A third of American workers now have access to some form of government-issued paid leave — the biggest share ever. 

The United States is one of only a handful of countries that doesn’t have a federal paid leave policy offering workers paid time off after the birth of a child or to seek medical care, for example, and access to unpaid leave is only about . In that dearth of federal action, states have moved ahead to pass since 2002, which now cover a third of the population. Ten of those were passed in the past decade, as support for paid leave ; three go into effect this year.

Some states’ paid family and medical leave programs expand beyond time off to care for a new baby or to get medical treatment. Last year, Colorado expanded its paid leave program to include an for parents of babies in the neonatal intensive care unit. In Oregon, also qualify for paid leave. Connecticut offers paid leave if you’re serving as an .

According to research from the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonprofit advocacy group, the 14 laws now cover 32 percent of private-sector workers, an estimated 46 million people. Of those covered, a third are women, a third are men and another third are parents. Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders have especially benefited — 55 percent have paid leave through their state programs, as do 41 percent of Latinx workers due to a concentration of these communities in states that have enacted programs. 

Paid leave laws are in 13 blue states and the District of Columbia: California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Oregon, Colorado, Maryland, Delaware and Minnesota.

Though other workers may receive paid leave from their employers, workers of color — and especially women of color — are less likely to be in jobs that offer any paid leave. That’s one of the reasons advocates have pointed to a state or federal system as an equalizer that could improve access. 

“All workers will at some point need paid leave, whether for their own health or to care for loved ones. But when access is not guaranteed, the workers least likely to have paid leave also tend to be those who are likely to face greater health and caregiving challenges and have fewer financial resources to fall back on,” the National Partnership for Women & Families noted in its report. 

Low-wage workers, , have to paid family and medical leave from their employers than do high-wage workers.

“This creates a double bind for low-wage workers who often can’t take off unpaid time because they lack savings or might lose their job if they do. This inequity especially impacts women who are more likely to be low-wage workers and at the same time do two-thirds of unpaid caregiving,” said Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior fellow at the National Partnership for Women & Families and one of the authors of the report. 

Large paid leave campaigns in six more states — Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Virginia — could, if passed, bring the share of American workers covered to 44 percent, the national partnership estimated.

The most imminent of those is a proposal in Virginia. Last month, lawmakers in the Virginia House and Senate that are likely to be signed by Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who called for passing a state program in her State of the Commonwealth speech this year. 

In Pennsylvania, lawmakers are hoping to reignite momentum behind a paid leave bill that has support. Lawmakers in and are also considering a bill this session. And both Nevada and New Mexico have come close: In Nevada, a paid leave bill passed in the legislature last year was by Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo and in New Mexico, a paid leave bill passed the House last year .

At the federal level, part of the momentum of the past decade has come from men — — pushing for more paid leave access. During the Biden administration, the United States got to passing a federal paid leave policy before it was removed from a spending bill. Now during the Trump administration, lawmakers made permanent a who voluntarily offer paid leave to certain employees. 

So while the issue does have bipartisan support, Republicans and Democrats remain at odds about what form a federal paid leave policy should take. At a , U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, a Pennsylvania Republican who has a newborn, said his wife is able to care for their daughter because of her company’s paid leave policy. 

“We know that this practice makes an important difference for many in our community. Unfortunately, paid family leave has been out of reach for millions of Americans who are hoping to grow their families,” he said. 

But while state bills are “encouraging,” Mackenzie said it is also “difficult for state administrators and private-sector benefits managers to navigate the patchwork of paid leave policies across different states. While one program may work in Maryland, Alabama likely has its own workforce challenges to manage. One state’s approach should not be forced upon another’s workforce, or vice versa.” 

For paid leave, he said, “there is no silver bullet solution.” 

Dawn Huckelbridge, the director of Paid Leave for All, a national advocacy organization pushing for federal paid family and medical leave, said she is “heartened to see there is bipartisan interest and dialogue” on the subject. 

But, she added, “there are states that will likely never pass paid leave, so as long as there isn’t a federal guarantee, this is going to create a system and have and have nots that will just continue to grow inequities.”

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . .

Kela King had two children by the time she was 17 years old. She dropped out of high school, received her GED, and for 13 years has struggled to complete her college degree as a working mother.

When King, now 35 and a mother of three, failed two classes last year because she was focused on her children’s needs, she wondered if she was ever going to graduate. But with the support of the student parent success program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee — which helped her navigate her studies while working — she��hopes to walk across the stage in December 2026.

“I’m building this legacy,” King said. “Even if I don’t get to where I want to be, you’ll be able to see the legacy just in the building.”

For King and many other student parents, attending college can be a very tough road. Obstacles like financial stress, balancing coursework with family responsibilities and finding affordable, quality child care make it difficult for students raising children. 

Parents make up about and according to , which provides research and resources for pregnant and parenting students. They represent a diverse population, including a significant share of , , and individuals from Student parents face especially steep challenges and are than those without children to leave college before completing their degrees.

These students have unique needs, and a growing body of points to that colleges and universities can take to help them flourish and graduate. Successful practices include: Offering child care on or near campus with financial assistance to cover or subsidize the cost; providing access to food and other basic necessities; building a student parent support center; and creating opportunities for peer community building. 

There’s a key — Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) — that helps colleges and universities support students like King by subsidizing child care and funding support services for student parents. But the program has come under threat recently. Last year, the federal government abruptly CCAMPIS grants for about a dozen colleges that depend on the funding. 

The future of the program’s funding has been precarious for some time, but in February, after facing potential elimination under the Trump administration for months, Congress approved the final 2026 federal budget, maintaining CCAMPIS funding at , the same as it was in 2025. This brought relief to some higher education institutions, but not for the colleges that saw their grants terminated.

Financial cuts to programs that support student parents will certainly hamper efforts to serve these students — especially through child care — but advocates say there are actions campus leaders can do to help them persist and thrive.

“Child care is huge, but it’s not the only thing that’s necessary for parenting students to be successful,” said Nicole Lynn Lewis, executive director of , a nonprofit that supports student parents in college. “We also want to see, across the institution, real intentionality around supporting these students. And sometimes that’s low hanging fruit at no cost or low cost.” 

For example, if a higher education institution simply shows student parents in its marketing material, it would send a message “that I belong here,” she said.

While more research on outcomes is needed, said Theresa Anderson, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, some have shown that initiatives such as a student parent resource coordinator, regular peer meetings and monthly stipends help by increasing graduation rates and offering a . Anderson has also found in her that parents who receive a college degree typically earn more than those of similar socioeconomic status without a degree, which suggests the importance of bolstering support for student parents. 

The question for colleges and universities is how to translate research on what helps student parents thrive into reality — and in ways that suit their specific type of institution. About half of student parents attend community colleges, while 20% attend private, for-profit institutions and a combined 29% attend public or private nonprofit institutions, according to by the SPARK Collaborative. They tend to have as high or higher grade point averages than their non-parent peers, but they are also to graduate from college within six years than those peers. 

Changing that dropout rate is one of the goals of Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland. Over the past four years, it has stepped up its services for student parents. The institution’s progress includes big-ticket items such as reopening its child care facility — which closed during COVID — and starting a that offers scholarships and wraparound services, including case management and academic coaching. Howard has also offered changes resulting in smaller, but still significant benefits, such as priority class registration.

For its efforts, the college last year was awarded a by Generation Hope. The seal, which the organization has given to 22 higher education institutions and nonprofits, recognizes “exemplary, measurable efforts in supporting parenting students.”

Celeste Ampaah, 23, and the mother of a 5-year old, said she first felt unseen on the Howard college campus. “I didn’t even know that there were any other parents on campus, especially people that were my age,” she said. And she wasn’t aware of the resources the college offered. 

She was leery about letting her professors know she had a child, afraid it would seem like she was asking for special privileges or making excuses.

“I just stopped going to class if I had a hardship,” she said. 

But that changed once she connected with Howard’s resources for student parents and became a parent scholar. Now she proudly carries the backpack that proclaims “Student Parent” below the Howard logo and reaches out to other parents. 

“I’m not ashamed anymore,” she said.

Priority class registration is one benefit Ampaah says is an enormous help. “Being able to plan my classes and work around my schedule before everyone else jumps on board feels like a luxury,” she said. 

There is room for improvement, she noted, including displaying resources for parents on the college’s website more prominently, and training faculty and staff to be more aware of student parents on campus and the difficulties they face.

Some of the obstacles that affect student parents, such as transportation costs, also impact many low-income students, so the goal is to connect those students with the services already available, said Maya Mechenbier, a fellow at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University who co-authored a recent of the needs of student parents in Maryland. 

