A state Senate panel advanced a bill Monday that would  to businesses with at least 15 workers, a change from the current threshold of 30 employees.

has seen some changes since it passed the Assembly in February. It had initially lowered the worker threshold to five, to widespread criticism from the business community. Business groups remain opposed, saying that encompassing businesses with fewer than 30 employees would deter hiring and potentially force small businesses to close their doors.

“New Jersey small businesses are already shouldering some of the highest operating costs in the country, including labor, insurance, property taxes, and compliance obligations,” said Amirah Hussain of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce. “Imposing these mandates introduces a new layer of risk and unpredictability.”

Yarrow Willman-Cole, with consumer advocacy group New Jersey Citizen Action, testified in favor of the bill, saying 1.7 million workers are not covered by the state’s current family leave law.

“We passed paid family leave 17 years ago. It took us 10 years to improve it. It should not take another decade to get this right,” Willman-Cole said. “Our laws should reflect our society’s growing caregiving needs. New Jersey is, in fact, not keeping up.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republicans and Sen. Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen), the panel’s chair, voted against advancing the bill.

New Jersey law requires that businesses provide eligible workers with up to 12 weeks of paid leave to bond with a new child or to care for a loved one. Workers pay into the fund that pays out benefits, and the benefits are based on a worker’s earnings. Workers’ jobs are protected until their leave ends.

The committee amended the bill Monday to include employees who have worked for a company for six months — current law says 12 months — and for 500 hours, down from 1,000 hours. The bill would take two years to phase in.

Elizabeth Zuckerman of the state chapter of the National Employment Lawyers Association said that whatever “small burden” the bill puts on an employer is justified to keep parents from choosing between bonding with their children or keeping their job.

“We are a pro-family country. We should support our families by allowing employers or encouraging employers to give employees time off when they need to care for a child or a family member,” Zuckerman said.

Businesses remain concerned that the bill would put an “unsustainable burden” on small employers, said Frank Jones with Big I New Jersey, which advises independent and locally owned insurance agencies.

Jones said he supports the goal of the bill to give more workers access to family leave, but when businesses with 15 employees lose one person, it’s difficult for the remaining workers to juggle the work. He also said it would drive up liability insurance costs. He stressed that paid benefits and job-protected reinstatement should be separate issues.

“The mandatory reinstatement requirement, regardless of business conditions, removes the flexibility small business employers need to survive,” Jones said. “Agencies may be forced to permanently restructure or hire to maintain client service, only to face liability for not reinstating later, even if decisions were made in good faith.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com.

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . .

Vicki Shabo had spent more than a decade advocating for a federal paid parental leave in the only rich country that doesn’t have it. Then in 2021, just when it seemed like it might happen, lawmakers and sent it tumbling back down the list of priorities.

Shabo wracked her brain: Why was this issue that continuously discarded as a nice-to-have and not a need? Advocates had tried so many strategies to help lawmakers understand, but there was one, she realized, that hadn’t yet been tapped.

Politicians kept treating paid leave and other care policies as expendable because our culture treated them like that. And what are some of the best tools to change cultural attitudes? TV and film.

“As a person who grew up in Los Angeles and has always sort of felt the parasocial engagement with favorite television characters and television shows, I was fascinated by the ways in which other issues and causes had used on-screen storytelling to move forward changes in culture and in policy,” Shabo said.

The concept of a “designated driver,” for example, was popularized through American TV shows and films in the late 1980s in an effort to reduce alcohol-induced accidents. Like with paid leave, the policy effort had stalled, so advocates worked to get messages into that featured characters abstaining from drinking if they were driving. From 1988 to 1992, the number of deaths tied to alcohol-related car accidents dropped 25 percent thanks to stricter laws and enforcement, but also a marked that was furthered by on-screen representation.

There was also a meteoric rise in representation of LGBTQ+ characters on screens in the years leading to 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality. A found that 34 percent of adults who had recently shifted their views on LGBTQ+ people said they viewed them more favorably because of characters they watched on TV. Shows like “Modern Family,” “Will & Grace” and “Glee” all played a meaningful role in , . By 2015, Bob Greenblatt, the chairman of NBC Entertainment, said the TV industry “ in advancing the conversation” on LGBTQ+ rights.

