    U.S. Government Publishing Office

    Primary Source

Parental Rights and Education

A century of Supreme Court decisions recognizes that parents, not the state, hold primary authority over their children’s upbringing.

The Supreme Court first recognized the constitutional rights of parents in the 1920s, striking down a Nebraska law that forbade teaching foreign languages to young children and an Oregon law requiring children to attend public schools. “The child is not the mere creature of the state,” the Court wrote in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) protected religious parents, and in Troxel v. Granville (2000) a plurality called parents’ interest in the care, custody and control of their children “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.”

Parental choice has grown alongside those rights. Homeschooling, legally uncertain in many states as late as the early 1980s, is now legal in all fifty, though regulation varies widely. Milwaukee launched the first modern private-school voucher program in 1990 with bipartisan support; Arizona created the first education savings accounts in 2011 and opened them to every student in 2022; and in 2025 Congress created a federal tax credit for donations to scholarship organizations in states that choose to participate.

The Supreme Court’s religion cases now reinforce parents’ choices: a state that subsidizes private education may not exclude religious schools (Carson v. Makin, 2022), and public schools may be required to let parents excuse their children from instruction that substantially interferes with their religious upbringing (Mahmoud v. Taylor, 2025). Curriculum, school gender-identity policies and parental notification remain among the most contested questions in American education.

  • 1923; 1925

    Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters

    In Meyer, the Court struck down a Nebraska law, passed amid anti-German sentiment after World War I, that barred teaching foreign languages to children before the eighth grade, holding that the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment includes parents’ right to control their children’s education. In Pierce, a unanimous Court struck down Oregon’s 1922 law requiring nearly all children to attend public schools, which would have closed Catholic and other private schools: “The child is not the mere creature of the state.”

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • 1972

    Wisconsin v. Yoder

    The Court held that Wisconsin could not require Amish parents to send their children to school past the eighth grade, recognizing the traditional interest of parents in the religious upbringing of their children and the threat that compulsory high-school attendance posed to the Amish way of life.

    Source: Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • 2000

    Troxel v. Granville

    A Washington law allowed “any person” to petition for visitation rights “at any time.” In a case brought by grandparents, the Court held 6–3 that applying it over a fit mother’s decision violated her due-process right to make decisions concerning the care, custody and control of her children.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • 2002

    Zelman v. Simmons-Harris

    The Court upheld, 5–4, a Cleveland program that gave scholarships, with priority for low-income families, to attend participating private schools, most of them religious, because the aid reached those schools only through the “true private choice” of parents.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • 1980s–present

    Homeschooling

    Through legislation and litigation in the 1980s and early 1990s, parents secured the right to teach their children at home in every state, under rules that range from simple notice to testing and portfolio review. Federal survey data show that the share of school-age children being homeschooled roughly doubled, from 1.7 percent in 1999 to 3.4 percent in 2012, before declining somewhat by 2019.

    National Center for Education Statistics

    Historical Record

  • 1990–2025

    School Choice Programs

    Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program, backed by Democratic state representative Polly Williams and Republican governor Tommy Thompson, began in 1990 as the nation’s first modern voucher program, and lawmakers extended it to religious schools in 1995. Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, created in 2011 for students with disabilities, became available to every Arizona student in 2022. The 2025 federal tax law created a credit of up to $1,700 for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, beginning in 2027 in states that opt in.

    Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

    Historical Record

  • 2025–2026

    Mahmoud v. Taylor and Mirabelli v. Bonta

    In Mahmoud the Court held 6–3 that Montgomery County, Maryland, parents of several faiths were entitled to advance notice and the chance to excuse their children from lessons using “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks. In March 2026, acting on an emergency application in Mirabelli v. Bonta, the Court allowed a district-court injunction to take effect for parents challenging California policies that barred schools from telling parents about a child’s gender transition at school without the child’s consent, finding the parents likely to succeed on free-exercise and due-process claims. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson would have denied the parents relief, and the ruling was an interim one pending appeal.

