Joe Waters: Katherine Prince is the vice president for strategic foresight at KnowledgeWorks. KnowledgeWorks is a close partner of ours at Capita, working to explore how trends are impacting the well-being of children and families. We’re here today to talk specifically about child care as infrastructure and in particular as we have heard a lot this year about how we might build back better. There has been a real push to position child care as infrastructure. I’m excited to talk with Katherine about this topic today.
Katherine, how does this relate to what we were seeing in 2019 with the first 10-year forecast that we did together, looking at those social, technological, economic, environmental, and political trends impacting children and families? What did we say then and what are we seeing now?
Katherine Prince: In that forecast, we explored five domains affecting the futures of young children and families, one of which was care. In that forecast term, we put care at the core. We were really seeing that we’re already in new economic and employment realities and along with the aging of the population, we’re creating tensions related to caregiving, both in structures and in people’s values. We’re seeing that affordable and accessible care for families was already a major challenge for many families, even though it plays a central role in allowing people to participate in the economy and fulfill the basic desire to form families. We were anticipating that the parents’ need for child care would diversify as work schedules become less predictable and as we have shorter, even ephemeral relationships between employers and employees. We also found in that forecast that more and more families would be supporting both older and younger relatives as the population aged.
Enter COVID-19. It upended so many things, including child care as we knew it, really in a sense accelerating a lot of the things we’d been looking at in the forecast and just adding new immediate-term complications. It disrupted work in many ways – many parents who could work from home were juggling child care and job duties simultaneously or flexing their job schedules in order to provide child care. Many parents, especially women, also dropped out of the workforce to care for their families. Even this past summer, a census bureau survey showed that 3 out of 10 adults with young children, a total of 6.6 million adults, had removed their kids from childcare and then compensated for what that meant for their jobs in various ways, from cutting hours to taking vacation or sick time, or maybe leaving their job or not looking for one. Even in the middle of September, we’re seeing nearly 1.6 million mothers of kids under 17 be absent from the labor force. I think COVID-19 really shed a harsh light on what we had seen in the forecast – that we don’t place a lot of value on caregiving in our society and that we have some real structural issues that we need to resolve as we look ahead.
Joe Waters: Great. As we’re starting to look ahead, Katherine, in the near term, we’re seeing a lot of attention on child care as an issue, particularly in the various stimulus and Build Back Better bills that are before Congress. Are we starting to see a discussion of childcare infrastructure?
Katherine Prince: We are. I think it’s following on from the sense that we’re facing a crisis of care. We’ve been seeing childcare centers have trouble staffing. Again, as of mid-September, employment in childcare centers was down 126,000 positions, because workers were leaving for higher-paid jobs. It’s a more than 10 percent decline compared to pre-pandemic levels of employment in the sector. That’s in the context of childcare workers typically earning about $12 an hour. Some centers are still closed or have reduced enrollments. We’re still navigating COVID outbreaks, so this is the biggest challenge that the sector seems to be facing, how to raise pay and then how to have enough facilities and enough care in the right place for folks’ needs.
The government is stepping up and trying to create a more sustainable approach to caregiving in this country. That is pushing child care more in the direction of infrastructure. These efforts are building off the baseline of the Child Care and Development Fund, allocating about $8.8 million to subsidize the costs of child care for eligible children of working parents, but it hasn’t been enough. A recent Treasury Department report outlined what it called ‘critical failures by the private sector to provide high-quality care at affordable prices.’ That report made the case that the federal government just has to do more to help families care for their children.
The government has been doing more and trying to do more. The American Rescue Plan allocated $39 billion in relief for the child care industry, most of it for stabilization funds, including boosting worker pay. However, even in mid-September, only 14 states had really set it up for childcare centers to be able to apply for funding.
The Biden Administration has been trying to do yet more. It had put forward a $3.5 trillion plan to expand social safety programs, which would have allocated $450 billion to federally-backed child care programs. It also would have aimed to reduce costs for low- and middle-income families, increase caregivers’ wages, and provide free kindergarten and pre-kindergarten to all three and four-year-olds – that’s been cut. In recent days, the package has been trimmed down to about $2.3 trillion, which is going to mean that democratic leaders will need to scale back those plans for supporting children and families, in all likelihood. The mood is still afoot and it’s still an ambitious effort to bring that infrastructure lens into the childcare sector.
Joe Waters: Infrastructure certainly brings up long-term thinking in my mind, as well as a long-term investment. When we build out something as infrastructure, it generally takes many years to do it effectively. The National Interstate Highway System is just one example. How might we use the tools of long-term thinking of strategic foresight to think about child care as a critical infrastructure issue and really build not just for the current crisis but for future needs?
