ABSTRACT
Public policies toward children and families have received increasing attention at the National Academy of Sciences. In 1976, the Academy's Advisory Committee on Child Development issued a report entitled Toward a National Policy for Children and Families which marshals a large corpus of social science data in the interest of informing basic policy choices. The Committee has balanced distinguished senior members with a strong representation of younger social scientists and in general has tried to include new faces. The most important contributions social scientists make to policy formulation are often non-scientific. The real usefulness of the social scientist in policy formulation may be embodied in a human wisdom or judgment unrelated to scientific training but given legitimacy by that training and by scientific accomplishments. All the crucial arenas of domestic social policy are related to children and families, and all are amenable to social scientific inquiry, but the arena called child and family policy remains elusive.