That idea gripped Shabo, who realized depictions of caregiving, gender and family dynamics on screens were often still playing on old tropes like the . Data from the Geena Davis Institute, which analyzes gender representation in media, shows that men are still depicted as the breadwinner on screen when in real life it’s more evenly split. Women are often shown either at home or at work but . Child care is rarely mentioned.

Helping viewers see that issues related to work, family and care are not theirs alone to bear, but that other families are dealing with them, too, and systemic support can also help could lay the groundwork for policy shifts, Shabo said. Changing how the public thinks about solutions could be what pushes policymakers to place issues like parental leave higher on the priority list.

“I just thought about the ways in which television and film are representing people’s lives as it relates to work and family obligations, but rarely doing so in a way that reveals the structural components of the individual struggles that people are facing, and often tends to invisibilize and kind of keep private — in the way that people do — challenges with work and family,” she said.

So in 2022, she started to build out , her entertainment initiative with the Washington, D.C.-based progressive think tank New America, to provide research, resources and tip sheets to writers, producers and other creatives about how and why they should shift the caregiving and gender narratives they bring to the screen. The initiative’s newsletter reaches more than 400 creatives, executives, media researchers and others, and Shabo regularly presents her research to Hollywood creatives at public speaking events.

by the initiative shows that 92 percent of viewers say realistic work, family and caregiving themes are important to see on screen, and 65 percent would be more likely to subscribe or keep subscribing to a streaming service that carries programming that shows authentic care and family stories.

“There’s a business case, a creative case and a social impact case to make these stories more visible,” Shabo said.

But moving an entire industry on an issue that lawmakers are still grappling with is a challenge, and an even bigger one at a time of political division. The right has more vocally expressed views on caregiving in recent years, from Vice President JD Vance advocating for to taking over Instagram feeds. Finding child care, taking parental leave or figuring out elder care for an aging family member are viewed by many conservatives as private family problems.

Writers and experts told The 19th that in this political climate studios are nervous about making content the Trump administration may disagree with. And even though Hollywood is largely liberal, executives are risk adverse and less likely to support projects that center authentic gender portrayals. A show like “Jack Ryan,” about a CIA analyst, has a better chance of getting made than a show about women’s health care.

“There is this perception that audiences just want pure entertainment and there are tried and true formulas,” Shabo said.

Kirsten Schaffer, the CEO of Women in Film, an advocacy organization fighting for gender parity in film and television, said there is “definitely” a contraction taking place both in terms of the kinds of stories told and gender representation in the industry because of the administration’s stance on issues related to gender and diversity, equity and inclusion.

“In times of abundance there is more getting made and more openmindedness. In times of scaling back everybody is more risk adverse,” Schaffer said. “Now women in the industry will say to me, ‘That executive who was so committed to having 50 percent women on every director, writer list that they sent out are now relieved that they don’t have to do that anymore.’”

Sasha Stewart, a writer on “Dying for Sex,” a limited series about a woman with Stage IV breast cancer who leaves her husband to explore her sexuality, said she and writer Keisha Zollar initially tried to sell a show about women’s health care that would focus on issues including reproductive care and menopause in a more documentary style. It ultimately was not greenlit.

“It was mostly that all the female execs loved it and then they had to go pitch it to their male bosses,” Stewart said.

“Dying for Sex,” she said, “was packaged in this super marketable sex adventure” and was the show that execs backed. But Stewart said the team worked hard to pull from personal caregiving experiences to build out the story, including talking to oncologists and patient advocates. One advocate they consulted even played a nurse on the show. Stewart, a cancer survivor, leaned on her own experience and that of her husband, who was her primary caregiver.

The story follows protagonist Molly on her journey, but flips some traditional scripts to also focus on her best friend Nikki, who steps in to be her primary caretaker. In the third episode, Nikki is fired from an acting job due to the demands of navigating health insurance, appointments and providing care for Molly.