Katherine Prince: The friction that we’re experiencing now really brings to mind a future thinking tool called the Pace Layer Framework, which is really helpful for us to think about all the layers of society and how they interact in order to lengthen our perspective on issues such as how we should bring care to families now and in the future. The Pace Layer Framework was developed by Stewart Brand. It really encourages people to stretch out what we see as the now, so that we think about future possibilities, not just next year and five years on the scale of decades or centuries, even millennia, and then to think about how we might lengthen the time span that we hold in mind when we make decisions or set strategies. Its core idea is that different parts of society act and change at different speeds. Brands called these various parts of society ‘pace layers’. The top layer, the fastest moving one is fashion and art; it moves in minutes and months. It’s a layer that is characterized by experimentation and fads, sometimes movements. Examples include things like the recent popularity of gender reveal parties or the resurgence of ‘mom jeans. This layer can also include more serious things. For example, in 2020 activists reclaimed a Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia, turning it into an emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement with the art and the activities that they staged at it.
The commerce layer moves a little more slowly; it brings form to the ideas and innovations that get generated at that fashion layer and hopefully, in a way, that helps society to benefit from them. Examples of the commerce pace layer might be the spread of drop-in child care, or a trend among some child care centers to add enrichment activities like soccer or ballet for kids to participate in while they’re at the center, instead of on their parents’ time.
Then, you mentioned the infrastructure layer. That’s the next one and as you alluded to, it moves slower. It costs a lot and it brings many benefits, but those are not immediately realized. Big investment requires patience and waiting to see the payoff. So, yes, transportation, energy, and education all operate at that infrastructure level.
Then we get slower still with a governance layer. It’s supposed to move slower to serve societal good and provide stability. As explained in a blog post for the Long Now Foundation that applied the Pace Layer Framework to education with support from KnowledgeWorks, the constraints of governance, ‘forced reflection and pause, which can be paralyzing or empowering’. I think we can feel that tension at play at the moment.
The culture layer is slower still to change. It includes language, religion, our enduring behaviors, and social norms. Those things tend to provide constancy over long periods of time; they change more slowly. Lastly, nature moves the slowest of all. The Earth, the human body, the bodies of other animals, and the plants on the planet take millennia to change.
Brand’s assertion was that when a society is healthy, each of these pace layers is, to quote, “allowed to operate at its own pace, safely sustained by the slower levels below and kept invigorated by the live layer levels above.” The brand introduced the idea of slippage between these layers, which describes how the different layers interact and how they rub against each other as society adapts. I think of this as the movement of geological layers over time. With the pace layers, the fast and slow usually balance each other out; the fast layers are going to be proposing new ideas and approaches and they’ll cause disruption, but they’ll also cause learning. In turn, the slower layers preserve things we value. We set up operating constraints and they’ll integrate some shifts from the faster layers to change at their relatively slow pace. Sometimes, we see slippage between the pace layers, which creates friction. Maybe something happening in one layer might try to force another layer to move faster or slower than it typically does. To illustrate how this idea of pace layers can play out, I’ll highlight the recent controversy over ‘Instagram Kids’, which would have created an Instagram experience for kids younger than 13.
As a company, Facebook clearly operates in the commerce layer of society, but the fashion and governance layers have been players. They have been getting involved in ways that have put the development of Instagram Kids on pause. There were activities in the governance layer coming out of the civic sphere that was raising concern and getting that public attention. In April, a letter from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood was signed by 99 health advocates to express concern about the platform’s targeting of younger children. More recently, a Wall Street Journal exposé claimed that Facebook knows how damaging Instagram can be for teen girls’ mental health. These efforts were attempting to slow down change, they’re trying to bring more consideration to the proposed development. They use that fashion layer to catch the attention to propose and report on new ideas. Now we’re seeing that there have been and will be more senate commerce subcommittee hearings about Instagram Kids. That’s showing how the formal government, which is part of the governance layer, is stepping in to slow down the pace of change while the concerns about kids’ health and safety can hopefully be worked through.
Joe Waters: How can this framework be useful as we think about positive change? That’s an example of how things might slow down based on the interaction of the pace layers, but how might we use the Pace Layer Framework to help think about and drive positive change – in this case for children and families?
Katherine Prince: The tool helps us really deepen our understanding of how systems are operating. It can help us think about where to intervene to create the kind of results that we want. Maybe we might have a tendency to try to make quick wins high up on the pace layers when really, we need to be thinking further down to achieve bigger and more lasting change. The tool can also help us extend our frame of reference so that we’re taking a longer view of the impacts and decisions that we make together today. This means thinking through if we do this, these other things could happen, and it might impact other parts of society in these ways. It can help us consider unintended consequences and the whole complexity of our lives together.
The tool can also help us think about new sources of innovation and problem-solving – is there a way to address a challenge or pursue a goal that maybe we don’t see from just one lens, but if we look at it from the lens of another layer, we get a fresh perspective. If we look at it with that longer view, we may see something we couldn’t see before.
