Domestic Arithmetic or The Administrative Family

In 2021, Spain became the first country in the European Union to impose fully equal and mandatory parental leave: six weeks for each parent, non-transferable. The policy has since been held up as a model of equality and is now being studied as a template across the bloc. In March 2026, the EU’s Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality, together with the Employment Committee, voted through a report on “advancing towards a care society,” which urges Member States to move toward equal sharing of unpaid care work as a matter of EU-wide policy. Buried in its preamble the report observes that "increased access to reproductive healthcare services and abortion services may help parents with their family planning and reduce stress resulting from unexpected pregnancies." Four years before that vote, the Spanish policy had already been presented, using similar language, as a model at a UNFPA forum on declining birth rates. While defending the policy, the Spanish ambassador clarified that the leave had to be mandatory because otherwise men would simply “escape their responsibilities.”

It is worth reflecting on that argument. The government is arguing that, without legal coercion, fathers cannot be trusted to care for their own newborn children. The language of “choice,” so often invoked as the foundation of modern family policy, collapses the moment it is tested. Families who choose to have children are still treated as incapable of responsibility, and policy is built on an underlying suspicion of their motives and their judgment.

What is more surprising is how easily this logic is accepted as progress. Spain is only the clearest example. In 2016, Sweden eliminated its home-care allowance for children aged one to three, a benefit disproportionately used by mothers. The official justification was that it was not “gender-equal.” The allowance had been used more often by women because many, given the option, chose to spend more time at home with their young children. Removing that option in the name of equality narrowed the range of options for women and made family life less, rather than more, balanced. As Rebecca Oas has documented for C-Fam, this kind of reasoning has become common within parts of the United Nations system, where family care is increasingly framed as a problem that can be solved through bureaucratic redistribution and the family itself as an inefficient economic unit. The recent push in Brussels reflects the same direction: the socialist push for coherent legislation “to promote equal sharing of responsibilities between men and women,” a stated priority of this legislative term. This language is increasingly treated as common sense across the political spectrum.

To understand why this approach feels so persuasive, it helps to look at a deeper shift in our thinking. Arthur Brooks has argued that modern societies have come to favor one kind of intelligence above all others: the ability to solve what he calls “complicated” problems. These are problems with clear parameters, measurable variables, and identifiable solutions. They may be difficult, but they are ultimately manageable. Much of our institutional life is built around them. Governments regulate them, companies monetize them, and education systems train us to handle them efficiently.

But the most important parts of human life do not belong to this category. Falling in love, raising a child, grieving a loss, and discovering who you are: these are realities to be lived through. Brooks describes them as “complex.” They unfold over time, resist standardization, and depend on judgment and contemplation rather than calculation. They cannot be reduced to metrics without losing something essential.

This distinction matters more now than ever. As artificial intelligence makes “complicated” problems easier to solve, the relative value of what cannot be automated becomes clearer. The writer and entrepreneur Luke Burgis has argued that we may be entering a moment in which the disciplines long pushed aside, those that train perception, attention, and interpretation, regain their centrality. They deal precisely with dimensions of experience that no system can fully replicate. They teach us, in his words, to “see, hear, touch, feel, and taste in a way that helps us enter into the mystery of the human experience at a deeper level.” The skills the administrative state cannot replicate are becoming more valuable, not less.

This blindness to the inadequacy of complicated methods for complex problems afflicts family policy. When two new parents sit down in the first weeks after a child is born, they are not focusing on making home life as mechanical as possible. They are learning to understand a person who did not exist a month before, and are reconfiguring their lives and loves around that gift. This is not a process that improves when parents are made into flattened administrative units expected to meet state-imposed quotas.

This is the strange position in which European social policy finds itself at the start of the AI age, doubling down on rationalistic and administrative logic when the world most urgently needs personal judgment, presence, and the slow work of parenthood. The premise behind the Spanish policy, that fathers will evade responsibility unless compelled, ends up revealing that the state no longer trusts parents to understand their own children or to make decisions together. Not long ago, it was widely assumed that those closest to the child were best placed to judge what the child needed. That assumption has quietly disappeared.

The issue here is not whether the state should withdraw completely. The state has a real and meaningful role in sustaining the conditions in which families can flourish. What the state cannot do is design the family as if it were a project of its own. When this becomes the mission of the state, even well-intentioned interventions begin to distort what they touch because they treat the family as a manipulable variable when, in fact, it is the prior reality. Spain's policy is not flawed because it offers parental leave, which can be a real support to families. It is flawed because it presumes to know better how to use it than the parents themselves.

Recognizing this would not require abandoning policy altogether. It would require a government with the humility to recognize that some realities require their own sphere of autonomy, apart from bureaucratic manipulation, to flourish.