The Once and Future Family

I did not expect that thirty years after President Gordon B. Hinckley of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints introduced the faith’s family proclamation that I would feel something akin to envy. I was a young woman when the proclamation was announced in the October 1995 General Relief Society Meeting, and my mind could not see beyond the text’s gender roles that enshrined men as presiders and providers and women as “primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.” Motherhood was still nearly two decades in the future for me, and I found these roles confusing, limiting, and overemphasized as a young woman for whom it was more age-appropriate to begin considering how she would make her way in the world. I could not have imagined that thirty years later, most people I know would no longer be able to afford living the family ideals the proclamation prescribed.

Today, however, I am a mother raising two children in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have spent much of the past few years writing about how I am increasingly doing so alone because economic shifts have put homeownership, childcare, and the other supports needed to raise a middle-class family out of reach for many families, particularly for those relying on only one income. This shift has resulted in fewer resources in my children’s schools and in primary and youth programs that are often too small to fully function in wealthier communities or that are, conversely, overcrowded in the less expensive locations families can still afford. It has resulted in fewer friendships and community gatherings; it turns out that those activities relied upon people with time to socialize and volunteer. It has strained extended families as children and parents are less and less able to afford to live in the same towns. It has resulted in wards being consolidated and meeting houses being closed. Ironically, these shifts have also unexpectedly resolved—or, more accurately, rendered irrelevant—feminist debates in Latter-day Saint circles about whether women can righteously work outside the home because the majority of adult members are now single and most Latter-day Saint mothers I know no longer have the luxury of exclusively staying home.

My younger self would be surprised to learn that I do not feel happy about the bulk of these changes. Parenting is a significant undertaking whose demands are often equal to or exceed