The Once and Future Family

President Dallin H. Oaks and the Resilience of Our Values

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 the time and attention required by a full-time job. While I am grateful that gender roles have softened to permit both men and women fuller opportunities to develop Christlike attributes and cultivate financial security, I am nostalgic for the robust economic conditions in which it was more plausible for a parent to dedicate their time exclusively to their children, their home, and their community. Now that these conditions no longer exist, I feel keenly the void in our communities and the strain upon parents. I appreciate the Church’s implicit stance that serving in the home should be enough without having to shoulder additional economic burdens.

In the October 2025 general conference, President Dallin H. Oaks focused on the “deterioration in marriage and childbearing” in the United States. He situated these familial shifts in their economic context, explaining how previously “the family was an organized and conducted unit of economic production. Today, most families are units of economic consumption, which do not require a high degree of family organization and cooperation” (emphasis original). In so doing, he aptly described what I observe in my own community: declining numbers of children, and families that are financially stressed and isolated as childrearing has become primarily a source of consumption. Moreover, these economic shifts can make it theologically confusing to know how to be a good Latter-day Saint when we can no longer live the ideals with which we were raised. Because the Church has been so invested in a particular conception of the family, it triggers an identity crisis for the Church and its membership when that kind of family no longer represents the majority of people in the pews.

One of the most pressing challenges for the Church has become how to adapt the core values articulated in the family proclamation to a very different economic moment. In 2006, the late University of Chicago professor Jonathan Lear published a study of another people who suddenly found it impossible to live the ideals they valued. In his book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, he studied the Crow chief Plenty Coups, who led his people through the loss of the American buffalo to a new life on a reservation. Lear’s book springs from Plenty Coups’s observation that “when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened” (2). Lear reads what Plenty Coups and the Crow people experienced as an example of the disorientation people face when their way of life comes to an end and they are no longer able to make sense of their world or identities using the conceptual methods they had previously developed (48). He argues that a people’s successful survival in the face of cultural collapse requires them to adapt “their traditions in novel ways in the face of novel challenges” (65–66). For example, the Crow were no longer able to practice their traditional conception of courage after they ceased to be a warfaring society. Lear explains, “In such a case, one would begin with a culture’s thick understanding of courage; but one would somehow find ways to thin it out: find ways to face circumstances courageously that the older thick conception never envisaged” (65, emphasis original).

The increasing inability of Latter-day Saints to live the specific ideals articulated in the family proclamation is by no means as severe a disruption as the Crow experienced with the loss of the buffalo. It is not even as significant a disruption as, say, the beginning and end of polygamy within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The proclamation always envisioned exceptions to the ideal occasioned by circumstances. And yet, it is a fundamental change for the Latter-day Saints raised within its auspices that has far-reaching consequences on their identities, families, wards, and church life. The widespread inability to live the ideal marks a transition for a Church that spent several decades integrating with America by emphasizing a certain kind of family. When President Oaks spoke of families in his October 2025 conference address, I would like to suggest he began the kind of work Lear describes: adapting the faith’s core commitment to families to our changed economic circumstances.

President Oaks began his address, “The Family-Centered Gospel of Jesus Christ,” by reiterating the importance of the family proclamation and emphasizing how it declares that “the family is ordained of God” and “is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.” He also noted that it declares “that God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force” and that “God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.” By now, this language is highly familiar to all Latter-day Saints. Where President Oaks went next, however, is not. Rather than emphasizing the roles assigned to each gender, President Oaks gave examples of how people can support their families when the traditional roles are unavailable.

Specifically, President Oaks shared how he was raised by a single mother because his father died when he was a child. He did not shy away from the difficulties his mother experienced, noting that “she was alone and broken” despite receiving help from the Lord. He also discussed living with his grandfather, who promised to be a substitute father for him. “That tender promise,” he explained, “is a powerful example of what grandparents can do to fill in the gaps when families lose or are missing a member. Parents, single or married—and others, like grandparents, who fill that role for children—are the master teachers.” In these examples, many people can step up to assist with childraising and meet the needs of people in nontraditional families.

These personal anecdotes expand the scope of family and highlight persons working outside of gender roles. They may not be enough to satisfy members who have experienced past teachings as painful, overly rigid, or insufficiently sensitive to those who fall outside the ideal. A challenge of the Church’s leadership structure, which has often resulted in Apostles being in the spotlight for several decades before ascending to the presidency, is that we live within an archive of past teachings that are rarely repudiated and continue to coexist even if leaders later pivot in their teachings. We listen to President Oaks’s 2025 address, for example, with a consciousness of everything that he and other leaders have previously said about the family. Yet although it can be hard to discern, President Oaks’s decision to subtly foreground nontraditional families and the roles that can be played by single mothers and grandparents is a significant shift. Perhaps it is even the beginning of successfully adapting our values to the world we are now experiencing.

As Latter-day Saints, we are often cautioned to be firm in our faith. We are told that the Lord does not change. In this context, it can be easy to mistake the command to be constant with the expectation that specific ways in which we practice our faith should not change. And yet, of course, we know that many of our practices must constantly change in order to stay relevant. The Church has made changes to the temple ceremony, to missions, to garments, and to ward meetings, just to name a few recent examples. Adapting our family values to today’s reality does not necessarily mean a weaker or lesser commitment to the importance of family relationships. Rather, adaptation can grant our values and relationships resilience through changing circumstances.

Natalie Brown is a Latter-day Saint based in Colorado. She holds a BA from the University of Chicago, a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, and a PhD from Columbia University. Her writing has frequently appeared in By Common Consent and The Salt Lake Tribune. She is writing a volume about how to live with faith during moments of crisis. Here she is writing in her personal capacity. Her views do not necessarily reflect those of the Church or her employer.

Art by Paul Gauguin (1848–1903).