“The 2020s represent a truly pivotal decade for the life of American families. If ever there was a time to stand up and say that quality early care and education should be an unconditional right, it’s now. ”
This the second in a two-part series by Elliot Haspel articulating a new child- and family-first agenda for the new decade. Part one was published last week.
Get innovative.
Yesterday’s goals and strategies aren’t up to the task set before us. We need to rethink everything. Innovation can take many forms. It can be technological, as we consider ways that modern technology can be used for good (an exciting recent example is Edquity, which provides college students with emergency aid for unexpected crises that often knock low-income students off track). It can be social and cultural, as we think through new social institutions that can fill the gap created by, for instance, the great “un-churching” of Millennials and Generation Z.
And it can certainly be based in policy, as we consider everything from whether child care should be free to whether we should have a universal basic income. The important aspect is that we step back and put everything on the table, all of our priors and axioms, and challenge them each in turn, deciding which still apply, which need to evolve, and which need a new solution altogether.
It may be useful to zoom in on my area of expertise to provide an illustrative example of what it looks like to seek out wholly new solutions. In my book, Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It, and an article for Romper, I profile middle- and middle-upper-income families struggling with the costs and availability of quality child care. One family in California told me of their struggles to find an opening in a quality child-care center, in preschool (even years in advance), and with available nannies who earn so little that they sometimes can’t afford to keep their jobs and instead choose to stay home. In Richmond, Virginia, where I live, we face a major shortage of child-care providers, especially after the closing of two 75-year-old child-care institutions.
“Quality early care and education should be an unconditional right for all children starting at birth, parents shouldn’t have to pay a dollar for this care beyond their taxes, and early childhood educators should be incredibly well-paid and -supported.”
Relatively more affluent families are discovering a problem that has plagued the poor and working class forever, although today’s economic conditions may be making the problems even worse.
The Center for American Progress found that roughly half of Americans live in “child-care deserts” — census tracts with at least 50 children but no formal child-care provider (center, home-based care, church, etc.) or more than three children for every one available slot. Harvard University’s School of Public Health found that roughly two-thirds of parents report having “only one” or “just a few” viable child-care options. Given that fully two-thirds of families with young children have all available parents working, this is nothing short of a crisis. Child-care deserts are urban, suburban, and rural, in red states and blue, and cut across income levels.
Child-care centers are increasingly expensive to run and cost too much for many parents to afford. Costs in many cities run upward of $10,000 a year or more per child. Oklahoma lost more than 40 percent of its child-care centers and home-based providers from 2005 to 2017, a loss of 21,000 slots as the state’s number of young children increased by 17,000 kids.
My view specifically, for which I make a more detailed argument in Crawling Behind: Our nation should provide every family an annual Child Development Credit of at least $15,000 per child for ages birth to 5. This wouldn’t be a tax credit, but an actual payment to each family.
How can we make such a drastic change in our society and treasury? We’ve certainly done it before, with tremendous results. Between 1910 to 1940, the rate of American teenagers enrolled in high school leapt from 18 percent to 71 percent. Another example: the GI Bill, through which nearly eight million veterans from World War II alone went to college, forever changing our workforce.
Many parents are utterly tapped out and child-care costs are decimating the ability to build wealth and savings. In the most crucial years for brain development that affect children for their entire lives, we pay those responsible for the care and education of our children about the same as parking attendants. Quality early care and education should be an unconditional right for all children starting at birth, parents shouldn’t have to pay a dollar for this care beyond their taxes, and early childhood educators should be incredibly well-paid and -supported.
Learn from international examples.
It’s fair to say that America isn’t exactly leading the way when it comes to family-friendly structures. Finland offers services such as free “family cafes,” where twice a week parents can leave their children with trained caregivers to socialize and learn, and “park auntie” or communal grandparent programs that act as free drop-in playgroups and activities at schools, libraries, and other family-friendly spaces, as Annabelle Timsit wrote in Quartz.
