As Leo Tolstoy famously wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In America, even as the political divide seems to stretch from sea to shining sea, this quote holds true. Happy family life on both sides of the political aisle looks remarkably similar.
That’s one of the findings in the latest edition of the American Family Survey, a nationally representative poll conducted by YouGov for the Deseret News and BYU’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy.
The survey of 3,000 U.S. adults, fielded Aug. 8-15 and released Tuesday, found that 76% of families eat dinner together weekly and 73% have weekly activities at home like watching TV or playing games.
Co-investigators Christopher F. Karpowitz and Jeremy C. Pope wrote, “We find large swaths of agreement in Americans’ assessments of the strength of their families and in the day-to-day activities in which families take part.” Family activities only differ sharply by political leaning when it comes to worshiping together.
Thirty percent of American families worship together each week, but that number is heavily weighted by conservative Republicans (44%) and moderate Democrats (39%). Just 15% of liberal Democrats say they worship weekly as a family, compared to 24% of moderate Republicans and 25% of independents.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic gave many people unprecedented time spent at home, nearly half of respondents said they would like more time with their family. While this was a new question in the American Family Survey, the results track with other polls. In a 2021 survey published by the Brookings Institution, 70% of mothers who were essential workers or working from home reported that they wanted more time to spend with their families.
“Most Americans would like to spend more time with their family and less time at work,” Karpowitz, Pope and Spencer Rudy of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy wrote in the report. “Few policies on offer in Congress directly address any of these concerns … but the clear interest in additional options to have a more satisfying life is out there in the public.”
Having enough time for family life is an important determining factor for overall health of children. Spending quality time with children, even doing something as simple as eating dinner together, has substantial effects on behavior and outcomes for children.
Simply put, as Latter-day Saint apostle Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf has said, “In family relationships, love is really spelled t-i-m-e, time.”
As Karpowitz, Pope and Rudy noted, there are a handful of policies that could lead to an increase in family time for Americans. The most obvious would be a change in the standard five-day, 40-hour work week, which became law in 1940.
As Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow for the Brookings Institution, wrote in 2016, economists predicted that the more prosperous we became as a nation, the fewer hours we would choose to work. That hasn’t happened. Sawhill said, “A reduction in the standard work week would improve the quality of life, especially for those in hourly jobs who have benefitted hardly at all from economic growth in recent decades.”
That’s even more true today.
When the four-day work week was piloted in Iceland, productivity in the workplace was reported to either remain the same or improve. According to the BBC, “Workers reported feeling less stressed and at risk of burnout, and said their health and work-life balance had improved. They also reported having more time to spend with their families, do hobbies and complete household chores.”
Paid family leave is another policy option that would allow families to spend more time together. Angela Rachidi and Abby McCloskey, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, said that workplace flexibility, including paid leave, could be instrumental.
They said, “At the end of the day,…
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