The writers room for “Dying for Sex” was made up of six women, one nonbinary person and one man, plus two women showrunners. Because so much of the cast and crew were also mothers, the team worked hours that allowed everyone to get home to their families, Stewart said. All of those elements mattered in what ultimately made it on the screen.

“I would love it if somebody in Congress watched the show, or any state or local government,” Steward said. “Maybe more people would try to pass paid family medical leave and other important issues.”

But “Dying for Sex” was the exception. For most writers, Stewart said, the goal is to get on whatever job they can, and then if it’s possible they may try to put caregiving storylines in.

The industry has long been unsustainable for women, women of color and caregivers, an issue that took center stage during the 2023 when creatives walked out of their jobs in response to growing disparities in the industry. Streaming has reshaped TV, especially, leading to smaller writers’ rooms, more limited opportunities and dwindling pay and benefits that have made it more difficult for writers to stay in the business.

As more diverse writers are shut out, it becomes harder for authentic stories about care, gender and family to make it on to screens. Writers of color and women are on TV and film sets. Only about 28 percent of showrunners were women in 2024 and just 8 percent were women of color, the lowest share of women in five years according to . And according to the Writers Guild of America’s , the share of women screenwriters dropped from 45 percent to 33 percent in just one year, from 2023 to 2024.

On screens, some caregiving storylines have cut through, both on streaming and network television. HBO’s medical drama “The Pitt” delves into the often invisible challenges family caregivers face around end-of-life care. On ABC’s “High Potential,” the protagonist is a single mother of three who, in the show’s pilot, negotiates a job contract to ensure it includes child care for her kids.

“Do you have any idea how expensive child care is these days?” she says.

In film, too, one of the year’s big superhero epics, “Fantastic Four: First Steps,” was at its core a that centered not Mr. Fantastic, but Sue Storm, who early in the movie donned a maternity spacesuit without anyone fussing over her or asking her to rest.

Care is on screens more than we realize, it just isn’t often directly addressed, said Zollar, who was also a writer on “Dying for Sex.”

There are still “a lot of people who just aren’t thinking about it, who it’s more out of sight out of mind and it’s not centered in how they build stories,” she said. But more directly referencing issues of family and gender on TV and film can shape attitudes, including those of legislators — the majority of whom are older men — who may not be thinking about topics like paid leave and child care.

“Beacuse we don’t label it or we don’t remind [viewers] that it is an essential part of the story, we can forget its existing in stories. We are not seeing how essential it is to the story itself,” Zollar said.

In Shabo’s work talking to writers about the ways in which they can , she said she’s found that many of them frame their work as thinking about their characters rather than thinking about issues. Luckily, “our set of things we want to see on screen are well positioned because they are so human and personal, and it’s not a stretch to get a story line of somebody trying to navigate work and family,” she said.

It’s medical shows that acknowledge that patients can be workers, too — are they missing work and need leave? It’s workplace shows that don’t shy away from the realities of biases that affect wages and conditions. It’s pregnant characters or parents who wrestle with securing child care to work, men also taking leave and parents who name the caregiving solutions they need.

In Shabo’s view, care and gender issues aren’t “the broccoli to hide” in shows and films. Instead, her research is helping to make the case that “this is actually the meal that audiences want to see.”

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . 

In America, diapers have long been treated as a luxury good rather than a necessity. 

struggle to afford all the diapers they need. A quarter of families miss work as a result, often because they don’t have enough diapers to send with their children to child care. 

It’s a largely invisible issue with enormous consequences for the health of parents and children. Studies have found that diaper need is a greater contributor than food insecurity and housing instability. And when parents don’t have enough diapers, they make do with sanitary pads, rags or other materials. Some report having to leave their children in soiled diapers for extended periods, raising the risk for urinary tract infections and diaper rash. 

So Amy Kadens, who has worked in the diaper space for nearly 15 years, wondered: What if diapers were free for the parents who need them most? For decades, the United States has not had a good answer. So she came up with her own. 

Diaper banks started popping up across the nation in 2011, collecting donations and dispersing diapers to families through a . They are one of the few lifelines for parents. 

