Parenthood’s nobility

In this Register guest editorial, political philosopher Quinton Peralta-Greenough makes the case for considering how public policies such as the Canada Child Benefit could foster virtue rather than being mere acts of income redistribution.

Contemporary politics is commonly characterized as a contest of interests and resources, with policies aimed at the maintenance and redistribution of both. But could politics not also include nobler motivations? 

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The Canada Child Benefit (CCB) offers an interesting case study. 

This program, with funds generated through taxation, provides monthly payments to families so as to ease household costs. Money is allocated based on household income and the number and ages of children in the family. A lower income means greater benefits. 

The CCB has existed in Canada in its current iteration since 2016, but there have been analogous policies since the end of the Second World War. Support for families through direct payments therefore has been a longstanding feature of Canadian public policy.

On the surface, this appears to be a simple redistributive policy. Money is taxed from the general population. However, this is disproportionately paid by the wealthy. Those who earn more than $106,717 per year make up less than 10 per cent of the population but pay nearly 60 per cent of federal personal income taxes. 

These tax-generated funds are then redistributed on a scale tilted toward those at the bottom of the economic ladder. The government’s consistent line about the program — that it is “to help with the cost of raising children” — suggests this redistributive justification. 

Within a cynical interpretation, one could argue the program invests resources in the production of future producers — Canadians as units of investment. Children growing up in poverty will tend to be less educated and less productive. Redistribution may allow them to become future contributors to the Canadian economy. Stripped of its moral veneer, the system is interested in little more than increasing GDP.

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Whether the CCB is aimed at maintaining the Canadian economic system or reducing poverty and economic stress — these objectives are hardly illegitimate — Canadians should hope for something more profound and aspirational.

Classically, political association possessed a formative dimension. Politics was understood as a deeply moral engagement, concerned with the cultivation of virtues — excellences of character — through law, custom and participation in common life. Despite disparate details, it is a perspective shared by thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas. 

What would it mean, therefore, to recover something of this older ambition in understanding the CCB?

One possibility begins by recognizing parenthood as a formative activity. Raising children requires more than providing sufficient resources for their survival. It asks parents to cultivate patience, sacrifice, constancy, prudence, generosity and responsibility. Parenthood places adults in relationships of dependence and obligation that they did not invent and cannot simply abandon when inconvenient. Children are not merely future citizens being formed by their parents. Parents are themselves formed through the activity of raising children.

Seen this way, the CCB takes on a different character. Its purpose need not be exhausted by either redistributing wealth or investing in future economic productivity. It can also represent a political community’s commendation of parenthood as an activity worth being sustained. 

A family with greater financial security may have more time to spend together, greater freedom to care for children directly, and less pressure to subordinate family life to economic necessity.

This does not translate into paying Canadians to become virtuous, much less empowering government to dictate what good parenting looks like. The virtues acquired through parenthood belong to parents through the particulars of family life. Public policy can, nevertheless, recognize that some activities contribute to the formation of citizens and arrange common resources so greater room exists to pursue said activities.

Such an interpretation would change little about the CCB. What would change is the political understanding of the distribution. The economic interpretation asks what today’s children might someday contribute to Canada. A more humanistic politics might also ask what raising those children asks today’s Canadians to become. 

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The CCB could then represent something more than compensation for the costs of having children: a public recognition that parenthood is among the activities through which citizens learn to live for someone beyond themselves, adding to their experience of what it means to be human. Politics, on this account, is concerned not only with what citizens have but who they become.

Distributed by Canadian Catholic News.

A version of this article appeared in the September 27, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "Parenthood’s nobility".