In an interview for the study, Mechenbier recalled, “one mother shared that having to walk across campus or use public transportation while quite pregnant was a big barrier for her. Had she known about transportation subsidies sooner, she might have not had to drop out at that time.”

For that reason priority parking for student parents is a welcome benefit, something California Polytechnic State University (CalPoly), a four-year university that is part of the California State University system offers. 

The university has also garnered the FamilyU Seal for its parent-friendly services. Much of the institution’s progress has been led by Tina Cheuk, an associate professor of education, who was a student parent herself when in graduate school at Stanford University.

It was about a decade ago, and she felt completely isolated, Cheuk said. She recalled asking for a quiet place to breastfeed her daughter — a lactation room — and being told it simply wasn’t possible.

She threatened to file a case with the U.S. Office of Civil Rights and ultimately received the space she needed. And that started her on the road to become a student parent advocate at Stanford and later at Cal Poly.

A student parent at Cal Poly won’t run into Cheuk’s problem today, as the university now offers . There is also on-site child care and a coordinator for student parents within the student affairs office. In addition, there are community events for families — and at graduation, children receive some regalia and walk across the stage with their parents.  

Some of these supports are mandated under California state law, which that public colleges and universities give student parents priority registration and provide a “clearly visible” on the institution’s website outlining resources available to such parents, as well as a designated support person.

The law, Cheuk said, “serves as a minimum. But if all can meet that minimum, that is a signal to potential students that there are resources.”

More states and colleges are recognizing that in order to serve student parents, it’s important to about their lived experiences. But one of the sticking points around serving this population, experts say, is simply identifying who they are.

There is no federal mandate to collect such numbers and a tool that many colleges used — a question on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form that asked if students had dependents — when the form was simplified for the 2024-25 academic year. 

While the FAFSA number wouldn’t have included international students or those who didn’t apply for financial aid, it was one data point.

“Without such data, it’s difficult to understand the characteristics of those students, which programs they’re in, and where they’re facing roadblocks and barriers,” Anderson said.

Five states — California, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon and Texas — requiring student parents to be counted. The Urban Institute has awarded grants to 23 higher education institutions, including Cal Poly, through its , as an effort to develop best practices for colleges to identify student parents in their data systems. 

For example, Cheuk said students could be asked if they have dependents when filling out an intake enrollment; California community colleges already do that during their application process. 

Some colleges — even ones that implement best practices — are struggling in the face of rollbacks. UW-Milwaukee has had an on-site child care facility for more than 50 years and a longstanding wraparound and scholarship program aimed at serving student parents, said Rachel Kubczak, the manager of UW-Milwaukee’s who has been working with student parents at the institution for the past decade. She is also King’s advisor.

The child care facility is still operating robustly, but when UW-Milwaukee last year, Kuczak said, many students had to scramble to cover the child-care subsidies they lost through that program or simply reduce their child-care hours, which affected their ability to work and go to classes.

In addition, the university’s wraparound program was supported through one generous grant from 2005 that ended in 2021. That left Kubczak, as the only full-time staff member, struggling to figure out how to serve these students. 

But even without the funding she needs, Kubczak offers crucial types of support — often partnering with other campus centers — such as welcome orientations, coffee and pastry mornings, parenting workshops and assistance in navigating the system.

And she can chalk up some wins, she said, such as getting diaper changing decks in most bathrooms on campus, as well as safe and comfortable lactation rooms. 

There are also success stories, like King’s, Kubczak added. King, who is majoring in social work and minoring in American Sign Language is on track to graduate this year.

“As a teen mom, I’ve been counted out by family members saying I couldn’t do it,” said King. But Kubczak “pushed me and supported me.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Kela King’s job and marital status. She’s currently married and working at a nonprofit.

Sarah Newberry Moore had long believed that motherhood would mark the end of her career sailing at the world championship level. A five-time national champion, she didn’t know of many women who had made it to the Olympics as mothers, even as many of her male peers competed at the highest level while raising children.

But then COVID hit, and her sailing competitions — and the 2020 Olympic Games — were . As the months went on, she realized she didn’t want to stop sailing, even though she wanted to have a baby. The widespread lockdowns had presented a rare window in which she didn’t have to choose. She recalled thinking: “Who made this rule? I’m going to do both.” In 2021, her son Iren was born. And then, three years later, he was at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris to cheer his mom on as she competed with the U.S. Sailing Team. 

Women have been competing in the Olympics when they were first granted access to participate, but it’s taken decades for pregnancy and parenthood to be acknowledged as a natural part of an elite athlete’s path — and policy still hasn’t caught up. 

Though Newberry Moore said it’s becoming more common to bring children to the Olympics — and she is in touch with several athlete-mothers competing in this year’s Milano Cortina Games who are doing so — she described how hard it was to bring Iren to the Olympics in 2024.

The children and families of athletes have historically . Athletes who stay in the Olympic Village typically have their room and board covered; those who want to bring their kids along need to make — and pay for — other arrangements for housing accommodations and child care.

During the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, for the , a was set up where parent athletes could visit with their children in the “nappy/diaper-wearing age.” There was also dedicated private space for breastfeeding. But Newberry Moore’s sailing competition was in Marseilles, not Paris, and the satellite Olympic Village where she was staying didn’t have a nursery. So Newberry Moore could only see Iren when her husband could bring him to visit; she would leave the hotel and give him a hug, and then return. He couldn’t go to her room and it was incredibly hot, so their visits were brief. 

“If my husband had been allowed to bring my kid into the room of the hotel, I could have spent actual recovery time with him,” she said. Newbery Moore in the Olympics, but skipped the closing ceremony — which the rest of her teammates attended — to reunite with her family. Out of the 13 athletes on the U.S. Sailing Team, she was the only mother.

For the 2026 Winter Olympics, there will be even fewer options for athlete parents. There will be during The Games. A spokesperson from the International Olympic Committee confirmed that there will also be no permanent breastfeeding facilities within the Olympic Villages, but “a certain number of bookable spaces will be made available in each Village, which may be used for breastfeeding, among other purposes.” 

These spaces matter a great deal for Olympic athletes because many are inclined to bring children along, rather than be separated for weeks, or in some cases, months. For breastfeeding mothers in particular, these spaces are not a luxury but a necessity.

As an Olympic medalist and mother of three, Alysia Montaño has been a vocal advocate for women in sports for years. She founded For All Mothers+ (formerly &Mothers), a nonprofit focused on dismantling the motherhood penalty that women face in all industries, including sports, and adopted better standards to help address it. 

Her organization provides for athlete moms — including the “Bring the Babies Changemaker Grant” — a $5,000 grant intended to help cover “essential family travel costs” which can include airfare, lodging and child care. Newberry Moore was a grantee in 2024, and this year, five athletes competing in the Milano Cortina Games have received funds from the grant.

The grants are “a crutch for a broken system,” Montaño said. While interviewing some of the grantees gearing up to compete in Italy to learn more about their experiences, she said, it became clear that the funding plays an important role “in alleviating maternal and child stress. Reflecting on her conversations with athlete moms, she said, that “being able to stay with their children is the very best support system so that our athletes can go out and be the very best they can be.”

Kelly Curtis, a skeleton athlete competing in this year’s Winter Olympics with the USA Bobsled & Skeleton (USABS) Team, is one of the grant recipients. In an with Montaño, Curtis explained that she regularly brings her daughter, Maeve, to competitions. “She comes with me wherever I go,” she said. For the 2026 Winter Games, Curtis will forgo staying in the Olympic Village, because she doesn’t want to be separated from her daughter. Instead, she will be staying off-site at a hotel. The cost is 700 euros a night, for 17 nights, she told Montaño, noting that she has to pay fully out of pocket. 

Tabitha Peterson Lovick, a member of the U.S. Olympic Curling Team and another grant recipient, Montaño that having a “little bit of baby time” will be good for her mental health during her competitions. She is staying in the Olympic Village, but her daughter, who is traveling with her husband and in-laws, is staying off-site. “I really want to have that time with my baby, even if it’s just 30 minutes.”

Kaillie Humphries Armbruster, an Olympic bobsledder, and another member of the USABS Team, called the grant “a huge relief,” in an with Montaño, and explained why it’s so important for her to have her baby there. “When I go to race, it will have been hours since I’ve seen him,” she said. “He could care less how I do every single time, but he’s just so excited. He like runs over and he just — he wants Mom. And I’m excited to end an Olympics and have that.”

For mom Olympians, challenges go beyond child care

Women’s participation in the Olympics has been over the decades, but it wasn’t until the 2024 Paris Olympics that The Games achieved among athletes.