Kadens, who co-founded a nonprofit that provides diapers called Share our Spare in 2011, knew that diaper banks often operate with limited staff and resources, and operationally can only address a small percentage of a massive need. Without more government support, they can only get at a slice of the problem. 

Federal assistance programs that help low-income families, such as food stamps and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), have never allowed families to use those funds to purchase diapers. 

“Diaper banks are doing heroic work with very little. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel,” Kadens said. But, “I wanted to continue to sink my teeth into this.”

So Kadens started to work on a solution that could give people the funds to get whatever diapers they needed, without the warehouses to store donations or the teams to get those donations out. 

That solution was Diaper Dollars, a $40 e-card that users get in their email every month. The virtual card comes with a barcode they can scan at checkout at most major retailers, including Walmart, CVS and Walgreens, that will cover the cost of diapers. So far, users in Illinois and Ohio can access the program.

The idea, Kadens said, was to make it as simple as possible, while also giving parents the ability to choose what brands they preferred. 

 “Families have brand loyalty,” Kadens said. “I wanted to keep dignity and choice at the forefront of everything we did.”

The Diaper Dollars team went through months of market research to refine the tech to work well for participants. They didn’t want coupons because there was too much in the system, and gift cards meant users could be limited on where to shop. 

Instead, they landed on a system that allowed them to build out a catalog of diapers at 6,200 retail locations in the country. The bar code on the digital card recognizes the diapers when it’s scanned and deducts the price from the total purchase. That catalog of diapers is monitored daily and updated in case brands come out with new box sizes or products. It also works for online purchases. 

The system does have some limitations. It’s not valid in Amazon or Target, two retailers that don’t yet accept that form of payment. And it also likely only covers a portion of the need: The average family spends about $100 on diapers a month, but families earning a median income can only afford to cover about $65, according to an . It’s also more expensive — parents are paying retail prices plus sales tax (, including Illinois). By contrast, products at diaper banks are donated or sold to the banks from the manufacturer at deeply discounted rates. 

To find participants, Diaper Dollars partners with organizations such as WIC clinics and local hospitals to refer people to the program, which is funded from a mix of philanthropy and financial support from those same partners. Partners establish the eligibility criteria, how long participants can be a part of the program, and whether the stipend will be higher for those with multiple babies.

A pilot program launched in 2023 with 100 people, then in 2024 the Illinois Department of Human Services dedicated $1 million to run its own pilot at a larger scale. Nearly 8,000 people have been served so far, with 10,000 projected by 2026. 

Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton told The 19th that she had been looking for solutions that could support people in the postpartum period, when is high, . Diaper need, specifically, is linked to and considered a potential risk factor for moderate to high maternal depressive symptoms.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2023, the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births. For White women it was 14.5 deaths. 

So when Illinois launched a birth equity initiative to address the needs of postpartum parents, from a home visiting program to better diaper access, it chose to partner with Diaper Dollars. 

“Giving someone a card where they can go to the store of their choice, decide what’s best, that is what’s part of dignity,” Stratton said. “Every woman deserves to bring life into this world safely and with dignity.” 

Brendan Kitt, Diaper Dollars’ program director, said the program was able to offer an operational solution to a problem the state wanted to address but didn’t have a mechanism for. The system works similarly to a universal basic income, where people in need are given a cash stipend, but it’s more targeted. 

“Both for funders and supporters, it’s always a question when you talk to people about where the money goes,” he said. “The fact that we can limit the transactions to the specific needs that we’re trying to serve, I think, is one of the biggest things that legitimized our operation over just giving basic cash assistance.” 

Parents who benefited from Diaper Dollars told the organization in testimonials that they’ve had to turn to using underwear or old T-shirts when they didn’t have the money for diapers, often making decisions between paying for rent or diapers. 

After going through the program, parents reported that the funds gave them the wiggle room to buy their children other essentials or to make them better meals. 

About 90 percent of those who went through the program reported being able to better afford essentials like food, rent and other bills. Some 95 percent felt less stressed about not having enough diapers. 