    Source: Supreme Court of the United States

    Primary Source

  • July 2024

    The 2024 Republican Platform on Education and Family

    The platform promised to restore parental rights in education, to pursue universal school choice in every state, to expand tax-advantaged education savings and treat homeschooling families equally, and to promote a culture that honors marriage, childhood and the central role of families.

    The American Presidency Project

    Official GOP Position2024 Republican Platform

Local Institutions

Congregations, lodges, clubs, fire companies and troops — the voluntary associations Tocqueville saw as a distinctive strength of American democracy.

Visiting the United States in 1831 and 1832, Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by how Americans solved common problems without waiting for government. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations,” he wrote in Democracy in America; where one would find the government at the head of a new undertaking in France, or a man of rank in England, “in the United States you will be sure to find an association.”

Congregations stood at the center of this associational life, and they gave rise to many other institutions: schools, hospitals, orphanages and mutual-aid societies. Fraternal orders such as the Freemasons, Prince Hall Masons, Odd Fellows and Knights of Columbus offered fellowship and insurance to members and charity to others; civic clubs such as Rotary (1905), Kiwanis (1915) and Lions (1917) organized local service; and youth organizations such as 4-H, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts taught skills and citizenship.

Scholars have described a decline in many of these associations since the mid-twentieth century. Conservatives from the sociologist Robert Nisbet, in The Quest for Community (1953), to Yuval Levin, in A Time to Build (2020), have argued that when families, churches and local groups weaken, individuals are left isolated before a distant state — a concern the political scientist Robert Putnam echoed in Bowling Alone (2000).

  • 1840

    Tocqueville on Associations

    In the second volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville observed that Americans formed associations “to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes,” and concluded that in democratic countries “the science of association is the mother of science.”

    Project Gutenberg

    Primary Source

  • 1790

    Burke’s “Little Platoon”

    In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke wrote that “to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections” — the idea that love of country is learned first through family, neighborhood and local attachments.

    Source: Project Gutenberg

    Primary Source

  • 1600s–present

    Houses of Worship

    Congregations have anchored American communities since the colonial era. Beyond worship, they run food pantries, schools, recovery programs and disaster-relief efforts, and religious bodies founded many of the nation’s hospitals, colleges and orphanages.

    Historical Record

  • 1730s–present

    Fraternal Orders

    Freemasonry spread through the colonies in the 1730s and counted George Washington and Benjamin Franklin among its members. Prince Hall, a free Black Bostonian, and fourteen other Black men were initiated as Masons in 1775, founding what became Prince Hall Freemasonry; the Odd Fellows took root in Baltimore in 1819; and Father Michael McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1882 to support Catholic families.

    Knights of Columbus

    Historical Record

  • 1736–present

    Volunteer Fire Companies

    Benjamin Franklin organized Philadelphia’s Union Fire Company in 1736, and volunteer companies spread to towns across the country. According to the National Fire Protection Association, about 82 percent of the nation’s roughly 29,450 fire departments in 2020 were all-volunteer or mostly volunteer, and volunteers made up about two-thirds of all firefighters — though their number had fallen to the lowest the association had recorded.

    National Fire Protection Association

    Historical Record

  • 1910–present

    Scouting and Youth Organizations

    The Boy Scouts of America was incorporated in 1910 and chartered by Congress in 1916; Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts in Savannah, Georgia, in 1912; and 4-H clubs grew with the Cooperative Extension Service created by the Smith-Lever Act of 1914. In 2025 the Boy Scouts of America took the name Scouting America, reflecting programs that now include girls.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Historical Record

  • 1881–present

    Chartered Service Organizations

    The American Red Cross, founded by Clara Barton in 1881 and first chartered by Congress in 1900, organizes volunteers for disaster relief and blood drives. Veterans built the Veterans of Foreign Wars, whose roots date to 1899, and the American Legion, chartered by Congress in 1919; both combine advocacy for veterans with service in their communities.