While it’s not uncommon for men to have both professional athletic careers and children, it is a much harder road for women who must pause their training and competition schedule to have children. According to an ongoing , conducted by For All Mothers+ and Carleton University’s Health & Wellness Equity Research Group, 73% of mom athletes experienced a decrease, termination or pause in funding related to pregnancy or motherhood, and 72% of respondents reported needing additional income or employment outside of their sport to support their family. 

The key goal for gathering this data, Montaño said, is “to influence policy changes more broadly across the sports industry. There are biases with the motherhood penalty that we are looking to shift.” It’s bigger than sports though, she explained. She’d like to see the narrative change for all mothers in all industries. “The podium moments for athlete mothers are podium moments for all mothers.”

Montaño has publicly shared about her own when she was pregnant in 2014.

In 2022, after several high-profile Olympic athletes, including Montaño, Allyson Felix, Kara Goucher and Elana Meyers Taylor the disparity, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) directed the National Governing Bodies (NGB) of each sport to for pregnancy and postpartum time periods, allowing athletes who announce they are pregnant to have their stipends and for up to a year after the birth of a child. 

Newberry Moore said these provisions are game changers. “It makes it possible for you to imagine returning, and it creates the climate needed for retaining female athletes.”

A number of athletes have continued pushing for change beyond those provisions. 

In 2022, Felix and Montaño, two world-class American track and field Olympians, started an initiative to in the in Eugene, Oregon. Felix, who went on to be a , has said that the is “the biggest barrier” to women continuing to compete at a high level. 

Kristine David, a spokesperson for For All Mothers+ explained that the recent on isn’t because there weren’t mothers who could compete before, but because “they just got forced out too early because they didn’t see a path forward with the infrastructure in place for them, such as getting their health care cut off, or not being able to bring nursing babies to competitions.” She added: “We are making headway with the USOPC and other NGBs, but there’s still a long way to go to making maternal support standard at The Games. Our hope is that by the Summer 2028 Games, we will see ourselves as obsolete, and all provisions become standard.” 

Montaño underscored that point and expressed the disappointment that there will be no nursery this year. “We are looking for consistent and reliable change that parents can rely on,” she said.

After the 2024 Olympic Games, Newberry Moore found out she was pregnant, this time with baby boy Rocky. She had a contract to continue with the U.S. National Sailing Team so she called her performance director and asked if she could defer by a year. But there was no specific language in her contract to protect her decision; a deferral would be at the discretion of the performance director. “I really think you guys should put this in writing,” she recalled saying to her director. “If she hadn’t had agreed to defer the contract, the idea of coming back is insane to me. It would have been a year of resources I couldn’t have used because I was growing a baby in my body.”

Colorado parents will soon be able to get partial refunds on certain upfront fees they’ve paid to child care centers if their children don’t land a seat there within six months.

A that takes effect on Jan 1. aims to ease the cost burden on families who pay waitlist, application, or deposit fees to child care programs that their children don’t end up attending. It requires child care providers to provide the refunds if a child has not been offered a spot within six months and the parent requests the refund in writing, such as by email.

Democratic lawmakers pushed for the proposal during the 2025 legislative session, citing instances where families sometimes pay fees of $100 or more to a dozen or more child care centers as they search for a slot.

The law applies to fees paid on or after Jan. 1, 2026, so families won’t be able to obtain refunds until they hit the end of the six-month window in July 2026 or after. Families who are offered a spot at a child care center but decline it aren’t eligible to recoup any of the fees they paid.

Under the law, providers are allowed to keep a “reasonable” portion of the waitlist, application, or deposit fee to cover administrative costs. , according to a Colorado Department of Early Childhood document released Thursday.

Besides the refund provision, the new law requires child care programs to disclose their tuition and fees when a prospective family requests pricing information, joins the waitlist, enrolls in the program, or when the provider changes the fee schedule. It doesn’t require that tuition and fees be posted publicly.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

In the 21st century, the scope and complexity of issues have piled up, constituting what Ariella Cook-Shonkoff refers to as a “polycrisis” — which she defines as a “a confluence of overlapping existential stressors” in her recent book, Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids through Climate Change and Tumultuous Times.

The book guides parents and caregivers through navigating difficult conversations about  topics like climate change, racism, pandemics, gun violence and political polarization. 

A “doomer mindset,” as Cook-Shonkoff describes it, is a psychological barrier that “deflates your energy, and squashes your sense of purpose and meaning in life. It can feel like a quick knee-jerk emotional response that overcomes you, or it can gradually eclipse you until one day you wake up under a blanket of depression.” The antidote, in a word, is hope.

Cook-Shonkoff draws from her experiences as a marriage and family therapist and as a former member of the executive committee of the , which promotes climate-aware therapy. Here, she shares parenting insights from her book and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a clear-eyed view of what’s at stake for children, families and the planet.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Many of the parents you quote in the book said they feel isolated and ill-equipped for the challenges they’re faced with. How did we get to this point?

What we see again and again is a failure of adults in charge — whether in government or private sectors — to protect kids’ best interests and consider their healthy development and safety. Be it common-sense gun safety laws, digital-free school environments, restrictions on social media accounts, and so on. Wherever there was bipartisan compromise or regulatory bodies in the past to protect children’s health, it’s nonexistent now. So unfortunately the onus — and immense burden of raising kids — has shifted fully onto parents.

What made you want to make this more than just a book about climate change?

The book really was born out of some of my personal experience in grappling with raising kids while the wildfires were starting to intensify in Northern California. It was originally going to be a climate-focused book, and then my publisher and I decided to expand that. 

It’s hard to separate climate from all the other layers of existential stress. For example, I’ve worked with undocumented families, and for children, there can be real fear in leaving behind their parents and going to school. They hold that anxiety, and it manifests, often as a stomachache or a headache.The book also addresses gun violence and school shootings. It’s absolutely traumatic to be in school, a place of learning and curiosity, and to have to do active shooter drills again and again. 

How young is too young to talk about these topics?

People want an easy formula for this, but it comes through trial and error. I don’t think you necessarily need to introduce the tough subjects at a really young age. There’s a protected time when you’re filtering out a lot of the realities and letting your kid grow up into the world and make connections. As they get older and more curious, kids are asking questions and hearing things at school, and you have less control over what they’re exposed to. That’s when it becomes important to think about how to bring up a subject that is not maybe the most pleasant. There’s an expression, “No fear before fourth grade,” which means not introducing really scary stuff before they’re able to get support and think through issues in a slightly more sophisticated way. 

Sometimes, the subjects come up before fourth grade.

Parents don’t always have a choice, depending on different factors, about when they have difficult conversations with their kids. But I think how you talk is what makes the difference. If you speak in a gentle voice, and you’re calmer, and your own nervous system is regulated, that’s very different from if you’re on edge, sad, depressed. Do you have a lot of unprocessed emotions yourself? Those can transfer onto your kids. 

Beyond acknowledging the polycrisis, it sounds like taking care of yourself is one thing you want parents and caregivers to come away with. What are some other words of wisdom parents need right now?

Yes, taking care of ourselves and just continuing to regulate our nervous systems because we have to remember that it filters down to the kids. That’s really critical. I think that “the parent club” [a tool Cook-Shonkoff uses in her book to describe a community including parents, guardian, caregivers, foster parents, involved family or community members] is a way that parents can support each other. Parent groups have enormous potential for developing community and resilience in the face of toxic politics and culture.

How do parents move from self-care to social change? 

We do have to do emotional processing, or, as I call it, emotional metabolizing, and we can’t squash or deny and keep pretending life is a certain way. We have to just be real about it. And from there, we can raise healthier families and take action and have some society-level impacts. If you develop those capacities early in a child, by the time they’re in high school, they’re ready to be advocates for themsleves and to be part of their communities. 

What else have you seen that works?

My book explores spending time in the more-than-human world [a phrase coined by ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram]. We can see our place in the world or just understand things differently when we’re out in the natural world. Spending time in communities, creating these little intentional communities, making music, writing lyrics, writing poems, creating art, making a mural — all that stuff is more powerful than people realize. 

Who or what gives you hope?

Two women who influenced my work recently passed. One of them was Jane Goodall. Meeting her in my hometown when I was 17 years old was pivotal for me. She started a youth program in our town, and I was a president of the environmental club in the high school and was on this panel with her. Her steady advocacy around animal welfare, the environment and human rights countered my frustration with the adult world. It showed me that some adults did care. There was both a gentleness and firmness to her demeanor, and I could tell that she was a quiet force to be reckoned with. Joanna Macy, an eco-Buddhist philosopher-activist, also meant a lot to me. When I first came across her work, as a mom with my own eco-anxiety, it felt relieving to have my intense feelings of hope and grief so well articulated. And that she had a clear program — and a literal path forward through all of my pain and fear — was a lifeline for which I remain grateful for today.

