A New Child- and Family-First Agenda for 2020 and Beyond

Photo by Joshua Sukoff on Unsplash

This is the first in a two-part series. The second part will be published next week.

by Elliot Haspel

The warning signs for children and families are not so much flashing as blaring, Star Trek red alert-style. Fewer children are being born in the United States, in part because of the overwhelming costs of child care. Economic trends and growing inequality are impacting families in new, profound ways that indelibly affect children’s lives.

“We’re far beyond the point where a few billion dollars here and a few percentage points there is going to put our finger back in the dam. But we can’t re-envision what child and family life looks like — and the policies that need to be fought for in the 2020s to get there — with the same tactics, siloed sectors, or incremental goals that many of us in early childhood advocacy tend to still pursue. As we’ll see later, addressing these crises offers a unique opportunity to even go beyond the left-right political divide.”

The “relentlessness of modern parenting,” as Claire Cain Miller has put it, has left parents feeling stretched too thin and isolated. The decline of worker protections and rise in nontraditional work hours is causing many parents to spend less time with their family, while high levels of chronic stress strain the quality of that time.

All of us interested in children and families — advocates, elected leaders, businesses and employers, educators, and others — should unite across sectors to pursue a Child- and Family-First Agenda. The costs to taxpayers of universal child care and other such services pale in comparison to the devastating consequences to our workforce and society if we don’t take a broad but precise set of actions to improve the lives of our families.

We’re far beyond the point where a few billion dollars here and a few percentage points there is going to put our finger back in the dam. But we can’t re-envision what child and family life looks like — and the policies that need to be fought for in the 2020s to get there — with the same tactics, siloed sectors, or incremental goals that many of us in early childhood advocacy tend to still pursue. As we’ll see later, addressing these crises offers a unique opportunity to even go beyond the left-right political divide.

While the 2010s were in many ways a decade of turmoil for children and families, there were some promising developments: Federal funding for child-care subsidies more than doubled, and federal workers gained 12 weeks of paid parental leave. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion, we continued to inch closer to having 100 percent of children covered by health insurance. Adverse Childhood Experiences and trauma-informed practices became widely accepted concepts.

Yet these laudable gains mask the serious and growing fault lines that threaten to become chasms in the 2020s unless child advocates use their hard-won foot hold to climb into a new tier of work altogether. Take child-care subsidies: The doubling of federal Child Care Development Block Grant funding has been accurately hailed as historic; it’s a real accomplishment, and no one should disparage it. Despite a nearly $6 billion increase over two years, child-care subsidies are still reaching only 15 percent of the low-income families they are intended to serve. Similarly, while the increases have brought subsidies closer to “market rate,” that rate reflects a desperately broken child-care marketplace lacking in available slots, quality care, and most definitely affordability for most American families.

Home-based family child care providers are closing at rates best described as a hemorrhage; we’ve lost nearly half of our family child cares just since 2005. Meanwhile, across all care settings, the supply of any staff --much less qualified staff -- is in alarmingly short supply as employers like Target and Amazon have begun to offer significantly higher wages. The pain from the massive cost of child care now penetrates deeply into even the middle- and upper-middle-class.

It’s not just child care. The American fertility rate has plummeted to an all-time low: There are over one million fewer children in the U.S. now than at the start of last decade. Tens of thousands of children have flooded into the foster care system as the opioid epidemic crashed over their families — and in some states, the foster population increased by more than 50 percent in a matter of years.

I could, sadly, go on. Yet these challenges are hardly insurmountable, even in our deeply divided political climate. There are practical steps our government and advocates can take to address the biggest challenges our children, families and society face. My ideas to ponder as we imagine a Child- and Family-First Agenda for the 2020s:

A Broader Policy Focus

Tame the excesses of ‘late capitalism.’

The root of so much family chaos is America’s “late capitalism,” a term whose current usage Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic defines as “a catchall phrase for the indignities and absurdities of our contemporary economy, with its yawning inequality and super-powered corporations and shrinking middle class.”

Lowrey argues that Americans both on the political left (who feel the country isn’t changing quickly enough and are concerned about economic inequality) and “the rage of millions of less politically engaged Americans who nevertheless feel left out and left behind” could rein in today’s runaway, late capitalism. She suggests these Americans would be happier with a society that addresses family issues and inequality more effectively while also doing business --rather than allowing the nation and its economic prospects to focus more on phone apps and “cheap services for the rich and lazy” while others languish in “no-benefit jobs for the eager and poor.”

