Family: The Original Safety Net
Family remains a more effective safety net than the government.
The word “welfare” generally calls to mind terms like SNAP, Medicaid, disability checks, and WIC. If you lean conservative or consume a lot of right-leaning media, the additional terms of socialism, the Nanny State, state-ism and “cradle-to-grave” come to mind. Semantically, this is how we think about welfare: welfare comes from the government.
A 2011 Pew Research Poll found that among college-age and post-college adults, 49% held a positive view of socialism. Socialism implies that the welfare of the collective should be provided for through functions of the state (consider the U.K.’s healthcare system, which is not just funded, but also operated by the government), and one of the its main functions is the redistribution of wealth. The idea that the government is responsible for the collective’s welfare has gained popularity in recent years, with self-described socialist Bernie Sanders competitively challenging Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democrat presidential primaries.
A fragmented and watered-down socialism in the form of various government programs has arisen and is seen by most Americans as a valid solution to poverty and socioeconomic disadvantage. Many would have a stronger dose of socialism: A recent CBS-Washington Post poll found that a slim majority of Americans have a favorable view of single payer healthcare.
I’ve stewed over the governmental connotations of “welfare” for a while. To really understand a concept, you have to put it in a different context, turn it upside down, find the exception to its rule — if welfare is almost always a word for government assistance to the poor, what else can it mean? What is welfare outside of government?
In the grand scheme of history, national governments that provide social services are fairly new. So what would welfare have been before their development? What was the original welfare system?
If you think I’m going to take us back in time to uncover some obscure Babylonian or Egyptian social system, you’d be wrong. The answer is actually quite simple and logical, obscured only by the deep shadow of a far-reaching government and, perhaps, our own pride in what is still very much an individualistic culture.
It’s family. Kinship has been humanity’s primary form of welfare. Like it or not, everyone needs family in one way or another. In the U.S., we take a sentimental approach to family, seeing it more as an emotional support group than an economic co-op. Matters of material support are considered individualistically, and the paths of brothers and sisters, both in geography and career, often diverge upon leaving their parents’ home.
One can see family welfare at work when parents subsidize their children’s college education, let them return home for a brief stay after college, or put up the down payment for their first home. Parents offer the training wheels of conventional adulthood, but after the first few pedals, we’re riding on our own. The value of individual achievement and personal responsibility that generally pervades American life, although weakening, feeds into the idea that family is not there to ensure your success; asking for support is considered a last resort. For many, getting a handout from a family member is seen as a personal failure.
Generally speaking, you sink or swim on your own. You don’t ask your brother to throw you a life preserver from the boat. We can debate whether this is due to rugged individualism or a sense that only the government can, and should, help you, but this is the general sentiment.
The truth is, family makes the best welfare system imaginable, if you do it right. I doubt you’ve ever met a bureaucrat that knows your individual situation, your motivations, your faults, or your work ethic better than a close family member. I doubt you’ve ever met a legislator who talks with you one on one to determine the best course of action and the best way to help you. I doubt you’ve ever met a social worker that will sacrifice for you like a sister would.
But what if your whole family is poor or uneducated? Then who helps you?
Many find themselves in exactly that situation, if you consider your family to be yourself, your parents, and your siblings. The nuclear family has been the most popular American model — aunts, uncles, and grandparents are people you generally dine with occasionally and visit when they are ill, and intimate relationships and frequent social involvement with in-laws are not all that common.
But the larger your family network, the more opportunities and support exist for you. Your parents and siblings may be no better off than you, but are all your aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, nieces, and nephews equally disadvantaged? Probably not.
For the family welfare model to work, two strong American attitudes must change. First, the idea of family must be widened to include “extended” members. In other words, we must remove the “extended” prefix. Second, our attitude about sacrifice and sharing must change. The family welfare model is based not on altruism, pity, or monetary profit, but reciprocity.
Reciprocal exchanges differ from direct exchanges, such as financial transactions, because they take varying amounts of time and are “repaid” in a variety of ways. If your brother takes two of his vacation days to help you move, he’s done you a favor. When the time comes for your brother and his wife to go on a real vacation, you’ll return the favor by babysitting his children and pets for a week. Some years it may seem like you’re sacrificing much and getting little in return, while other years you might enjoy a lot of help from family members at their immediate expense.
Of course, in America we often develop sibling-like relationships with unrelated friends, and such “fictive” kinships can work in the same way. And if you belong to a church, your church is considered your family; each congregant is, more than a friend in this life, a brother or sister in the Lord. A radical example of this sharing among brothers is recorded in the early church.
Reciprocity is the smartest social strategy for survival, particularly in high risk, high gain situations. There’s hardly a better example of this than among the Ju/’hoansi of Southern Africa. At one time a completely hunter-gatherer community, each individual’s survival ultimately depended on the cooperation and sharing of others — many times a hunter would come back empty-handed, but those few who did make a kill would distribute the meat to everybody so that no one went hungry. The next success a hunter has is expected to be shared, just as others had shared with him. If you hunted for only yourself, you would most likely die of starvation in periods where gathered foods were scarce. Far from describing a utopian commune, this tribe illustrates the power of kinship and voluntary sharing arrangements. It is an organic welfare that cannot be recreated by a national-level bureaucracy.
When you fall on hard times, there’s nearly always family experiencing relatively good times that can help you out. Family members can also be held accountable for their reciprocal participation in a way government cannot.
Ironically, both the traditional American values of individual success and responsibility and the newer positive attitudes toward state-provided welfare inhibit consideration of family as an economic co-op in addition to a set of emotional attachments. Socialism emphasizes the state’s responsibility to care for you, while individualism stresses a sink-or-swim attitude. And while charity is universally accepted as a “good” institution, it tends to operate more like government programs in its pseudo-anonymous, “big box” model of distribution. The social bonds of kinship and community are the neglected middle ground.
As Americans, we need to change the way we think about family and welfare. There is no shame in accepting help from family, particularly if you are willing to someday return it when you’re able. Evidence strongly suggests that poverty exists not because we don’t have enough socialism, but because our most fundamental social institution, the family, has frayed. Government cannot solve every economic and social woe. Fifty years of the War on Poverty has barely made a dent in the poverty level. State welfare is patching, perhaps even exacerbating, a damaged institution. Can we expect government to fix the institution on which good citizens, and therefore good government, is predicated? Of course not.
Families are built and repaired on the family level, and by and large communities are built and best repaired on the community level, which is why conservatives want to rebalance power away from higher levels of government and toward local government and individuals — it’s the people who know you or your local community who are most accountable and best equipped to help those in need.