Each afternoon, a familiar conversation unfolds in many households.

“How was school today?”

“F���Ա�.”

“What did you learn?”

“N�dzٳ󾱲Բ�.”

In the classroom, teachers also struggle with stonewalling students. They’ll pose a question, . They might incorporate “” to give students a moment to gather their thoughts. But even then, their students offer brief or vague responses. Students, meanwhile, about asking for clarification or diving deeper into a topic in front of their peers.

This can have consequences. Children who hesitate to ask or answer questions risk becoming . Adults who avoid asking questions or avoid admitting what they don’t know can become willfully ignorant: and the impact it can have on themselves and others.

With the start of school just around the corner, it’s an important time to create opportunities for children to stretch their .

I’m an educator, and parent who studies and .

Here are five strategies parents and caregivers can use with children to make them better conversationalists and cultivate curiosity. The suggestions might appear straightforward. But they outline an easy way to avoid being iced out with “yes” or “no” answers.

1. Be creative with your questions

Part of the issue arises from asking questions that can be batted away with a one-word response.

Children want to know whether the adults in their lives are genuinely interested in their day. Asking the same, rote questions each day says otherwise.

Try shaking things up and ask more specific, open-ended questions instead: “What was the most interesting thing you did today?”

“If you could turn back time and change how you handled something at school today, what would it be?”

“If you were in charge of your class tomorrow, what would you teach?”

2. Engage with their curiosity

As important as it is for adults to ask questions that convey genuine interest, it’s just as valuable to engage with questions kids ask.

Young children ask “why” so often that adults can find themselves falling back on a classic retort: “Because I said so!”

When a “why” gets shut down, . Instead, try acknowledging and engaging with this curiosity: “Good question. Here’s my thinking …” or “Let’s talk about why this is important …”

At the same time, you can also : “I’ve wondered that too. Do you think it’s because …?”

3. Think out loud

When adults , they’re showing children how their brains work and how problems get solved.

“Do you ever wonder why cats purr?”

“Do you think I can mix the dry and wet ingredients for the cake at the same time?”

“I noticed the flags were at half-staff today in front of your school. Could you ask someone to find out why?”

Doing so encourages children to listen to their inner voice – and to trust the questions that emerge, no matter how silly they might seem.

4. Be a seeker

Admitting you don’t know the answer to something can be uncomfortable, especially because children often expect their parents to know everything. But simply responding “I don’t know” to a question isn’t enough. It’s important to show children how to find answers, whether it’s through assembly manuals, recipes or a nutrition label.

If you come across a confusing passage in a book, you can show kids how to use the : a glossary, table of contents or index.

Then there are the questions that don’t have a single, simple answer. You can explain how more than one internet search might be necessary and it’s probably not a great idea to simply accept the first answer that pops up.

By showing children that it’s OK to not know all the answers, you give them the confidence to ask more questions.

5. What I heard you say was …

Children can have a hard time articulating what they’re curious or confused about.

For this reason, is a critical behavior to model. If you’re confused about what you’re hearing, rather than saying something like, “I don’t get what you’re saying,” you could repeat what you heard, and then ask, “Is that what you’re saying?”

If they give a meandering answer to your question – even if they go off topic – you can highlight what stood out to you to show that you were really listening: “What I really appreciated about your answer to my question was …”

Avoid the temptation to multitask when children approach you with questions. If you put your phone away, make eye contact and ask follow-up questions, kids will be more willing to keep asking questions in the future.

Children are born with a natural wonder and enthusiasm for learning. As , “The complex and subtle problems we face can only have complex and subtle solutions and we need people able to think complex and subtle thoughts. I believe a great many children have that capability if only they are encouraged.”

Prodding children to tap into their own curiosity while respecting their needs, limitations and fears can have a powerful impact on their ability to ask and answer questions about the world, big and small – or, at the very least, give them the confidence to try.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

When Dayanara Rivera drops off her 4-year-old daughter Keilanys at the center each morning, she doesn’t have to worry about traffic or rush back across town to make her classes. Instead, she walks a few hundred yards across the (STCC) campus, knowing that if she needs to check on her daughter, pick up materials from the library or meet with a professor during office hours, everything is within reach.

“I was ecstatic when I found out that they were literally right on campus,” said Rivera, a medical assistant working toward her nursing degree. It provided convenience, she said. “It just made it easier. … It made me come to school.”

undergraduate college students in the U.S. are raising children while enrolled, and about half of these student parents attend community and technical colleges, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

A lack of access to affordable child care, college costs, and challenges related to balancing work, school and raising a family, contribute to the fact that students with children are to leave college before graduating than students who aren’t parents.

The Head Start center at STCC addresses this need. The center educates 25 babies and toddlers while their parents attend school, and while it’s open to all families in the community, leaders expect that it will primarily serve children of STCC students over time as more of them learn about it. The program is part of a five-year project launched in 2024 by the and the . By increasing the number of Head Start child care programs on community college campuses, the project intends to remove child care barriers that too often derail student parents from achieving their educational goals. 

The project represents a strategic convergence of two urgent needs: expanding access to quality early childhood education for low-income families and supporting student parents whose educational aspirations are often .

The approach helps colleges gain capacity to support child care, which is a basic need for many students — and that boosts enrollment, persistence and completion. It offers families access to affordable high-quality, early learning opportunities for their children, and it gives future teachers at the colleges opportunities to get authentic classroom experience. 

Kids on Campus aims to establish at least 50 Head Start programs on community college campuses by 2030. The initiative’s shows concrete progress: Three programs are fully launched, with two more opening this fall. Furthermore, 87 community colleges and 98 Head Start programs have engaged with Kids on Campus, leading to 18 potential matches between interested partners. The initiative has also launched Kids on Campus —Texas as its first state-focused effort.

While the impact report acknowledges that “big initiatives take time to grow and blossom,” results from the first year suggest the model is gaining traction. Perhaps nowhere is the promise more evident than in Springfield, Massachusetts, where HCS Head Start and STCC are providing student parents with exactly the kind of integrated support system the national initiative envisions.

Making It Work in Western Massachusetts

HCS Head Start faced acute staffing shortages in the post-COVID landscape. Nicole Blais, CEO of HCS Head Start, which  operates 11 sites across the greater Springfield area and serves about 650 children from birth to age 5, was searching for solutions when she connected with STCC president John Cook.

The partnership that emerged goes far beyond colocation. Students in STCC’s early childhood education program can complete observations and student teaching requirements on-site. Students in the college’s health services program practice screenings and clinical skills with Head Start children. The model creates what Blais calls a comprehensive approach to “rebuilding the early child care workforce” while providing essential services to families and the broader campus community.

For HCS Head Start teacher Heidi Fogg, the campus location transforms what student parents can realistically accomplish. She sees how the opportunity plays out in daily schedules: “Some of our moms who are students at STCC aren’t full-time students,” she said, explaining that some take evening classes because they’re raising a family and working. But for those who take classes during the day, she said, “they are able to bring the kids to our center, and then they can go, whether it’s to the library, to make copies, to speak with their professor or for office hours.”

“They just have that luxury of not having to drive across town, bring the child to day care to come back,” Fogg added.

The convenience of on-site child care can help student parents persist and . The benefits of these programs also extend to the babies and toddlers who attend them. At home, Rivera watches her daughter enthusiastically share what she’s learning. “She likes to be the teacher. She likes to teach everybody at home what she learns,” Rivera said. “She says, ‘Okay dad, we’re going to learn about the spine of the book.’ So she literally pulled out one of her favorite books and started telling [her] dad, ‘This is the front, this is the spine. Repeat after me.’”

While it’s too early for comprehensive outcome data, the Springfield experience suggests the Kids on Campus model addresses several persistent challenges in higher education and early childhood development. By colocating services, the partnership reduces barriers for student parents while creating practical learning opportunities for future educators and health professionals.

For Rivera, the impact is clear: quality child care on campus means she can focus on her nursing program goals rather than logistics. “I don’t have to call the school if I have questions [and] wait for somebody to call me back. I can do it all in one go.”

As the Kids on Campus initiative works toward its goal of opening 50 campus-based Head Start programs, the Springfield model offers a template for how strategic partnerships can transform isolated challenges into integrated solutions. The promise lies not just in convenience, but in creating the conditions where student parents can succeed academically while their children receive quality early education.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Dayanara Rivera’s first name.

