ABSTRACT
American families are facing many challenges and as noted in several chapters, many are finding it difficult to meet the escalating costs of education and health care. Working families often struggle to find affordable, quality day care, and they rely on the income from two jobs to provide a living wage. Although families take responsibility to meet these challenges in whatever manner possible, often they cannot do it alone and increasingly, the government’s role in family life is central to how we define ourselves as a country. Basic societal questions revolve around the need to determine how far we are willing and able to go to support families and what it means to be profamily in a political climate where the term family excludes some functioning family units and being profamily can have opposite meanings for different groups.