Such endeavors provide worthwhile volunteering opportunities for the growing number of seniors and help to combat the isolation and loneliness — and societal separation — that plagues many countries, urban neighborhoods, and even suburban enclaves and rural areas. Timsit cites a survey showing that one-third of American adults can’t even name all of their grandparents, and this program is aimed in part at connecting generations for the sake of learning from each other — and enriching lives, old and young
In Tel Aviv, all parents with children younger than three get a Digitaf card which enables them to do everything from book well-child pediatrician appointments to find child care to access museums at a discount.
In Kigali, Rwandans come together the last Sunday of every month for the official practice of umuganda, a few hours of communal community service and socializing. And the number of things we could learn from high-performing early childhood systems around the world could fill an entire separate post (and indeed, fill two volumes of a book series on the subject).
This doesn’t mean that the U.S. needs to adopt any of these ideas whole cloth. But we would do well to start learning from our international peers and asking ourselves the questions they’ve asked. The Bernard Van Leer Foundation based in the Netherlands has an initiative called Urban95 that works with six international cities and asks a simple yet radical question: “If you could experience the city from 95 centimeters — the height of a 3-year-old — what would you change?” I don’t know of many people in America asking that kind of question — but we should start.
Why does this type of big thinking matter? Because more than a billion children now live in cities around the world, and these babies, toddlers and caregivers need safe, healthy places to live and explore, where helpful services are available, and where interaction with caring adults is prevalent. “A good start in life for the youngest urban residents is one of the best investments a city can make,” the Van Leer Foundation contends.
Making cities into places where children and family have easy access to adequate public transportation, walkable neighborhoods, and access to parks and green spaces, the arts, and meaningful educational opportunities, the Foundation says. “But family-centered urban planning and design is not only about building more playgrounds. Families are disproportionately challenged by poor public transport, as well as food, healthcare and child-care deserts. Thoughtful urban planning and design can play a major role in addressing such challenges and in giving children a good start in life,” it adds.
In other words, if we want more urban families in the U.S. and globally to thrive, be better educated and employable, and for safe and healthy neighborhoods to prevail, these factors matter.
Go big to go far.
The large-scale changes that need to happen for families and children are happening against the backdrop of an ever-graver existential crisis that goes beyond the unmooring of families: climate change. There’s no question that rapid, radical transformations are going to need to occur in everything from energy generation to consumption patterns. A society with fewer children (a “gerontocracy”) is exquisitely ill-equipped to tackle these challenges and will find itself facing a host of other problems.
Jonathan Last, author of What To Expect When No One’s Expecting, put it this way in The Wall Street Journal in 2013: “Low-fertility societies don’t innovate, because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don’t invest aggressively, because, with the average age skewing higher… they cannot sustain social-security programs because they don’t have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power, because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.”
“The large-scale changes that need to happen for families and children are happening against the backdrop of an ever-graver existential crisis that goes beyond the unmooring of families: climate change. There’s no question that rapid, radical transformations are going to need to occur in everything from energy generation to consumption patterns. A society with fewer children (a “gerontocracy”) is exquisitely ill-equipped to tackle these challenges and will find itself facing a host of other problems. ”
Unless we pay much greater attention to children’s and family issues, all of us, liberal and conservative, wealthy and not, don’t be fooled: We will pay for our lack of foresight. We could pay dearly in terms of economic stability and even national security.
Therefore, the 2020s represent a truly pivotal decade for the life of American families. If ever there was a time to stand up and say that quality early care and education should be an unconditional right, it’s now. If ever there was a time to pursue an aggressive package of worker protections, it’s now. If ever there was a time to test out new family-supporting institutions, it’s now. If ever there was a time to actively steer the cultural ship back into safer waters, it’s now.
This notion might seem like a paradox for progressives who might consider family-first policy as old-fashioned and conservative. To the contrary, embracing and enacting a bold child-and-family-first agenda in public policy and large- and community-scale approaches to these issues is a moonshot for equity. Such an agenda will benefit all of our families, children, and indeed the overall fabric our society, very much including those who do not have children.
In fact, it might save all of us an entire world of problems just ahead.