The author of two college textbooks and five books for non-academic readers, she is equally at home researching and writing about adolescent mental health, sleep disorders, digital technology, homework and narcissism. She was one of the first experts to warn nearly that smartphones could hold negative consequences for our mental health. A decade after the advent of the iPhone, Twenge went viral in 2017 with an that asked, provocatively, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

A professor at San Diego State University, she has collaborated for years with the researcher and author Jonathan Haidt, whose 2024 book was a mega-bestseller that has helped build momentum for school cellphone bans in a growing number of states — .

And she is one of the few experts in the education and mental health world to have appeared on HBO’s .

Twenge’s 2017 book, , looked at how modern teens are somehow both more connected than previous generations and less prepared for adulthood. In it, she theorized that depression rates among teens are rising because they spend more time online, less time with friends in person, and less time sleeping — a problematic combination. 

The dilemmas Twenge identified in 2017 are only getting worse: By 2023, the typical American teen was spending nearly five hours a day using social media, recent research finds, with severe depression rates rising. In , girls who were heavy users of social media were three times as likely to be depressed as non-users.

Her , out Tuesday, offers practical guidelines for parents raising kids in the age of ubiquitous connectivity and sophisticated — some would say addictive — social media.

Twenge doesn’t shy away from challenging harried parents to do better. Among her suggestions: No one — parents included — should have electronic devices in the bedroom overnight. Likewise, she says, the first handheld device a kid should receive is a “basic phone” that allows calls, texts and not much else.

“It’s a really big myth out there that if kids are going to communicate, it has to be on social media,” she said. “That’s just not true.”

Ahead of its publication, Twenge spoke with The 74’s Greg Toppo about her rules, her work with Haidt and her belief that we need stiffer laws that keep young people off social media until they’re old enough to drive.

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

I wanted to start with a quote from your book. It’s a parent’s description of his 10-year-old after she got her first smartphone: “She suddenly wasn’t playing with her younger siblings as much. Novels were promptly cast aside. She wasn’t around to help with dinner anymore. She danced less, laughed less. She was quieter. Our home was quieter.” That’s so heartbreaking, but I’m guessing it’s not unusual.

I don’t think it is. Many, many parents describe how their kids are different after they give them a smartphone. And it’s especially heartbreaking when that’s a 10-year-old, but even when it’s a 16-year-old who might otherwise be ready. It’s very noticeable how they change after they get that phone in their pocket.

Were there any particular data points about smartphones and social media that persuaded you they were causing a mental health crisis?

It was a slow process for me, and it wasn’t an immediate conclusion when I first started to see these trends in adolescent mental health. It was first a process of ruling out obvious causes, like the economy, which wasn’t aligned at all, and any other big events that might happen. I would trace it, really, to the big that I work with on teens, where there was just this combination all at once of not just rising depression, but teens spending less time with each other in person and less time sleeping. And then realizing, “Well, wait: What might explain all of those things happening at the same time?” 

And it seemed clear that a good amount of that answer is probably smartphones and social media, particularly after I found a Pew Research Center poll about the ownership of smartphones, that [it] in the U.S. at the end of 2012. And that’s right around the same time all these changes were happening.

I want to dig into a few of your rules. No. 3: “No social media until age 16 or later.” That seems a lot tougher than what most families practice. Why 16? And what do you say to parents who worry about their kids’ social isolation and FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out?

I have not found that with my kids — that they’ve been socially isolated for not having social media. Most other parents I talked to who have put off social media have also not found that with their kids. Social media is just one mechanism for communicating. There’s so many others. Kids can call each other, they can text each other — they do a lot of texting. They can FaceTime each other, they can get together in person. Usually that ends up tilting toward texting, but it does not have to be social media. It’s a really big myth out there that if kids are going to communicate, it has to be on social media. That’s just not true.

And that leads to rule No. 4, where you advocate “basic phones” — your phrase — before smartphones. In a world where even school assignments need Internet access, is that practical for most families?

Yeah, because kids have laptops. And if the family can’t afford to buy them a laptop, almost all schools provide a laptop. So they have Internet access on their laptop even if they don’t have it on their phone. And laptops have come so far down in price too, that if you haven’t bought a laptop recently, or if you use Mac laptops like I do and my kids do now, you might not realize you can get a . So that’s another big thing: Maybe 10 years ago, if a kid doesn’t have Internet access on their phone, then they don’t have Internet access at all. That’s just not true in the current landscape.

Although you do have problems with school laptops.

Oh, yes. I mean, this is a thing! They get Internet access on the laptop, whether it’s a school laptop or a personal one, and then that opens a whole other can of worms. Absolutely true. Laptops are the bane of my existence as a parent, particularly the school laptop, although they’ve gotten a little bit better, at least in my district. 

Actually, that was going to be my next question, this parental controls thing. It sounds like your district is being responsive.

Well, on that issue, they still don’t have a coherent phone policy during the school day. In the high school, it’s especially bad. That’s something I’m hoping will change. It is changing in a lot of schools around the country, thankfully. A lot more schools are doing “no phones during the school day, bell to bell,” which is what needs to happen.

A big message of the book is phone-free schools. And I know you’ve worked with , who has pushed for schools to get rid of phones. A few critics have said that this is a to a complex problem, and that it’s not entirely clear that phones are actually causing the mental health issues that Haidt has become a best-seller writing about. How do you respond to that criticism?

There are a couple of things to unpack there. For one thing, even if you take mental health out of the equation, kids should still not have their phones at school for academic and focus reasons, for the reason of developing social skills by talking to their friends at lunch, for the reason that a bell-to-bell ban is actually easier to enforce than a classroom-by-classroom ban. There are so many reasons for it that don’t even include mental health. 

The second question is [about] the research on phones and social media and mental health: We’ve known for quite a while that teens who spend more time on social media are more likely to be depressed or unhappy. Almost every single study finds that. Where you sometimes get more debate is, “O.K., that’s correlation. What about causation?” But in the last 10 years, we’ve gotten a lot more studies, and the studies that ask people to cut back or give up social media for at least three weeks a month or so, almost all of those studies show an improvement in well-being. And I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but that’s actually a little bit shocking, because by definition in those experiments, you’re taking people who are at average use and having them cut back to low. 

That’s actually not where we see the biggest effects in the correlational studies. The heaviest users are much more likely to be depressed than the average or light users. So, you know, you can’t ethically do an experiment that would really answer the exact question: You can’t take 12-year-olds, randomly assign them to spend eight hours a day on social media, and then see what happens. At least I hope not.

In the book, you talk about the 10 rules “creating a firewall for kids against anxiety, attention issues and constant insecurity.” I think most parents would get behind that. But let’s be honest, they’re users of these tools themselves. How do we craft rules around web dependence and social media without being hypocrites?

Parents have to be role models. Parents are also allowed a small amount of what I call “digital hypocrisy.” Because they’re adults, they have jobs, they may be responsible for elderly parents, etc. But that said, parents should think about their technology use as well. They should get their phones and electronic devices out of their bedroom at night. They should also consider doing things like not having social media on their phone. If they want to use Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, do it on your laptop. That’s what I do. I mean, I don’t have much social media to begin with. I have X, but I don’t have it on my phone, and that’s very much a purposeful decision. During family dinners, unless there’s a really specific reason for me to have my phone with me, it’s upstairs.

That seems to be an easy one: Phones away at dinner.

Well, you’d think so, but you’ve got to get the whole family on board, and sometimes husbands are not really into that.

I want to skip to Rule No. 8: “Give your kids real-world freedom,” which will probably be met with some resistance. I have a 4-year-old grandson, and when I read your recommendation to let 4-to-7-year-olds go find items a few aisles away in the grocery store, I shouted, “Hell no!”

Why? Why is there, do you think, a resistance to that idea?

I have nightmares about this child being snatched from me at Safeway. I guess I want you to just pull me back from the edge, if you would.

I mean, that is not just unlikely to happen — the chances of that are so infinitesimal it probably shouldn’t even factor into our decision making. There’s one stat in there, and I forget the exact number, but someone calculated that if you wanted your kid to get kidnapped, how many hours — it turned out to be years — would they have to be in your front yard for that to happen? It’s something like 100,000 years. 

O.K., well that helps.

And a four-year-old loves that stuff! They love being grown up. I mean, look, even if you don’t do the grocery store thing, make sure they learn how to tie their own shoes, that they know how to get dressed. I remember when my girls were that age, and it occasionally amazed me when I would be with other moms in various situations and their kids couldn’t dress themselves at that age, and that’s where it starts. 

At pretty much every age, the great thing is that giving kids independence makes it easier for parents. It is easier as a parent if your 4-year-old can dress themselves. It is easier if your teenager makes dinner once a week. It’s good for everybody.

