Teasing that a major family-policy overhaul is on the horizon is a bipartisan endeavor. Over the last few years, Democrats and Republicans have floated possible expansions of support for American families. President Biden expanded the child tax credit for a single year; Senator Mitt Romney proposed a major child-cash-allowance program and kept workshopping it to bring others on board; the heads of Americans United for Life and Democrats for Life of America proposed making birth free. The current Congress has a bipartisan task force on paid family leave led by Representatives Stephanie Bice (R., Okla.) and Chrissy Houlahan (D., Pa.).

But so far, none of these proposals has won the wide support needed to become law. Parents are brushed off as a special-interest group and children dismissed as a luxury good. Senator Joe Manchin has frequently intervened to make sure only the right families get aid. If people make the choice to have children, he wants to see the parents bear the cost first, before anyone else chips in. In practice, programs for children are means-tested in a way that excludes the poorest families. Work requirements exclude parents struggling to find work and especially mothers who can’t easily reenter the workforce. Meanwhile, the earned-income tax credit, the child tax credit, and additional-child tax credit all phase in with income, meaning the poorest 10 percent of American families receive almost nothing.

Child benefits are universal benefits, not a special payout to parents. The justice of child benefits is rooted in the undeniable need of the children, not the possible merits of the parents. For all the talk of “viability” before birth, a child is no less dependent after birth, but its need can be met by more people than just the mother. Programs such as the child tax credit, work protections such as paid leave, child-care subsidies, etc. are the most universal benefits a government can offer.

Whether you have children of your own or not, any program that addresses the needs of children will cover every American born from the time of enactment, since everyone begins life as a child. Aid to children is a more universal program than an entitlement such as Social Security, because not everyone lives long enough to claim that benefit. It’s a mistake to frame aid to families as a transfer from the childless to parents. It is a benefit granted to every child, paid for by every grown-up.

But the framing of children and families as a special-interest group extracting money from others has been used against more long-standing benefits than the recent expansion of the child tax credit. I grew up in a neighborhood that voted down our school budget because nonparents didn’t want to pay to support the school (or replace the leaking roof). Public schools and private-school vouchers, where they exist, are one of the largest transfer programs from adults to children.

Sometimes, the defenders of family policy and schools argue that we should be willing to support education because present-day adults will one day benefit from today’s kids’ being well educated. Pay your property taxes now to make sure you have an adequate supply of nurses when you’re very old. It’s a slightly strange argument, like saying the reason to support SNAP benefits is that children who aren’t malnourished will be higher earners and better able to shore up your Social Security payouts.

The reason to support the weakest and most vulnerable among us isn’t that it raises GDP by a few tenths of a percentage point. It’s that shelter for the dependent is a core function of both the government and the natural family. Beginning in the womb, every single American is affected by how our laws respond to the reality of a child’s need and dependency. It is children, not parents, who qualify for aid, even when that aid is mediated through the parents (as a paid-leave program is). Children can’t earn money or spend the aid given to them — whatever aid they receive is and should be mediated through the natural institution of the family. It’s for that reason that I most favor, of all the policies being floated, child allowances, which enable all families to respond to their children’s need in the manner that best fits their families’ circumstances.

A cash grant affords families the most flexibility. Unlike proposals to focus on subsidizing child care, child allowances are usable by all families, whether the parents choose to use outside care or keep their young children at home. Unlike the Make Birth Free program, which would offer hospitals a capped rate for all deliveries, the money goes directly to parents and is less likely to vanish into the made-up fees of insurers and hospitals. Direct aid, simple and unconditional, removes the opportunities to coerce parents by requiring them to complete a course or by preventing them from buying the food their family prefers.

Keeping aid simple makes it easier to avoid the ballooning of an entitlement or the special interests’ interventions to siphon off money for themselves. The question is simply how much money per child is just and prudent, not which side interests will get to add regulations and rules to obtain rents.

Attempts to peel children away into their own special-interest group represent a false anthropology. Those making this argument imagine that adults have no continuity of identity with the children they once were. Adults who say they “hate children” or don’t want to be around them aren’t expressing an aesthetic taste but a certain degree of self-hatred. A world that isn’t welcoming to children cannot be a humane world, since childhood is part of what it means to be human.

Adults might not currently experience the radical dependency of a child, but it’s how every single person began life. The abject need that babies display is also a preview of how most of us will end life. Practicing self-deception and self-hatred won’t prepare us for our return to dependency.

The reason to help children is that children need help. In responding to that need, families, and especially mothers, become vulnerable and need help, too. Child allowances and other unconditional aid to children are ways to respond to this basic reality of human existence. No one enters the world as an autonomous individual, and very few people would be happy if they grew up to be one, either.

There’s room for debate about the right amount of aid, the best way to deliver it, and how to pay for it, but the dependence of children is a plain fact. Children strain family life and finances at the beginnings of the parents’ careers, when the family has the least ability to absorb the shock. Prudent savings over time can’t pay for the needs of a child now.

Silicon Valley companies offer a toxic bargain to their employees, pushing egg-freezing as a way to delay childbearing and keep workers’ prime years at the employer’s disposal. America can’t make the same bargain. A polity where children aren’t valued and welcomed is a state that does not believe in its own future. Every child born is a sign of hope. Our family policy should bring that hope to fruition, not leave each family to struggle alone.