1. How Current Policy Issues Can Benefit from the Family Impact Lens
Chapter 8
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How Current Policy Issues Can Benefit from the Family Impact Lens

2. Chapter 8 Outline What Is the Family Impact Lens?
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Chapter 8 Outline
What Is the Family Impact Lens?
How Can the Family Impact Lens Be Useful to Policy and Practice Decisions?
Policy and Program Eligibility, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Design, Implementation, and Targets of Interest
What Insights Can the Family Impact Lens Bring to Family Policy?
Early Childhood Care and Education, Parent Education, Welfare Reform, Juvenile Crime
What Insights Can the Family Impact Lens Bring to Issues Beyond Family Policy?
Health Care, Long-Term Care
Summary

3. What Is the Family Impact Lens?
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What Is the Family Impact Lens?
The family impact lens considers the past, present, or probable future effects on family well-being of a rule, legislation, law, program, agency, or organization.
When policies or programs are under consideration, the family impact lens raises the questions of:
how are families affected by the issue?
in what ways, if any, do families contribute to the issue?
would involving families in the response result in more effective and efficient policy responses?

4. © Routledge/Taylor & Francis 2014
How Can the Family Impact Lens be Useful to Policy and Practice Decisions?
Applying the family impact lens to policies and practices can:
reveal who is and is not eligible to receive benefits;
enhance effectiveness in achieving policy and program goals
increase efficiency in reaching policy and program goals that provide a greater return on investment
inform program design
guide program implementation
indicate whether some families benefit and others do not.

5. Examples of How the Family Impact Lens Can Inform Policy and Practice
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Examples of How the Family Impact Lens Can Inform Policy and Practice
Policy and Program Eligibility
Eligibility requirements for policies such as SCHIP and EITC may unintentionally discourage marriage between cohabiting partners.
Policy and Program Effectiveness
Welfare reform demonstration projects that invested in parental employment, particularly among fragile families, improved children’s school performance and social development.
Policy and Program Efficiency
A rigorous cost-benefit analysis of criminal justice programs showed the most effective interventions were those targeted at juveniles, and the most cost-beneficial prevention and rehabilitation programs were family-focused.

6. Examples of How the Family Impact Lens Can Inform Policy and Practice
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Examples of How the Family Impact Lens Can Inform Policy and Practice
Policy and Program Design
Evidence shows that engaging parents in early childhood education programs, or addressing the mother-father relationship in fatherhood programs, is more effective than individual approaches.
Policy and Program Implementation
Family-centered approaches are pivotal to the effectiveness of program implementation across a range of social services and programs.
Policy and Program Targets of Interest
Policies or programs can target only some relationships in families and overlook others, such as when the views of birth parents are absent in international adoption debates.

7. What Insights Can the Family Impact Lens Bring to Family Policy?
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What Insights Can the Family Impact Lens Bring to Family Policy?
Early Childhood Care and Education
Studies have shown that investments in early childhood programs are beneficial to children, families, and society.
Effective programs have the shared characteristic of including a family engagement component.
Parent Education
Programs may focus on improving parenting (e.g., in the U.K.) or promoting marriage, relationship quality, and father involvement (e.g., in the U.S.).
One study found couple-focused programs improved both the parent-child relationship and the couple relationship, as well as parent and child well-being.

8. What Insights Can the Family Impact Lens Bring to Family Policy?
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What Insights Can the Family Impact Lens Bring to Family Policy?
Parent Education (cont…)
Further research should examine if focusing on the whole family system is more effective than focusing only on the parent/child subsystem.
Welfare Reform
Welfare debates tap into core issues that define civic and personal responsibility—children, family, poverty, and work.
Welfare reform dramatically increased the number of poor women who entered the labor market.
Welfare reform shifted the policy focus from problem remediation to problem prevention, and from individual problems to addressing families holistically.

9. What Insights Can the Family Impact Lens Bring to Family Policy?
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What Insights Can the Family Impact Lens Bring to Family Policy?
Juvenile Crime
The strongest predictor of juvenile crime is ineffective parenting.
The most cost-effective program for preventing juvenile crime is a home visiting program for low-income, pregnant mothers focused on family health, security, and education.
The five most cost-effective juvenile rehabilitation programs are family-focused approaches that teach families resiliency behaviors and skills that continue after the program ends.
Policymakers can reduce juvenile crime by shifting funding away from unsuccessful policies toward evidence-based, family-centered program alternatives, and ensuring these programs are well implemented.

10. © Routledge/Taylor & Francis 2014
What Insights Can the Family Impact Lens Bring to Issues Beyond Family Policy?
Health Care
Family-centered approaches to health care can improve the quality of care and help curb rising costs.
Families play five major roles in health and illness:
health promotion and risk reduction
vulnerability and disease onset/relapse
illness appraisal
acute response
adaptation to illness and recovery.
Historically, families’ critical role in health care has been “overlooked and undersupported” by public policy (Doherty & Campbell, 1988; Doherty & Anderson, 2006).

11. © Routledge/Taylor & Francis 2014
What Insights Can the Family Impact Lens Bring to Issues Beyond Family Policy?
Long-Term Care
Increased life expectancy over the last century has resulted in more expensive and longer-term care for the elderly.
Long-term care is broad ranging, and must integrate family support with physician, hospital, and other institutional care.
Most long-term care is provided by family caregivers, whose unpaid contributions totaled $450 billion in 2009.
Caregiving responsibilities can affect family members physically, emotionally, and economically.
Public and private sector policies that support family caregivers may be the most effective and efficient way to address the rising costs of long-term care.

12. Summary Families make important contributions to the public good.
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Summary
Families make important contributions to the public good.
Public policies on issues such as health care, long-term care, and welfare reform could be more effective and efficient if families were deliberately involved in their design and execution.
The many contributions that families make to their members and to society have become increasingly pricey, yet continue to be undervalued by society.
Despite increasing pressures for parents to meet both work and family responsibilities, work/family conflict has not emerged on the policy agenda.
Rethinking how we publicly support and invest in families is important for both family well-being and societal prosperity.