The Most Important Concerns For Families

Since 2015, the American Family Survey has assessed Americans’ views about the most important issues facing American families by presenting respondents with a curated list of 12 potential items, from which they could choose up to three. The list can be organized under three broad topics — economic issues, cultural issues, and family structure. Survey respondents saw the items only, not the topic labels, in random order.

For most of the past ten years, structural issues have outpaced economic or cultural concerns, driven primarily by the large percentage of Americans who express worry about “parents not teaching or disciplining their children sufficiently.”

But the past decade has seen important changes in the issues Americans identify as the most important concerns facing families. For one, cultural concerns have declined significantly. In the first year of the American Family survey, nearly 7 in 10 respondents selected at least one item in that category. In 2024, fewer than half of respondents chose an item in that category, and no single item in the list of cultural concerns was chosen by more than 20% of respondents.

By contrast, more American families now worry about economic issues. In 2015, just over half of survey respondents chose an item in that category. But economic stresses steadily increased in the ensuing decade. In 2024, for the first time, more Americans selected at least one economic concern (71.4%) than a structural concern (70.6%), with both the costs of raising a family and high work demands and stress on parents counting as especially important worries. Evidently, many Americans have concluded that the dynamics of the current economy are not especially family-friendly.

When COVID was dominating the news and people were concerned about jobs and putting food on their tables, it was possible to see this trend as a reaction to that crisis. But we are now so far from that event that it is clearly not the main reason economics dominates the thinking of more and more Americans. For all the attention to social and “culture war” issues, fewer and fewer Americans see those issues as key concerns for American families.

The decade’s changing patterns of concern can be seen more clearly by focusing on two discrete issues from the curated list: “the costs associated with raising a family” and “parents not teaching or disciplining their children sufficiently.” As the figure below demonstrates, about one-quarter of 2015 AFS respondents identified costs as one of the most pressing issues facing American families. By 2024, that number had nearly doubled, with exactly half of respondents choosing the item — by far the most of any item on the list. By contrast, worries about parental discipline have steadily declined, from a high of 53% in 2015 to 40% in 2024. Discipline is still the second most frequently selected item, but it is now a full 10 percentage points behind worries about costs.

Increasing concerns about economic issues also have a partisan dimension. Democrats consistently express more concern about the economic challenges facing families than do Republicans. In 2015, for example, we found a 25 percentage-point gap between Republicans and Democrats. Though this gap remains in 2024, both Democratic and Republican levels of concern have increased over time. In 2024, for the first time ever, majorities of both parties said economic concerns are one of the most important issues facing families.

Beginning in 2023, the American Family Survey introduced an updated list of response options to include new challenges facing families today. In both 2023 and 2024, we randomly assigned 1,000 respondents to answer the traditional question analyzed above and 2,000 respondents to choose from new set of 15 potential family challenges, allowing them to choose up to three. We asked half of these respondents to identify the most important challenges facing your family today and the other half to identify the challenges facing families today. Thus, one randomly chosen set of respondents focused on their own families, while the other considered the challenges of American families more broadly.

The new curated list of potential challenges introduced a variety of new potential family concerns not present on the traditional list, including mental or physical health struggles, tensions or disagreements between family members, parents’ lack of commitment to each other, and violence and abuse within the family. The items on the new list can be roughly divided into three categories: structure and relationships (children growing up without two parents in the home; violence and abuse within the family; tension or disagreements between family members; parents’ lack of commitment to each other; and difficulty finding quality family time), economics (high work demands and stress on parents; the costs associated with raising a family; the lack of good jobs or wages; lack of educational opportunities; crime and other threats to personal safety), and culture (lack of religious faith or church attendance; the widespread availability of drugs and alcohol; social media, video games, or other electronic resources; mental or physical health struggles; sexual permissiveness, including infidelity).

Most importantly, this new approach, with its random assignment to two different questions, allows us to distinguish between the concerns family members have about their own families and the concerns they have about the health of the American family more broadly.

Large percentages of Americans identified the high cost of raising a family as a key challenge, whether they are reflecting on families generally (45%) or on their own family (34%). Similarly, about 1 in 5 Americans chose the lack of good jobs or wages, regardless of the question wording. If we aggregate the statements by the categories indicated above, two-thirds of Americans chose at least one item in the economics category. These concerns reflect the high level of worry that was also evident in the responses to the traditional question we analyzed earlier. Notably, such widespread economic concern exists even though very few respondents pointed to a lack of educational opportunities as an issue for families.