Joanne Samuel Goldblum, the CEO of the National Diaper Bank Network, which has more than 240 partners nationwide, said a model like Diaper Dollars can address unmet needs, particularly in rural areas where it’s harder for diaper banks to distribute products. 

“The need is really so big, and it’s not going to be addressed through just one sort of answer or one type of program,” Samuel Goldblum said. “It’s really important to have ways to reach people in all sorts of different communities.” 

The Diaper Dollars program has raised about $2 million so far — 45 percent from the state of Illinois, 35 percent from philanthropic donors and 20 percent from grants from community partners. It is now also running in Ohio and expected to expand to Washington soon. 

Kadens’ dream is to take the program to every state. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned and some red states instituted abortion bans, conservative lawmakers have been looking for ways to support postpartum parents. 

In Tennessee, for example, where abortion was banned in 2022, the state in 2024 that allowed families enrolled in Tennessee’s Medicaid program to receive up to a month for the first two years of life. 

Samuel Goldblum said the National Diaper Bank Network has seen more bipartisan support for addressing diaper needs this year “than we’ve ever seen before.”

It should be that simple, Kadens said: “It doesn’t matter if you’re blue or red. Babies need diapers.”

This was originally published on .

A new child tax credit is coming next year, bringing significant changes that will alter how much assistance families receive — and which families can receive it.

With his , President Donald Trump passed a permanent change to the child tax credit spearheaded by congressional Republicans. It goes into effect for families filing income tax returns in 2026. 

The changes increase the total amount of the tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200, and index it to inflation so it grows over the years, a change advocates have championed for years. However, the package also introduces new parameters to qualify for the credit that will directly affect immigrants and the lowest-income families.

For the first time, children and at least one of their parents or guardians will have to have a Social Security number to be able to qualify for the child tax credit. That means an estimated American kids who likely qualify for the credit this year will no longer be able to get it as of next year. 

The tax credit was passed in 1997. Families help cover basic needs like food and also wants, like getting their children into extracurricular activities. 

But for its nearly 30-year history, the credit has been structured in a way that families with the lowest incomes couldn’t get the full amount. With the most recent change, and because the credit phases in depending on income and the number of children you have, families have to earn more before they can claim the full amount.

Democrats had been pushing to change those requirements in recent years so that the lowest-income families could get more of the credit, but Republicans pushed back, saying it . 

Under the new child tax credit, an estimated 19 million children are now blocked from receiving the full amount, compared with 17 million currently, according to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, which has done much of the research and analysis on the child tax credit. The share of children from marginalized backgrounds who are not going to be able to receive the full amount has also gone up for each group:

• 48 percent of American Indian or Alaska Native children (from 45 percent under the current law)
• 45 percent of Black children (from 41 percent)
• 39 percent of Latinx children (from 34 percent)
• 60 percent of children of single mothers (from 55 percent)
• 35 percent of children in rural parts of the country (from 30 percent)

“Families of all sizes are going to need higher levels of income to be eligible for the full credit amount,” said Christopher Yera, a research analyst at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy. The child tax credit is being cut at a time when other vital services for low-income Americans are seeing reduction.

Under the same tax package, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is losing in funding through 2034, affecting eligibility for free school meals and for families that rely on the assistance to put food on the table. Another will be cut from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the next decade. 

“All these families that are going to lose access to basic needs, it would be handy if the folks harmed by that were actually reached by the child tax credit,” said Meredith Dodson, the senior director of public policy for the Coalition on Human Needs who has been lobbying for an expansion of the credit.

Here is a breakdown of how the new child tax credit works and how to access it: 

What is the child tax credit?

The child tax credit is a return parents and guardians receive in their taxes annually for every child under the age of 17 in their care. Stepchildren, foster children, half siblings and descendants, including grandchildren and nieces or nephews, may also qualify if the tax filer is their main caretaker.

Since 2017, the most families could claim from the credit is $2,000 per child, and that amount goes down after a certain threshold. 

Guardians who earn very little or nothing have never been able to claim the full amount of the credit except for , when it temporarily expanded during the pandemic.

What is the new child tax credit amount? 