A lot of people might see this freedom rule as somehow contradictory to some of the other rules, in which you talk about adults being “in control.” Can you parse that?

For sure. Jon has said this as well — and I completely agree: We have kids in the real world and underprotected them online, and these principles are just trying to get those two to balance. When you’re talking about the real-world freedom thing, it’s not a matter of letting kids completely run wild and do whatever they want. We’re talking about giving kids some of the freedoms that parents themselves had when they were kids, and to build independence in a way that is really good for kids and good for them as they grow up. 

I can’t even remember who said this to me when I had young kids: “You’re not raising children, you’re raising adults.” And that’s just so true. That is your job as a parent. Giving kids some freedom and independence is a really, really key part of raising an adult.  

I wrote a whole book about learning games, and one of the powerful ideas that I took from that reporting is that many adults don’t realize video games have become. You acknowledge that, saying gaming is the primary way that some kids spend time with friends. But I gather that you see the risks as well. And I wonder if you could talk about that.

It really comes back to the principle of “Everything in moderation.” Many games are not as obviously toxic as social media. Games tend to be more in real time, more interactive. But is it a good idea for kids to be spending five or six hours a day gaming? Probably not. There have to be some limits.

You quote , the Facebook founder, admitting they’re “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” to keep users on the app. Given social media’s sophistication, are mere parental rules sufficient? I mean, don’t we need a bigger hammer, like legislation and policies? 

Absolutely! Yes! Yes! It would be absolutely amazing for parents and for kids if we had laws that verified age for social media. I mean, ideally, that would be age verification to make sure they’re 16 or older, to raise the minimum age to 16. But even if we just enforced existing law with the minimum of 13, that would be progress, given the enormous numbers of 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds who are on social media, often without their parents’ permission — often explicitly against their parents’ permission — and actually against the law [Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule] that was passed in 1998.

What is the biggest obstacle to getting better regulation, or, to your point, to enforcing the existing regulations?

It’s interesting. The barrier is not the inability to verify age or the inability to verify age without a government ID. There are so many companies that will verify age now that they have their . It can be done in many different ways. The biggest barrier is tech companies themselves. Any time a state passes a law about verifying age on social media or even pornography sites, the companies — every single time. They have sued to keep those laws from going into effect.

Are any emerging technologies that parents should be concerned about? Do your rules need updating for AI or virtual reality or whatever comes next?

AI chatbots are what a lot of parents are rightly worried about. And yes, you could certainly modify or add to the rules and say, “No AI chat bots until 16 or 18 — probably 18.” And of course, it depends on what we’re talking about. It is common for kids to use ChatGPT when they need to look up something for homework or even have it write their essays — that’s a whole other horrible discussion. But what I’m specifically referring to is the many chatbots out there right now that are supposed to be AI friends, or worse, . There’s already been a tragic case of a child who , apparently due to one of these AI girlfriends. It’s just really scary to think of kids having their first romantic relationship with an AI chatbot. It’s terrifying.

The good news is, if you follow that rule about your kids having basic phones, if you give them one of the phones that’s designed for kids, those phones do not allow AI relationship chatbots. It’s on their banned apps, just like social media and pornography and violence apps. Parents have such a tough job, and it’s nice that there are at least a few tools out there that can make their lives easier and keep their kids off of things like AI girlfriend and boyfriend chatbots.

In keeping with the theme of overwhelmed parents, I wonder: If I were to come to you as a parent and say, “Oh my God, Jean, 10 rules is a lot. If I could only do two or three, where would I start?” Is that even a smart thing to do? And if so, where would you start?

I would say, “No electronic devices in the bedroom overnight.” Start there, because the research is so solid on it, and it’s such a straightforward rule, and it works for everybody, of all ages. Your teenager can’t say, “Well, you do it differently,” or, “You get to be on social media.” No, actually, my phone is outside my bedroom when I sleep at night too. So that’s a great place to start. And then, just because they have so much utility, I would probably say the second rule, about basic phones, because even with all of the mess of the laptops, I’m just so happy and grateful that my kids did not have the Internet or social media in their pocket until they were older.

As a parent and a grandparent, I really appreciate you using your real life to inform a lot of these rules. In a way, it hardens them a bit, makes them more durable. Anything I haven’t asked you about that you feel needs to be in the mix?

Two things I’ll throw out there just in terms of pushbacks: With “No phones during the school day,” the pushback is often “What about school shootings?” And it’s actually less safe for students to have access to their phones during an active shooter situation. And I go through the reasons for that in that chapter. 

And then the real-world freedom piece: When you look at the things that I’m suggesting in terms of how to give your kids freedom, obviously letting them go off on their own in the real world is important, and you should do that too. But there are lots of things in that list of suggestions you can do without even leaving the house: teens making their own doctor and hairstylist appointments, for example, or middle-school kids, or even elementary school kids, cooking dinner for the family. Those are great experiences for kids to have without too much parental interference. 

You do have to — and I know this by experience — step back, especially with the cooking piece, and let them do it by themselves and learn how to make mistakes. It’s tempting to just be there when they’re doing that, but you learn quickly that if you leave them alone, they’ll figure it out. And then you can go do something else. Go and read that book you’ve been meaning to read for a while. Go for a walk. Watch TV. Have some relaxation time that you wouldn’t otherwise get. 

I wrote a piece a couple weeks ago on unschooling, this idea of pulling kids out of school and letting them find their own level and their own interests. This almost strikes me as unparenting.

It is — and I’m not a huge fan of unschooling, because it’s a rare kid it would actually work for — but it is. It’s the general idea that not being up in your kids’ business all the time is better for both parents and kids. It’s something we really have to consider more.

Gonzalez is a longtime community organizer and advocate who works with community health workers and in the local school system in Santa Ana, California, a city . Most kids and families she knows spent their summers cooped up inside for fear of walking outside and being taken. She has seen for herself kids running in search of safe places to go when they see a truck that could have ICE agents, and knows firsthand of parents being detained after walking kids to school, and of raids at a popular grocery store. “The aisles are now empty since no one ventures outside anymore,” she said.

But the changes to the tax code that target immigrant families are the least of her concerns right now. “We used to offer classes about how to pay taxes,” she said, speaking of The Promotoras, a community support group that she is involved in that provided resources for families adjusting to life in the United States. “But we aren’t even giving out information about the taxes now because we are so impacted by worrying about who is going to come home each night.

Growing up, as the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, her grandfather would stop by the panaderia every Sunday and invite people who had recently arrived from Mexico into their house for menudo, a type of Mexican spicy stew. Gonzalez, fluent in both English and Spanish, would translate and help fill out immigration paperwork and tax forms.

For decades, immigrants in her community were actively encouraged to file taxes, she said. Having taxes in good standing was one of the criteria for gaining citizenship under the Reagan administration’s 1986 reform, which happened when Gonzalez was in 6th grade. But 40 years later, Gonzalez is now hearing from more people that they are scared to file taxes and have decided to hold off. “Who wants to tell the IRS where you are? Right now, silence is our safety.” 

Changing the filing requirements for the Child Tax Credit is a recent action by the Trump administration to revoke benefits for noncitizens — one that creates a particular pain point for families with young children. In the passed this summer, Congress increased the CTC amount to $2,200 and indexed it to inflation, and also , including requiring children and at least one parent to have a Social Security number. 

More than who are American citizens are living with an undocumented immigrant according to estimates from a study published by Brookings Institution in April. More than 2.7 million are children in elementary and middle school grades and 1.96 million are under 6 years old. 

Policy experts believe that many of these families would have qualified for the Child Tax Credit under the previous policy, but will no longer be able to receive it due to this change. Many of these kids are American citizens living with parents who pay taxes through an (ITIN), not a Social Security number. The IRS issues ITINs and relies on them to collect tax revenue from people who may not have work authorization but still earn income in the United States. By contrast, a Social Security number is issued by the Social Security Administration and is only available to citizens and those legally authorized to work in the United States, including or have a pending asylum claim with work authorization. 

A family’s income also plays a role. According to from the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, an estimated 19 million children under age 17 will be ineligible for the full Child Tax Credit because their family’s income isn’t high enough to qualify, up from 17 million under the previous policy. For children under 6, estimates show that 30% could be ineligible for the full credit because of their family’s income. The analysis in the brief estimates that a family with two children will now need to make $41,500 in income to receive the full tax benefit, a leap from $36,000 under the previous policy. 

Since its inception in 1997, the CTC has been a partially refundable tax credit, meaning that people who file with a little or no tax burden can still receive the credit in the form of a refund. And in 2021, it was the one time “advanced refundability” of the CTC that sent checks to so many households in America, cutting child poverty in half and being lauded as the most (and no, the checks aren’t likely to return). The credit also enjoys widespread popularity with a , which crosses party lines.

