The United States is the only wealthy country in the world without a national paid parental leave system. It is one of the only countries at any income level without one. The peer group on this specific dimension is not Germany or Japan or Canada. The peer group is Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and a handful of small island states. This fact is so consistently startling when first encountered that it has produced a small genre of journalism dedicated to repeating it, as if the repetition might eventually break through and change something. The repetition has not worked. The fact remains, and it is worth asking why, because the answer reveals something about American politics that goes beyond any particular policy fight.
American family policy is exceptional not in one respect but in several. No national paid leave. No universal childcare. No universal child allowance, though a brief expansion of the child tax credit during 2021 functioned as one for six months before being allowed to expire. No guaranteed sick leave for parents caring for ill children. A health insurance system tied to employment in which the birth of a child is a billable event averaging several thousand dollars even with insurance, and tens of thousands without. No universal preschool. No federal regulation of childcare quality. The exceptionalism is systemic. It is not a gap in one corner of an otherwise complete edifice. The edifice was never built.
The standard explanations are partial. The fragmentation thesis points to federalism, the difficulty of building national programs in a system designed to resist them, and the resulting tendency for family policy to be left to the states, where it has developed in patchwork fashion. The race thesis points to the explicit exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers from the original Social Security framework, an exclusion that disproportionately affected Black workers and that established a pattern of social provision that worked around rather than through the workforce that needed it most. The gender thesis points to the male-breadwinner assumptions that underlay the postwar settlement, assumptions that treated women's labor force participation as exceptional even as it became the norm. The market thesis points to the political power of employers who preferred to control benefits as a tool of workforce discipline rather than cede them to a public system. Each thesis explains part of the picture. None alone is sufficient.
What ties the explanations together is a peculiar American formation that Christopher Howard and Suzanne Mettler have, in different vocabularies, identified as the submerged state. The United States does spend on family support. It spends through tax expenditures, through dependent care flexible spending accounts, through the mortgage interest deduction that subsidizes family-sized housing, through the employer-sponsored health insurance that costs the Treasury hundreds of billions in foregone revenue each year. The spending is real. It is just invisible. It accrues mostly to households in the upper half of the income distribution, which receive most of the tax benefits, while households in the lower half receive a thinner set of direct programs that are means tested, stigmatized, and politically vulnerable. The submerged state delivers substantial value to its beneficiaries without producing the political constituency that would defend or expand it, because its beneficiaries do not perceive themselves as recipients of state action.
This is the deeper exceptionalism. Other countries built family infrastructure that is visible, universal, and politically defended. The United States built a parallel system that is invisible, stratified, and politically inert. The result is that proposals to add visible universal programs face a peculiar headwind. Voters who already receive substantial submerged benefits do not see themselves as gaining anything from new programs, and they perceive the new programs as transfers to others. The submerged state crowds out the political space for the surfaced state, even when the surfaced state would deliver more value at lower cost. This is the policy trap that American family politics has been stuck in for decades, and it is the reason the exceptionalism persists.
The Connect law asks what a society owes its members, and the American answer has been: it depends. It depends on your employer. It depends on your state. It depends on your income. It depends on whether you can navigate the application forms, whether you can afford the copays, whether your shift schedule permits you to enroll your child in the limited slots available, whether the slots exist at all. The dependence is the system. It is not a failure of the system. It is what the system produces, and the production has been remarkably stable across generations. Changing it would require not just policy but a different theory of what a country is.