“We can’t restore thriving families to the center of American life without more aggressively reckoning with these economic realities. That’s going to require child and family advocates to focus on both cultural and policy shifts. On the cultural front, we need to fight against the cult of “workism.” ”

For families, late capitalism often manifests as chronic stress and instability. In their book Unequal Time: Gender, Class and Family in Employment Schedules, sociologists Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel point out that predictably unpredictable events — like when a child is sick at home — only become a crisis when there’s no slack in the machine: “Much of the chaos caused by unpredictability is created by an economic system in which employers increasingly squeeze workers and run on razor-thin staffing margins,” the authors write. In other words, everything from the flexibility to provide love and care to an ill child to the consistency of family time is mediated by factors like class. Income inequality (with all of its disproportionate racial and gender implications) is leading directly to inequality in family flourishing.

We can’t restore thriving families to the center of American life without more aggressively reckoning with these economic realities. That’s going to require child and family advocates to focus on both cultural and policy shifts. On the cultural front, we need to fight against the cult of “workism” (at a time when Nordic nations are moving toward four-day work weeks and six-hour work days, America’s unyielding primacy of work demands reflection).

On the policy front, we need to bolster worker protections through stronger and better-focused unions (more on these below), a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, laws that limit just-in-time shift changes, and so on. It’s difficult to move away from workism when work has employees in its clutches.

Build bridges in relational health and social connectivity.

Just recalibrating our economic system won’t be enough. Our society is badly fractured, with spikes in loneliness and detachment from historically social-binding institutions such as faith communities, as well as rising anxiety and depression in children. The trends Bob Putnam called out in 2000’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, have only intensified over the first two decades of the new millennium: Americans are less civically involved, seldom know our neighbors, and spend less time with our families and friends. While late capitalism is certainly an exacerbating factor in the political divide, it does not alone explain these fault lines. Putnam blames longer commutes to work, changes in family structure, the evolution of suburban life, and more.

There are tangible actions to be taken to address these problems, such as creating more family-supportive social structures and institutions (more on these later), but the first step is asking the right questions. As Capita’s Joe Waters has written, we need a “relational revolution,” focused on answering this fundamental question: “How do we redesign the system to privilege relational well-being, fraternity, flourishing, and communion rather than competition, money, power, or prestige?”

Child and family advocates must become more vocal leaders in mapping out a new social era that puts families first. That’s a very different mission than most groups currently have, but one that must be wrapped into the other good work that’s underway.

Address income supports.

There is little better one can do for a child’s development than stabilize the income of his or her family. This was the conclusion of the blue-ribbon report from the National Academies of Sciences’ Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty, which states plainly: “Many programs that alleviate poverty – either directly, by providing income transfers, or indirectly by providing food, housing, or medical care – have been shown to improve child well-being.”

“Any family-focused policy agenda for the 2020s, therefore, must include direct income supports as a guiding principle. Income supports, for those unfamiliar with the term, is simply an umbrella phrase meaning actions that directly increase the amount of money a family has, in addition to indirectly helping by providing a needed service that would otherwise cost out-of-pocket money.”

It might seem like a radical idea — it’s actually not, as I’ll explain — but taking more direct action to increase family income causally can accomplish everything from reducing risk of child abuse and neglect to significantly boosting children’s academic achievement. Any family-focused policy agenda for the 2020s, therefore, must include direct income supports as a guiding principle. Income supports, for those unfamiliar with the term, is simply an umbrella phrase meaning actions that directly increase the amount of money a family has, in addition to indirectly helping by providing a needed service that would otherwise cost out-of-pocket money.

This doesn’t necessarily mean just writing every family a check (though, when it comes to things like a child allowance, it should). Rather, such policies could range from zeroing out the costs of child care, to raising the income eligibility threshold for food and medical assistance, to boosting the Earned Income Tax Credit and making state-level EITCs fully refundable, to raising the minimum wage. All such measures are important. Simply put, poverty is bad for families and exquisitely bad for children. Directly attacking poverty should be a non-negotiable strategy.

A Broader Strategy Toolbelt

Stirring political sophistication through a “horseshoe coalition.”

