Our core policy goal must be to reinforce the fundamental bonds of family: elevating — rather than displacing — the vital role of parents in raising their own children, especially during the first, foundational years of development.

A growing chorus of advocates are vigorously pushing for a large expansion of U.S. child care as a “win-win-win” that supports women’s careers and boosts the economy while promoting children’s healthy development. However, a growing body of research on childcare’s impact on children suggests that greater caution is warranted.

The American Rescue Plan was presented as an emergency response to prevent the childcare sector from collapsing. But its primary aims are in fact to advance a longstanding advocacy agenda: leveraging pandemic relief funds to carry out a kind of “trial run” of universal childcare.

We know too little about the child care problem we’re spending billions of dollars to solve. To make good policy in a crucial area, we need more reliable data.

Katharine Stevens and Matt Weidinger propose allowing parents to advance future child tax credits into the earliest years of their child’s life, strengthening families' ability to choose how and by whom their children are cared for during the formative first years of development.

Rather than seeking to outsource young children’s care to paid professionals, policy should aim to better enable parents to spend more time caring for their young children themselves, especially in the critical first five years of life.

Biden’s American Rescue Plan constitutes a substantial scale-up of government spending on nonparental, out-of-home care for young children, which poses an unrecognized risk to the well-being of children and families.

A groundbreaking new study has found that despite enormous public investment, achievement gaps between wealthier and poorer children have remained unchanged over the past 50 years.

A two-generation approach that eliminates silos between current federal programs and reduces regulatory and fiscal barriers to innovation can break the cycle of intergenerational poverty — advancing opportunity for two generations simultaneously.

Eighty years ago today, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the 37-page Social Security Act (SSA) of 1935 into law, enacting the most fundamental change in social policy in America’s history. But the program's original focus on children’s human flourishing has largely been lost.

Building new bureaucracies or tacking preschool programs onto failing public schools are not the correct strategies for moving forward. Instead, we should target funding at the most vulnerable children, strengthen existing federal programs rather than create new bureaucracies, and promote research and innovation to raise the bar for action.

State leaders have an extraordinary opportunity to build effective early childhood systems right, from the ground up. Here is what they should do — and what they shouldn't — to accomplish that.

The well-being of America’s most vulnerable kids is crucial to both their life chances and the success of our country as a whole. Failing to act on this issue condemns millions of our youngest citizens to a bad start that many can never overcome.