Parenting & Family Quote by Phyllis Schlafly

Schlafly is doing what she did best: taking a policy that presents itself as morally unassailable and yanking it back into the culture war. The line works because it’s a bait-and-switch. It begins by acknowledging a widely accepted premise - that enforcing child support is about kids - then flatly denies it, daring the listener to suspect that “helping children” has become a cover story for something else.

The specific intent is to reframe enforcement not as social responsibility but as state intrusion and moral hazard. Schlafly’s politics treated the family as a private institution that government routinely misunderstands, and she’s implying that enforcement regimes punish or alienate fathers, destabilize parental reconciliation, and create incentives that serve bureaucracies more than households. The phrasing “People think” signals contempt for mainstream consensus; it’s populist, but pointed: you’ve been sold a comforting narrative.

Subtextually, it’s also an argument about gender and authority. Child-support enforcement emerged alongside no-fault divorce, rising single-parenthood, and a welfare state increasingly eager to recoup costs by chasing “deadbeat dads.” Schlafly’s camp often saw those shifts as rewriting male obligation into a cash transfer enforced by courts, while absolving women (and the state) of harder questions about marriage, custody, and cultural expectations.

Context matters: by the late 20th century, “tough on deadbeats” enforcement became bipartisan, wrapped in the language of children’s rights. Schlafly’s contrarian claim isn’t a data point; it’s a rhetorical crowbar, prying “the child” away from policy branding and insisting that the real fight is over who gets to define family responsibility: parents, or the government.