Originally published in the Washington Examiner.

A new White House executive order seeks to “expand access to affordable, high-quality” child care. Though well-intentioned, the Biden administration is promoting a myopic approach to family policy. State and national leaders should instead embrace a vision that better reflects parents’ preferences for work and caregiving, rather than forcing their own ideas on working families.

The order points out that “many Americans — particularly women — stay out of the workforce to care for their families, making it hard for businesses to attract and retain a skilled workforce and for the economy to grow.”

Absent from this framing is a recognition of families’ preferences and the value of parents caring directly for their children.

Well-credentialed, well-meaning advocates often presume the “ideal” arrangement for parental work and caregiving is both parents in full-time work, with children cared for in a licensed, institutional setting.

At a recent American Enterprise Institute event co-hosted by Sutherland Institute in Salt Lake City, AEI senior fellow and Washington Examiner senior political columnist Tim Carney called this a “GDP maximalization” approach.

“It’s actually a deliberate policy goal of the Biden administration and many state governments … that they prefer the two full-time paid jobs and child care model,” Carney said during a panel on family policy at the event.

This stands in stark contrast to the stated preferences of working families.

Nationwide, most mothers with children in the home prefer to work part time or not at all. Even when controlling for socioeconomic status, having a full-time stay-at-home parent is the preferred way to care for children among lower-, working-, and middle-class families in America.

In Utah, 75% of two-parent households report their ideal arrangement as one parent working full time while the other stays home with children or works only part time. That preference climbs to 84% when families are asked what they would do if they could cover household expenses on a single income.

Fixating solely on parental workforce participation, while viewing children as obstacles to that goal, is the wrong approach. A better vision for family policy in America would center on this question: How can we help more families achieve the work and child care arrangement they feel is best for their own family?

Such an approach takes a matter currently mired in partisan debate and elevates it to a broader, unifying goal that invites a wider array of policy innovations aimed at helping families.

Take for example the approach in Utah, where a child tax credit was recently signed into law.

“All children will require child care whether it’s done in a center or facility, or whether it’s done at home with parents providing child care,” state Rep. Susan Pulsipher, who sponsored the bill, told me over the phone. “This tax credit will allow parents to choose which of those options work best for them.”

Debates over the precise mechanism of a child tax credit and how it works in practice can and should continue alongside other ideas designed to help families. But that productive dialogue is only possible through this broader family-focused vision — one that is currently eschewed by the Biden administration and many other leaders across the country.

Sutherland’s family policy fellow, Krisana Finlay, describes the problem as a “failure to recognize the family as a core civic institution that is as important as government and the marketplace to social prosperity and well-being.”

National and state leaders should take the elevated approach to family policy by empowering parents, not government, to decide the best work and care arrangements for their families.