A Common-Ground New Child Care Agenda That Includes Parents
By Katharine B. Stevens
BLOG
February 14, 2024
Last week, I participated in a Senate event celebrating the release of an outstanding new report on family policy: In This Together: A Cross-Partisan Action Plan to Support Families with Young Children in America.
The report is the product of the Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families project I was honored to be part of, which brought together an unusually diverse group of leading child and family policy experts from across ideologies, disciplines, and industries. We met over the course of a year, both in-person and online, charged with identifying policy solutions to help families with young children flourish.
To no one’s surprise, the group disagreed on a lot. But as the year progressed, we also managed to reach common ground on more than we’d expected at the outset. By the end of the year, we’d roughly agreed on a substantial range of principles and policy priorities, laid out in the project’s culminating report.
As I shared at last week’s event, the “holistic child care agenda” the report describes strikes me as especially notable. Typical of such reports, it highlights the importance of high-quality, affordable, reliable care, especially for low-income parents who are working. But what makes this report exceptional is that it also underscores the role of parents in caring for their own young children.
My panel comments:
The part of the report that I'm most impressed with and excited about is what the report describes as a “truly holistic child care agenda.” What distinguishes this report’s framing of that agenda is that while it highlights the enormous importance of high quality, affordable, reliable care, especially for low-income parents who are working, it also highlights the role of parents in caring for their own young children if that's their preference. Which for many it is.
This emphasis on parents is too often excluded from our policy debates. I think in part that's because we forget tha when we say "child care," what we really mean is the care and raising of young children.
The report's acknowledgement of parents' essential role in that, and on empowering especially lower income parents to spend more time with their own young children if they want to, makes a crucial and new contribution to the debates in this policy arena.
See Also
Report ~ June 14, 2023
Podcast ~ 7-Dec-23
Blog ~ November 30, 2022