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By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

Whenever I read a nostalgic reverie for the traditional family, like the policy paper the Heritage Foundation put out in early January, I am reminded of the many biographies I have read of great American artists raised before we had anything resembling the modern welfare system. The families of origin of, for instance, Jackson Pollock, Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath were not the happy trad life of Heritage’s imaginings. Parents died young, and their marriages were often anything but blissful.

Pollock’s history is particularly instructive. His upbringing shows how poor many large families were before the New Deal and Great Society programs helped build our........

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