Child and family advocates have done a lot on a little for a very long time. The gains that have been accomplished are all the more impressive for the fact that child issues (other than public education, an important exception) have long been banished to the corner of social policy. There are no megadonors supporting a child advocacy infrastructure, no multimillion-member interest groups, and let’s remember that there’s mainly a constituency of young children who can’t vote and young parents who are just a little bit distracted. Yet the crisis point we’ve reached offers a new opportunity — and imperative — to increase the sophistication of our advocacy strategies.

In other words, let’s get more families and social sectors and swaths of the public more worked up about the issues that directly impact all of our lives so massively.

Already, there are nascent efforts underway to mobilize the public to push for stronger policies to strengthen families and children’s lives and build a movement of parents and other stakeholders to wield greater political clout: The Grassroots Movement for Child Care and Early Education and the Care For All Children campaign are among those bringing together an array of early childhood advocacy organizations toward good-quality and affordable child care for all. The Grassroots Movement, for example, is petitioning elected leaders to introduce ballot initiatives and organizing advocates and activists to push for more progressive child-care policies across the country. These campaigns require more of our attention and investment, and surely there are complementary efforts yet to come.

If such endeavors seem daunting, consider the gun control movement’s rise in recent years. Long a David to the NRA’s Goliath, gun control groups have seen huge swells in influence over the past decade with thoughtful strategies and the careful cultivation of monetary resources. As a result, organizations like Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action are nationwide forces to be reckoned with. Gun and school safety laws have passed recently even in relatively red states such as Florida. There’s no reason child and family issues can’t follow a similar trajectory.

Child and family issues also offer a rare opportunity to build what Capita frames as a post-liberal future: a “horseshoe” political coalition that goes beyond left and right. Indeed, some of the most strident voices on the crisis of the family are conservatives such as Brad Wilcox, Laurie DeRose, and Lyman Stone. Their in-depth report in Foreign Policy argues in part that cultural waves like workism may be swamping policy attempts to make family life a little friendlier. While they analyze the problem from a different angle than a liberal like myself, we both see the same asteroid hurtling toward Earth — and historically, imminent existential threats have been the only things that have caused often warring tribes to set down their weapons and work together. We must seize this opportunity.

Engage with unions and mobilize them for support.

A resurgent labor movement offers crucial support for workers and an important source of political power. The 2010s saw several successful organizing campaigns, including, for instance, by home health-care workers.

In New York City, child-care and pre-K teachers’ successful efforts to unionize and as a coalition push for higher pay (winning raises of up to $20,000) is another powerful example of collective bargaining in a sector that has seen far too little of it. Efforts to cultivate ongoing unionization — and campaigns for better wages and working conditions — among child-focused fields is a strategy that interest groups and philanthropy would do well to back. For those who might be skeptical of this strategy, consider that child-care workers make a median hourly wage of slightly more than $10 an hour. While in truth child-care practitioners deserve to have middle-class salary floors similar to K-12 teachers, building the power of early care staff is a necessary start.

Expand our tent across sectors.

While there are upwards of two million early care and education workers and millions more informal care providers, who together care for around 20 million young children (all of whom have parent(s)/guardian(s)), you’d be forgiven for thinking the children’s services sector was small and meek. By and large, those who work with children and families remain politically sidelined and isolated. This needs to change, and perhaps the best way to move the ball is to join with those already on the field.

For instance, the home health-care workers and pre-K teachers in New York didn’t start a new union. They joined powerful existing ones; in the case of home health-care workers, joining up decades ago with the Service Employees International Union and more recently trying to replicate the Fight for $15 campaign by fast-food workers.

This idea, though, stretches beyond labor unions. Advocacy groups are out there every day fighting for things like affordable housing and cleaner air, issues which undeniably impact children and families, and they are sectors that likely could use an influx of parents and young children at their side. Likewise, to use the same examples, affordable housing and environmentalist campaigns and movements should be cultivated to ensure they understand and strive for related issues that impact children and families.

Perhaps the most promising potential alliance: the public education sector, a behemoth that is funded by $700 billion annually in government expenditures, and can claim the nation’s largest union, the National Education Association. The K-12 sector should be encouraged to help address broader issues that affect children’s education rather than only school-focused changes like modest improvements in teacher pay and contracts. As evidence continues to mount that education outcomes are inseparable from stable families, building a true coalition offers the opportunity for exponential impact.