Question wording also matters a great deal. The pattern of responses varies substantially, depending on whether respondents focus on their own family or families generally. Americans do not tend to see issues like violence and abuse, parents’ lack of commitment to each other, infidelity, drugs or alcohol, and children growing up without two parents in the home as key challenges for their families, but they do regard them as problems for families in the United States more generally. In other words, Americans see these as concerns, but more for other people’s families than for their own. At the same time, respondents who received the “your family” question were somewhat more likely than those who received the “families” question to emphasize difficulty finding quality family time, tensions or disagreements between family members, and mental or physical health struggles as being important. Americans tended to perceive these as important issues for their own family, but were slightly less likely to identify them as broader challenges facing families across the United States.

Aggregating responses by category, 64% of respondents chose at least one of the items in the economic list as an important challenge for their family. By contrast, 43% chose at least one element of family structure and relationships and 54% identified cultural issues, driven primarily by mental and physical health struggles. Among those assigned to think about families more generally, 70% chose at least one economic issue; 63% identified a structural issue, and 66% selected at least one cultural issue.

Finally, some important partisan differences emerged in these assessments, but those differences are mostly among those who received the question asking them to reflect on families generally. The partisan divides are substantially smaller among respondents asked to think about their own families.

In the figure above, the gray line indicates no partisan differences in responses to the question. Blue points to the left of 0 indicate issues where more Democrats than Republicans expressed concern, while red points to the right of the line indicate greater concern among Republicans. Purple points are those where the partisan difference is small — less than 5 percentage points.

The key finding to emerge from this analysis is that there are very few partisan differences among respondents asked to reflect on their own families’ challenges. Democrats report more concern than Republicans about their family’s mental or physical health struggles and about a lack of good jobs or wages for their family members. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to emphasize a lack of religious faith or church attendance in their family and are slightly more worried than Democrats about crime and other threats to personal safety. But for all other challenges in our curated list, the partisan differences among those who received the “your family” version of the question are small to nonexistent. Even where we do find differences, they never exceed 10 percentage points. When we examine partisan differences in the three categories of potential challenges, no difference exceeds 2 percentage points.

These relatively small gaps are dwarfed by the partisan differences among respondents asked to think about families generally. When asked to think globally, not personally, Democrats express substantially more worry than Republicans about families’ economic and health challenges. Republicans express more worry than Democrats about social and cultural issues, such as a lack of religious faith, single-parent homes, and the effects of social media, video games, and other electronic resources. To a lesser extent, they are also more worried than Democrats about the availability of drugs and alcohol, parents’ lack of commitment to their families, and parents’ lack of commitment to each other.

Analysis of the aggregate categories shows that more than three-quarters of Democrats assigned to think about families generally named an economic challenge, compared with two-thirds of Republicans. By contrast, 70% of Republicans named a structural challenge, and 75% chose at least one cultural challenge. The corresponding percentages for Democrats are 57% (structural) and 59% (cultural) — still majorities, but substantially smaller than among Republicans.

The 2024 patterns that we report here are very similar to what we found when we first introduced this new approach in 2023. In both years, we see far more agreement than disagreement among Americans asked to consider the challenges facing their own families. This is consistent with our finding that the day-to-day family life of Americans does not differ much across party lines. But when prompted to think about American families more broadly, these similarities disappear. Partisans focus on different sets of challenges and concerns, with Democrats pointing to economic challenges and Republicans emphasizing social and cultural issues. As we wrote in 2023, these findings do not mean that anyone is wrong to be concerned about any of these issues; it is, rather, that people’s views of the American family — but not their concerns about what they see in their own homes and personal experiences — are refracted through partisan lenses.

By Christopher F. Karpowitz and Jeremy C. Pope with research assistance by Ellie Mitchell

METHODOLOGY NOTE

Between August 22-29, 2024, YouGov interviewed 3,245 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 3,000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined, and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The weights were then post-stratified on 2020 presidential vote choice as well as a four-way stratification of gender, age (4 categories), race (4 categories), and education (4 categories), to produce the final weight. The overall margin of error is +/- 2%.