The shift to requiring that children and at least one parent have a Social Security number to access social benefits is part of a larger effort that dates back to the Gingrich era in 1996, explains Josh McCabe, director of social policy at the Niskanen Center. This was when Republicans took control of Congress and unveiled the “Contract for America,” which was designed to rework a number of the country’s social programs. This included changing the earned income tax credit — a refundable tax credit for low income families, which has been long considered one of the — to require tax filers to have Social Security numbers. But even with the changes to the EITC, parents filing taxes with an ITIN could still claim the Child Tax Credit, McCabe explained. 

Excluding immigrant families from receiving the CTC isn’t likely to have a meaningful impact on immigration, said McCabe. “Most people don’t migrate for tax credits,” he said. “But people who are here, legal or not, with families and with kids, will have fewer resources to get by on.” 

Chris Wimer, director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy and Megan Curran, policy director of the organization, said that while the changes brought about by this shift to the CTC will affect families, the impacts are dwarfed by the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, which will hit families hard. Even the $200 increase in the CTC does little to offset it. “It’s basically lower than it was previously given that inflation has overtaken the $200 increase,” said Wimer. 

“Those are the same kids that are going to see the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid and the ACA Tax Credits, and could see changes to eligibility for free school meals,” Curran said. 

Economist Kathryn Edwards said that adding the additional Social Security number requirement is creating a “chilling effect.” She adds: “It is a — when you target mixed status families they drop out of programs they are eligible for. These are kids eligible for Medicaid, but maybe the mom is afraid of what could happen to her brother. That is the point of all of these changes, intimidation and fear.” 

For Gonzalez, there is little surprise that the CTC has been targeted. “They pick on the kids,” she said. “They know how much we love our families.” She works with many families that have at least one parent with an ITIN, and said many of them have been in this country for 20 years paying taxes. “They use their ITIN numbers to buy a house, get a phone or a car,” she said. 

Any possible savings from limiting the CTC could be offset by those afraid of filing at all, she said. “The U.S. is going to be losing all that money.”

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics in June, involved a meta-analysis of 84 studies and found that paternal mental distress around the time of birth was associated with poorer global, social-emotional, cognitive, language and physical development in their children. 

While research on the intersection of mental health and parenthood has long focused on mothers, this analysis sought to examine whether the mental health of fathers influences child development, said Delyse Hutchinson, an associate professor in the school of psychology at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia and the study’s senior author.

The results didn’t surprise Hutchinson, she said. “It’s still a stigma for a lot of dads, mental health, and they tend not to talk about it openly and that kind of leads maybe to a lot of men not even necessarily recognizing that they’re experiencing mental health symptoms.” 

“It matters for families. It matters for supporting mums and babies. So it’s not a surprise. It’s just the affirmation and having the evidence to take to policy makers, healthcare, and say, look, this does matter. We’re gonna do more about this,” she added.

The studies included in the analysis followed the development of children ages 0 to 18, though the majority of research examined development before adolescence. Hutchinson emphasized that the postpartum period, when fathers typically have more direct contact with their baby, has the greatest impact on a child’s development. 

Part of the study’s goal was to build awareness around what depression looks like for dads, since they often than women. Men might withdraw socially or feel unable to emotionally regulate themselves. They could also erupt in outbursts or anger, Hutchinson said.

While conducting the analysis, researchers found that a father’s mental state affects children in a number of ways, most notably a child’s social-emotional development, including emotional regulation and social skills. Children who grow up in a household with a father navigating mental health issues such as depression, may themselves have difficulty regulating their emotions, Hutchinson said. 

“Say you’re feeling a little bit sad and down, you tend to be less sensitive towards others, or if you’re getting agitated and frustrated … that’s a less sensitive response to an infant or a young child,” Hutchinson added.

Children pick up on emotional cues. When a child experiences their father expressing anger or distress, it can lead them to develop an insecure bond with him, according to Hutchinson. This can bring a child to feel unsure that their dad can provide for their emotional needs.

Most of the existing research on how a parent’s mental health influences child development focuses either on both parents or just the mother, Hutchinson explained. That means moms and dads are grouped together when researchers look at development outcomes for children. While conducting the meta-analysis, lead researcher Genevieve Le Bas reached out to many authors of the published studies to ask if they could retrieve unpublished data on the mental health of fathers.

“Whilst a very significant proportion of the data in this review is from published studies, we often had to contact authors to obtain data on fathers that wasn’t specifically recorded in those studies,” said Hutchinson.

The fact that fathers were either initially left out or mixed into data about mothers is reflective of larger issues in the research field, as well as the culture of parenting, Hutchinson explained. That culture tends to push fathers to the side and neglect health services which could support them throughout parenthood.

But the role of fathers in parenting and the awareness around their mental health is changing. Dr. Craig Garfield, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University and a practicing pediatrician at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, has experienced that change firsthand as both a father and a researcher. When Garfield took a year off to take care of his 18-month-old son, he felt very lonely. He recalled being the sole father on the playground and in the local “mom and tot” classes. Soon after, he shifted his research focus from injury prevention in childhood to the role of fathers in families.

Medical journal reviewers have long been skeptical that fathers can experience post-natal depression, Garfield said. When he worked on a with his colleagues in 2002 about how pediatricians can support fathers and recommended screening fathers for depression after their partner gave birth, he got pushback during the peer review process.

“It came back from the reviewer saying, ‘There’s no such thing as this. You can’t kind of make it up and start suggesting screening dads,’” he said. “And to a certain extent, that is true. There was not much in the literature, but we all knew from clinical experience that there were dads that were depressed.”It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that Garfield was able to include peer-reviewed studies on paternal mental health in his published research papers, he said. 

There are cultural norms and stereotypes working against dads, Garfield said, but it’s necessary to recognize that paternal mental health affects families every day — and to address the issue. 

Addressing Mental Health for Fathers

There are a number of efforts underway to address some of the findings surfaced by the emerging body of research on fathers’ mental health. Kevin Seldon, who runs Dads Supporting Dads, a network of organizations supporting fathers under the nonprofit All Parents Welcome, said the dads he works with are often met with skepticism when they express their struggles with postpartum depression. Seldon and his wife spent years trying to have a baby. During the birth of their son, his wife needed an oxygen mask and their baby emerged blue. (Seldon’s wife and now 6-year-old son are healthy.) 

“It’s very stressful and anytime I tried to address it, people would be like, ‘You didn’t give birth.’ But trauma is not mutually exclusive,” Seldon said.“[After] five years of struggling and the very traumatic birth — by the time we got home, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror.”

Dads Supporting Dads grew out of a podcast Seldon launched when he found himself feeling isolated after the birth of his son. Through his show Dad I’d Like to Friend, Seldon and other fathers were able to talk about their feelings after the birth of their children. 

“My wife had all these moms groups, right? But I couldn’t find any support,” Seldon said. “I realized that I was so far from alone, so many people were struggling.” He also sought help through talk therapy, which helped him understand that his depression wasn’t uncommon, that what he experienced wasn’t a depressive episode, and that his emotions wouldn’’t necessarily disappear a few years after birth. 

As the podcast took off and Seldon saw demand for that connection, he started facilitating in-person gatherings for local dads and a WhatsApp community where dads could connect across the country. 

As nonprofit organizations and community groups look to connect fathers, researchers are urging policymakers to enact more and physical and mental health for fathers. Though society has traditionally pushed dads to return to work as quickly as possible to get a paycheck, Garfield believes paternity leave could help fathers better support their children.

“I took care of a family in the NICU this weekend where the baby was two days old in the NICU and dad’s back at work,” Garfield said. “One of the most important things that we can do is really work toward paid leave for moms and for dads.”

That tension is personal: parents and caregivers come to the job with the hang-ups we’ve amassed since childhood. We’re famously prone to imposing some version of those onto our own kids — however hard we try to free them. 

The tension is also social and cultural — even political. We’re all trying to teach our kids to stand up for themselves in the tough, pushy, sometimes violent world out there even as we coach them toward leaning vulnerably into grace, compassion, sharing and forgiveness. And a lot of it involves hiding uglier truths about the world from them. But even that only works for so long, because they’ll eventually outgrow our abilities to deceive and distract — and nothing builds resentment in adulthood like realizing how much you were lied to in childhood. 

This is beautiful, impossible work. We’re all messing up all the time, no matter how hard we push and strive — and no matter how much we try to let go and back off. 