Then, it helps us think about, since there are these many parts of society, how can they support one another in achieving our stated aims? Just as an example, we were working with this tool in the context of education in the U.S. and came to see that the commerce layer was really dominating what is a really important form of social infrastructure. In education’s case, the rapid introduction of new educational technologies and pedagogical approaches was outstripping the capacity of the other pace layers to engage effectively and exert their influence; that was pushing education to adopt values and purposes that serve business interests, but not society as a whole.
Joe Waters: Katherine, what skills or habits might we need to develop to think along these various pace layers? It’s very easy to be distracted by the fashion art layer. How do we think at the infrastructure layer, for example?
Katherine Prince: I think one consideration is to think about what kinds of outcomes we’re wanting and then how much time they can take. Really, extending our perspective in many cases. Instead of saying, “in the next two or three years, I’d like to see this happening for kids,” to realize that some of the most supportive changes that build the most resilience for families are on that decade-plus timescale. We need to temper our sense of outcomes, and what we expect – we just need more patience, which means we can still have data and course corrections and lots of feedback loops along the way, but not to expect something that really is infrastructure, to pay commerce or fashion-level benefits.
Joe Waters: How might we apply the Pace Layer Framework to the current discussion about childcare infrastructure here in the United States?
Katherine Prince: My sense really is that child care has been, in many ways, operating at the commerce layer. It’s very tied to employment. Each family or individual has had to find child care that works for their budget and their work schedules. Many child care centers operate as businesses or are aiming to bring in revenue for the individuals who run them if it’s home-based care. Of course, they’re regulated, but they’re trying to generate income; they’re relying on direct payment from families, they are directly playing in that commerce space. Sometimes, there’s child center-based care available as a benefit of employment, but only about 4 percent of employers subsidize that. Then, of course, if a person leaves employment, the benefit goes with it. Child care is expensive, typically. It’s often hard to come by, especially for infants. We’re seeing families spend about 13 to 16 percent of their income on child care, which is more than they spend on groceries and almost double what the government thinks is affordable. Many family members are providing on-care or low-paid child care to enable others to do their jobs. It’s been a patchwork with each family funding for themselves and just trying to balance the equation of how much funds to expend on child care in relation to the income they can earn, often relatively early in their careers, where you’re trying to maintain some quality of life at the same time. That sometimes results in parents, as we’ve seen with the pandemic, just leaving the labor force and then maybe also losing access to the health insurance and retirement benefits that might have come along with their income. Even the treasury report I alluded to led to the U.S. secretary of the treasury, Janet Yellen calling child care a textbook example of a broken market; it’s just not working for it to be in that commerce layer.
With the federal efforts to extend support for child care, that’s literally trying to push it into the infrastructure layer. They’re using that language: ‘child care should be infrastructure’ and ‘there should be more of a shared societal responsibility for it’. That’s reflecting a deeper, slower moving shift, a cultural change in values that are accepting more of that sense of collective versus individual responsibility for child care. It’s certainly not universally shared, however. Even among democrats, there is disagreement as to the extent of the federal government’s responsibility, but that cultural shift has pushed into the governance layer enough for them to try to regulate and support child care at that infrastructure level of the pace layers. That promise is to provide some near-term relief while also making changes in systems of family support over that scale of decades that we’ve been talking about. I think having child care be at that infrastructure layer would also help provide more resilience. It would maybe in that case be less buffeted by changes in the commerce layer and be able to incorporate selected, meaningful disruptions from the slower-pace layers, while also bringing in new approaches from the faster layers.
There’s always still going to be pressure, even if it gets into the infrastructure layer. If we really treat it as infrastructure, there are still going to be things that buffet it, but we may be in a better place for childcare systems to ride out those waves of change, in particular as employment continues to shift. More of us are working in less traditional ways as waves of displacement occur as a result of increasing technological automation – the commerce layer is likely to push on child care, potentially asking infrastructure to flex in ways that it might be hard-pressed to do or to do quickly enough. Other forms of disruption and strain will pressure it, too. We’re expecting to see significant climate disruption. Child care, even as infrastructure, will still probably struggle to adapt to immediate pressures as well as longer-term changes in the environment, but if we leave it to the commerce layer and continue to rely on those individual and patchwork solutions, we’re going to undermine families’ attempts to weather both those personal and those larger-scale disruptions.
Joe Waters: Great. What is the promise here? What might we hope for by adopting this Pace Layer Framework to think about a critical infrastructure challenge that we face, particularly around childcare?
Katherine Prince: Applying the Pace Layer Framework to child care can really help us challenge ourselves to extend and broaden our perspectives, to look further out in time than we often do as we consider child care solutions and systems; to really stretch our thinking out long-term. It can also help us consider others’ perspectives and needs as we navigate tensions around child care – where child care should be in society, who is responsible for it, and how it should operate. I think the tool can also help us consider the complexity of how the many societal layers that are impacted by and impact child care come together to balance interests across them. It can help build empathy as well as help reframe current situations, current issues, and current goals and identify some new solutions.
Watch the video here.