    American Red Cross

    Historical Record

Community Service

Presidents of both parties have called Americans to serve, from the “thousand points of light” to national-service programs.

American volunteering has always been rooted in neighborhoods, congregations and civic groups, and presidents have used the bully pulpit to encourage it. George H. W. Bush spoke of “a thousand points of light” in accepting the Republican nomination in 1988 and again in his inaugural address, describing “all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good.”

Federal support for service has been bipartisan. Bush signed the National and Community Service Act of 1990; President Clinton signed the 1993 law creating AmeriCorps; George W. Bush launched USA Freedom Corps after the September 11 attacks; and the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of 2009 was sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy and Orrin Hatch.

Conservatives have also debated the federal role. Many support national service as an expression of civic duty; others argue that government-funded service can crowd out or bureaucratize the voluntary work of churches and charities, and President Trump’s first-term budgets proposed eliminating the federal agency that runs AmeriCorps.

  • 1988–1990

    A Thousand Points of Light

    President Bush turned his call to recognize “a thousand points of light” into a program: he established the Daily Point of Light Award in 1989, and in 1990 the Points of Light Foundation was created as an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit to encourage volunteering.

    Source: Points of Light

    Historical Record

  • November 16, 1990

    National and Community Service Act

    Signed by President George H. W. Bush, the law created the Commission on National and Community Service and supported school-based service-learning, youth corps and other programs, laying the groundwork for later national-service efforts.

    Source: Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • September 21, 1993

    AmeriCorps

    President Clinton signed the National and Community Service Trust Act, creating AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National and Community Service, which offers education awards to members who complete a term of service.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • April 1997

    The Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future

    President Clinton and former Presidents Bush, Carter and Ford, joined by former First Lady Nancy Reagan, convened a summit in Philadelphia chaired by retired General Colin Powell, which launched America’s Promise to mobilize mentors, tutors and other volunteers for young people.

    U.S. Government Publishing Office, Public Papers of the Presidents

    Historical Record

  • January 29, 2002

    USA Freedom Corps

    In his State of the Union address after the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush called on every American “to commit at least two years — 4,000 hours over the rest of your lifetime — to the service of your neighbors and your nation,” and created USA Freedom Corps to coordinate volunteer programs, including a new Citizen Corps for community preparedness.

    Source: The White House (George W. Bush Archives)

    Primary Source

  • April 21, 2009

    The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act

    Sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and signed by President Obama, the act reauthorized national-service programs and authorized a large expansion of AmeriCorps, though Congress never funded the full expansion.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • 2017–2021

    The Debate over Federal Service Funding

    Supporters of national service argue that programs such as AmeriCorps extend the reach of local charities and build civic habits in young Americans. President Trump’s first-term budgets, beginning with the fiscal 2018 blueprint, proposed eliminating funding for the Corporation for National and Community Service, reflecting the view that volunteer work should rest on private and local support; Congress continued to fund the agency.

    Source: U.S. Government Publishing Office

    Opposing View / Debate

Opposing View / Debate

Where Americans Disagree

Opposing View / Debate

What role should the federal government play in supporting families?

Americans across the spectrum want strong families but disagree about whether Washington should provide direct support, reward work, or leave family policy to states, communities and churches. The temporary expansion of the child tax credit in 2021 sharpened the debate.

Advocates of larger federal family benefits

Supporters — including many Democrats and some Republicans, such as Senator Mitt Romney, who proposed a monthly child allowance in 2021 — argue that direct, predictable support helps parents afford to raise children. They point to Census Bureau data showing that poverty under the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which counts tax credits and other aid, fell to its lowest level on record in 2021, when pandemic relief including the enlarged child credit was in place, and rose sharply after that aid expired, with a particularly pronounced effect on children.

Pro-work conservatives

Other conservatives, including Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee in response to the 2021 proposals, argue that being pro-family requires being pro-work: family benefits should reward employment, as the 1996 welfare reform sought to do, rather than replace earnings with unconditional payments.

