A letter to President-elect Obama

President-elect Obama:

You have impressed me in many ways during your campaign, but no impressions have been more profound than those you have made as a husband and father. You clearly cherish your daughters, and you have a prioritized partnership with your wife, Michelle. During this long political season, nothing in your famed rhetoric has rung more true or more real than your take-responsibility admonitions to fathers and your parental involvement solutions for education.

It may be, as you move into a presidency moribund with massive problems, that your own fatherhood holds the key to sound and simplified solutions.

One reason our financial institutions are in trouble is that our families are in trouble. Wrong priorities always lead to excess.

One reason so many of our corporate and business institutions are breaking up is that our families are breaking down. Broken homes weaken every part of our work force.

One reason our education continues to fall further and further into subpar levels is that parents are less involved — both with the schools and with the homework.

One reason Social Security and all of our social welfare systems are impossibly overburdened is that parents are abdicating their responsibility — for their children and for their parents — to larger society.

One reason our justice and criminal systems cannot keep up is that they can never restore or make up for the values families fail to teach.

One reason health care is so inadequate is that doctors and hospitals are playing catch-up football due to parents' lack of attention to prevention.

We don't strengthen our families by strengthening our larger institutions. It's the other way around. We brace up the small which then builds up the large. Society doesn't create families, but if it protects and honors them, those families will create a strong society.

The new Obama administration should seek practical and political implementation for that old, true clich? "The family is the basic unit of society." I suggest you:

— Double or triple the IRS child exemption to recognize the immeasurable contribution parenting makes to a stable society.

— Introduce "family impact statements" on all policy and legislation, thus encouraging policymakers and lawmakers to focus on how every public direction will affect and impact parents, families and children.

— Promote family friendly private sector policies from longer parental leave to more job-sharing options for moms.

— Create a Cabinet-level office of the children and family. (If we look out for institutions like agriculture, housing and education at the Cabinet level, we should do the same for the parents and children that eat it and live in it and use it.)

— Use your own personal example and the bully pulpit of the presidency to encourage parental responsibility and to remind all citizens that their highest priority, greatest joy and longest-lasting asset is their children and families.

— Give every parent of minors one extra vote in all elections so that children have a voice and so that with the additional responsibility of parenting comes additional power at the ballot box.

You are to be the president now. The stewardship of all of America's institutions will be in your care. Don't forget the most basic one!

Richard Eyre is an author and advocate for families and parents.