For the 2025 tax filing year, the child tax credit will increase to $2,200. Eligible parents will see this amount in their tax returns next year. 

The credit will also be adjusted annually to account for inflation beginning in 2026.

Who qualifies for the new child tax credit? 

If filing a single return, parents and guardians must have a Social Security number to access the credit. This is a significant departure from prior years when only the children, but not the adults claiming them, had to have a Social Security number. 

For parents and guardians who are filing jointly, only one parent has to have a Social Security number to qualify. That means some mixed-status households will be able to qualify for the credit. 

To be able to claim a child, the child has to have: 

• Lived with the parent or caregiver for at least six months during 2025 (though there are some exceptions)
• Lived six months or more in the United States
• Have a Social Security number

The shift is part of a years-long effort to limit immigrants’ access to government services. Before 2017, any child living in the United States was eligible for the child tax credit. Then Trump’s tax cuts package in 2017 changed that rule to require that the child have a Social Security number to qualify. Their parents could use an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN, to file their taxes and still be eligible for the credit. Now at least one of those parents will need to also have a Social Security number. 

Families headed by an undocumented single parent, where the child is an American citizen, will not get the child tax credit at all. 

“Instead of actually expanding the [child tax credit], they took it away from millions of kids,” Dodson said. “There are important changes [in the law] but they kind of miss the mark when the whole thing is leaving out the folks who need it the most.”

Does everyone who qualifies get $2,200? 

No. Families who earn less than $2,500 a year do not receive anything. After that, the credit begins to phase in depending on how much families earn. (Keep reading for exact figures)

Some families earn little and owe no taxes. Those families are eligible for only a portion of the child tax credit, up to $1,700 in 2025. That means that even if your tax liability is zero, you can still receive a check for up to $1,700 for the child tax credit.

Then, the credit starts to phase out once families earn too much to qualify for the full amount. For a single filer, the credit starts to decrease for any amount they earn past $200,000; for joint filers the threshold is $400,000. Caregivers earning more than $240,000 for a single filer and $440,000 for joint filers do not receive anything. 

What is the minimum you need to earn to qualify for the full amount? 

According to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University: 

• Families with one child: A single filer needs to earn at least $28,700; joint filers need to earn at least $36,500. 
• Families with two children: A single filer needs to earn at least $33,700; joint filers need to earn at least $41,500.
• Families with three children: A single filer needs to earn at least $38,700; joint filers need to earn at least $46,500. 
• Families with four children: A single filer needs to earn at least $45,800; joint filers need to earn at least $51,500. 

Who doesn’t qualify? 

Children who don’t have a Social Security number don’t qualify. Single parents or guardians who don’t have a Social Security number also don’t qualify, even if the child does have a Social Security number. 

An estimated 28 percent of children will not qualify for the full amount because their parents earn too little. That is up from 25 percent previously, according to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Policy at Columbia. The share of kids who are ineligible because their parents earn too much stays the same, at 4 percent.

The states with the largest share of children who don’t qualify for the full amount are Mississippi (40.6 percent), Louisiana (38.2 percent), New Mexico (38.2 percent), Alabama (35.1 percent) and Kentucky (34.9 percent). 

How do you claim the credit in your taxes? 

Filers must include their children or dependents on Form 1040, the Individual Income Tax Return, and also complete a Schedule 8812.

Is this like the child tax credit in 2021? 

No. In 2021, that to give families up to $3,600, much of it in the form of monthly checks, instead of an annual lump sum. The 2021 expansion allowed the poorest families in the country, those who don’t file income taxes, to access the child tax credit for the first time in its history. Those pandemic-era changes cut the child poverty rate in 2021 to a historic low of 5.2 percent. 

But the temporary changes lasted only a year, and an effort by Democrats to make them permanent failed. The tax credit then reverted back to its usual amount — $2,000 — and the child poverty rate rose to 12.4 percent in 2022. 

Is this a temporary change or a permanent one? 

This is a permanent change. Previous child tax credit expansions have been in place for a set number of years and when it was time for those changes to expire, lawmakers renegotiated the new parameters. 