Federalists and localists

A third view holds that Washington should do less, not more. Family policy works best closest to families — in states, towns, congregations and charities — and federal programs tend to crowd out the institutions that know families best. Tax relief that lets parents keep more of what they earn is, on this view, preferable to new federal spending.

Sources

  1. Poverty Measure That Includes Government Assistance Increased to 12.4% in 2022, When Pandemic Relief Ended · U.S. Census Bureau
  2. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Public Law 104-193 · U.S. Government Publishing Office
Opposing View / Debate

Should public education funding follow students to private and religious schools?

School choice has grown from a single Milwaukee program in 1990 to universal education savings accounts in several states and a federal scholarship tax credit. Supporters and opponents disagree about its effects on families, public schools and religious institutions.

Supporters of school choice

Parents, not the state, hold primary responsibility for their children’s education, and low-income families deserve the options wealthier families already have. Choice programs introduce competition, let families pick schools that share their values and — under Zelman, Espinoza and Carson — must treat religious schools equally. The movement’s bipartisan roots include Milwaukee’s Polly Williams, a Democrat.

Defenders of public schools

Critics argue that vouchers and savings accounts divert money and students from public schools that must serve every child, often with less accountability for results, and that universal programs largely subsidize families whose children were already in private schools. Rural families, they add, often have few private options, and some object to public money supporting religious instruction.

Conservatives wary of government strings

Some religious-school and homeschooling advocates on the right warn that public money brings public regulation, and that accepting vouchers or savings accounts could eventually subject private schools and home education to testing mandates, curriculum rules or hiring requirements that compromise their independence.

Sources

  1. Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002) · Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
  2. Vouchers in Education · Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
  3. Arizona’s “universal” education savings account program has become a handout to the wealthy · Brookings Institution
Opposing View / Debate

Where do parents’ rights end and a public school’s authority begin?

Courts have long held that parents have primary authority over their children’s upbringing, but public schools must also set curricula and serve students of every background. Recent disputes over instruction touching on sexuality and gender, and over whether schools must tell parents about a child’s gender transition, have tested the boundary.

Parental-rights advocates

Parents are the primary educators of their children, as the Supreme Court recognized in Meyer, Pierce, Yoder and Troxel. Schools should be transparent about what they teach, inform parents about matters affecting their children’s health and identity, and honor religious objections, as the Court indicated in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025) and Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026). The 2024 Republican Platform pledged to restore parental rights in education.

Defenders of school authority

Public schools must teach a common curriculum and cannot run on individual vetoes. Dissenting in Mahmoud, Justice Sotomayor warned that requiring notice and opt-outs whenever a lesson touches a parent’s religious beliefs would impose “impossible administrative burdens” and bring “chaos for this Nation’s public schools.” Supporters of student-privacy policies such as California’s argue that some students may face rejection or harm at home and that schools must protect them.

Advocates of local and legislative solutions

Others argue that most of these disputes are best settled by elected school boards and state legislatures — through curriculum review, parental-notification laws and clear opt-out procedures — rather than by federal courts. Dissenting in Mirabelli, Justice Kagan also objected that the Court had decided novel questions hastily on its emergency docket.

Sources

  1. Mahmoud v. Taylor, 606 U.S. 522 (2025) · Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
  2. Mirabelli v. Bonta, 607 U.S. 492 (2026) · Supreme Court of the United States
  3. Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000) · Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

Sources

  1. The Republican Contract with America · The American Presidency Project
  2. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Public Law 104-193 · U.S. Government Publishing Office
  3. Child Tax Credit · Internal Revenue Service
  4. Adoption Credit (Topic 607) · Internal Revenue Service
  5. Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925) · Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
  6. Fast Facts: Homeschooling · National Center for Education Statistics
  7. Democracy in America, Volume 2 (Henry Reeve translation) · Project Gutenberg
  8. U.S. Fire Department Profile · National Fire Protection Association
  9. History · Points of Light