That is why the child tax credit came up this year — changes put in place in 2017 were set to expire in 2025. 

What the new version does differently is make the changes permanent. Lawmakers can still tweak the credit if they want to later, but there is no set date where the changes will end and the credit will revert back to a former amount. 

“Yes,” the children chorus back.

“I didn’t hear you!”

“Yes!”

Love is at the heart of Through The Night, a revealing and intimate look at family child care, a frequently overlooked but essential component of the child care system. The documentary takes viewers through the daily routines of Dee’s Tots, where Nunu and her husband Patrick work with children ranging from babies to one youth about to age out of subsidy eligibility upon turning thirteen. The title refers to the fact that Dee’s is one of a growing number of 24-hour child care programs that serve children whose parent(s) work overnight; journalist Alissa Quart has described this phenomenon as “.”

Through The Night illustrates the limitations with applying public school frames to child care. While certain K-12 elements are applicable ideals — publicly funded, free to all, decently (though still under-) compensated practitioners — Nunu’s house looks nothing like a classroom.

Let’s be clear: There is inarguably a specialized skill at work here, complex and valuable labor that is not easily replicated. Education is also certainly happening, as Nunu and Patrick ensure their school-aged charges complete their homework, while the little ones are frequently seen with books. But the interactions and informality border on familial, almost a form of village . One can understand why some parents feel more comfortable with family child care over other settings.

There are also relational advantages to family child care that are too often left unremarked. At a local parade, Nunu runs into a former attendee, now a young adult. The young woman appears to be having a hard time: “I need to talk to you,” she tells Nunu, repeating herself. “I really need to talk to you.” How do you quantify the existence of that support, so many years after the direct caregiving relationship ended? It doesn’t show up on our traditional quality measures, but it’s arguably far more life changing than any shiny classroom corner. Harvard’s Center for the Developing Child is clear that damaging “” is defined by the “prolonged activation of stress response systems in the absence of protective relationships.” The Nunu’s of the world are protective relationships.

None of this suggests that there’s anything wrong with the relatively more staid world of formal child care centers, where children tend to stay in narrower age bands and move from one teacher to another as they grow older. That model can and does serve many children well (I mean this: my youngest child attends a center where she’s thriving). What Through The Night confirms, then, is that we should be cultivating a pluralistic child care system, one that empowers parents to select the type of care that works best for them and their children.

Yet, worrisomely, family child care programs like Nunu’s are disappearing at rapid rates:  of the supply of these programs disappeared just between 2005 and 2017, the latest year for which data is available. While there are multiple reasons why, the two primary driving factors seem to be persistently low compensation and the fact that many providers are aging out without a supply of younger providers waiting to take their place. As Nunu puts it, “the state doesn’t give much” when it comes to child care subsidy, while the work hours are nearly nonstop: at more than one point in the movie, I wondered aloud when she ever found the time to sleep. And indeed, sadly, Nunu — who has been running Dee’s for more than 20 years — suffers a serious medical episode over the course of the documentary’s filming.

Though not its main thrust, the other issue Through The Night reveals is how badly our modern economy is harming families. One single mother who uses Nunu’s services works multiple jobs to provide for her children — exhausting herself in the process — yet none of the jobs will give her enough hours to allow her to qualify for benefits like health insurance. She goes to apply for a job at, of all places, a local child care center, and the center director almost apologetically shares that the starting wage is $11.50 an hour. While this is miserably low anywhere, New Rochelle, located in Westchester County, has a cost of living index more than 50% above the national average. For anyone who thinks parents should be able to spend a reasonable amount of quality time with their children, it’s viscerally clear from stories like these that our low wages and job-linked benefits are working against the goal of healthy families.

Through The Night will leave you with a new appreciation for family child care (and gratitude for efforts like the working to bolster this type of care so it is sustainable).

It should also leave no doubt that care and relationships are the foundation of all human development, and that we should cultivate a country where those values, not , lead us forward. As Nunu said in a virtual about the film, when asked about her self-care: “the way I take care of myself is through my kids … I couldn’t see myself not being here for them.”