Parenting is even harder in moments of public fear and stress. As a father of two, I spent much of Donald Trump’s first term wrestling to guard my children’s faith in virtues like patience, kindness, honesty, personal integrity and responsibility. I tried to coach them into believing in the power of peaceful, democratic institutions that represent the will of the public. I tried, in other words, to swim upstream against the prevailing Trumpist political currents. 

Now I’m a father of three. I’m dreading the implications of his second term — for my kids, for the work of raising them, for our schools and for our democracy. It’s a much more difficult project this time. How can families teach our children to believe in a better, kinder, fairer world … when they see glory, honor and power repeatedly rendered to a man like this? Can advocates for better educational opportunities for all children build a safer, kinder country with Trump unavoidably at its helm?

It’s hard to imagine. His return has launched a genuinely bleak era driven by a movement that targets and marginalizes people — — to gain power, whether they’re immigrants or transgender kids who just want to use the bathroom in peace. This is a nightmare for parents trying to raise their kids to be fundamentally polite, to stand up for the weak among us, to choose grace over scorn and peace over violence. 

If you think this is overwrought, please remember that Trump’s first arrival in office a national spike in behavior at schools. We’re seeing this time . That’s not an accident. Trump is persistently, constantly a bully, one who reserves , and   any woman who with the slightest .

This is incessant intimidation that any middle schooler would recognize, that any parent would hate to see imposed on their kid. It’s sexism that any young girl would instantly view as infuriating and behavior that any decent parent or caregiver would find unacceptable in their son.

What’s more, Trump is cynically nihilistic. That’s why many of the president-elect’s colleagues . He has been caught and never admits his deceit, even when hurt other people. This year, Trump baselessly accused Haitian immigrants in Ohio of stealing and eating pets: innocent people — immigrants and native-born Americans alike — , some closing . Note: immigrants community members than native-born Americans.

Trump’s responses to the pandemic were probably his most consequential distortions. He and insisted that the pandemic was under control and easily manageable. He promoted and , unscientific “treatments” — . People because believed . 

Any family would recognize a kid with Trump’s penchant for selfish betrayal and willful deceit as a terrible friend or classmate. No family would want an adult who treated people so carelessly in charge of their child’s safety or well-being. 

, Trump’s is . He routinely muses about using force against political opponents, journalists, and protestors. Not coincidentally, in an October 2024 poll, were sure that there would be a peaceful transfer of power after the election, what was once an unshakeable tenet of our democracy.

Even if you’re confident that you can set a strong enough example for kids to be a bulwark against this behavior, that still won’t solve for the most substantive issue: Trumpist politics have consistently failed to address the very real problems that the U.S. faces — including and particularly the ones preoccupying U.S. young adults. 

For instance, while a 2023 poll showed that American kids are , Trump and his party are pushing to , , , and close the Department of Education. None of these are real solutions. 

Families in my community tell me they’re struggling to explain the present state of American democracy to their children. One says their middle schooler keeps bringing them media articles where Trump supporters express surprise that their preferred candidate absolutely plans to follow through on his campaign promises around , , and . “Why did they vote for him then?” they say their kid asks. “What did they think would happen?” 

Trump has put families in a terrible situation. It’s hard to explain why men who violently assaulted law enforcement en route to desecrating the U.S. Capitol are touted as heroes and . It’s hard to look at all the violent, undemocratic vengeance Trump has promised and insist to kids that nonviolent politics is core to our democracy. 

See, kids are relatively sophisticated risk detectors — they know real dangers from partisan hysteria. That’s why it’s particularly difficult to tell them to be patient now and to trust in the democratic process, to believe that the adults will get their acts together and work on real problems. It’s hard to believe that the system will self-correct after you’ve spent another math period under your desk because there’s another active shooter in the neighborhood, or even worse — , as just happened again last week in Madison, Wisconsin. 

Nonetheless, the vast majority of families in my social orbit are grimly hoping they can perhaps pretend the situation away. They’re hoping that Trump won’t be who he’s been for the past decade, that he’ll step up instead and act like a prudent statesman that they can safely ignore. Most are planning to actively distract their kids from American public discourse, to try to keep them from internalizing the next four years as “normal.” 

A lot of education reformers sound similar notes. They’d like to set all this aside and just get on with their lives and careers and work with Trump to overhaul the federal role in education or expand school choice or somesuch. They’d like to pretend like Trump’s behavior can be tolerated or ignored. 

I guess I hope they’re right. But I think we all know they aren’t — and so do the kids. 

The views expressed here are the author’s alone and not those of any organization with which he is affiliated.

When I was growing up, a question like this would have been deflected with, “I’ll tell you when you’re older.” But with the internet at nearly every child’s fingertips, vague answers won’t suffice anymore. Kids are curious, and if their parents don’t provide answers, a query to Alexa or a Google search will.

I explained the basics of pregnancy, which she already understood, and described abortion as a medical procedure that ends a pregnancy. We discussed the spectrum of beliefs on when, if ever, abortion is acceptable, and compared the laws in our home state of New York with those in Mississippi, where abortion access has been severely restricted. This led to a discussion of federalism, which I broke down in terms she could grasp: how states can set different laws based on local political opinions and lawmakers.

My goal wasn’t to push my own views, but to give her the tools to think critically about the issue. Like so many other moments in parenting, this conversation wasn’t about giving her the “right” answer — it was about guiding her to ask questions and take a broad look at things.

Talking about abortion, or any political topic, is daunting. But with at least , and with the presidential and vice presidential candidates being asked about the issue in multiple forums, kids will inevitably encounter these terms and concepts.

In today’s polarized climate, parents often feel ill-equipped to navigate these weighty subjects with their children, so . But these discussions are too important to avoid. The responsibility of raising informed, engaged citizens falls on the family. 

Parents shape how their children perceive politics. While schools might cover civics basics, conversations at home are where kids truly start to understand and navigate the wider world around them. It’s where they learn that politics isn’t just something shown on TV or happening in Washington, D.C. — it affects their lives and futures. And parents get only four — or fewer — presidential elections to focus on how high-stakes political discussions ought to look before their kids reach voting age.

Here are three strategies for making political discussions with kids more meaningful during election season:

First, recognize your role. Children look to their parents to make sense of the world, politics included. Families are their first teachers — not because they have all the answers, but because they can model the importance of coming together to explore questions about government and politics. If kids see their parents avoiding political topics because they’re uncomfortable, they’ll likely shy away from them too. But by approaching these subjects with curiosity, children will learn to question, debate and seek out different perspectives. These skills will serve them not only in their civic engagement, but in all areas of life. 

Second, restrain your negativity. It’s easy for parents, or anyone, to slip into negativity, especially when discussing politicians they don’t like. But constantly disparaging politics or government can shrink children’s desire to engage with civic life. If all they hear is how broken the system is, why get involved? Instead, model productive political discourse — teaching them to disagree respectfully and value different perspectives.

Third, humanize government. Don’t let politics become an abstract thing: Introduce your kids to the people who represent them, whether it’s by attending a local event or writing a letter to an elected official. Show them that politicians are accessible and that their work has a direct impact on their constituents’ lives. These interactions help kids see government not as a distant, faceless entity, but as real people working (or sometimes failing) to solve problems. 

It is the job of parents to help kids understand politics is part of life. Navigating these conversations is necessary for raising children prepared to shape a better political climate. So, when your child asks, “What is an abortion?” or “Why are you voting?” — don’t brush it off. Don’t assume they’re too young. Welcome the conversation. It might be challenging, but it’s a necessary step in raising the next generation of engaged citizens. They are the ones who will inherit American democracy; make sure they’re prepared to lead it toward a brighter future.

While Helen Russell’s clever, well-researched exploration of the parenting culture of Denmark and other Nordic countries might not fully map onto the experience of most families in the U.S. or U.K. (Russell’s original home), it offers refreshing insights that can help parents relax a bit, give themselves heaps of grace and have much more fun raising their family. For societies like ours that are confronting crises in practically any arena that concerns our children, Russell’s deep dive into the “Viking way” offers practical, doable approaches that entire nations have proven can work in creating healthy, happy families.

Russell had been in London, “living the city dream” as an editor for MarieClaire’s U.K. online edition when her husband was offered his dream job working for Lego in Denmark. Both were feeling overworked, overwhelmed, burned out and ripe for a change. Denmark had just been voted the happiest country in the world (not for the first time) and she was intrigued. The couple emigrated and soon found themselves parents of “the redhead and the IVF twins,” which placed them in the thick of Nordic childrearing culture.

After 10 years in her new homeland, Russell still maintains sufficient outsider status to offer observations that are helpful, thought-provoking and sometimes hilarious. Her culture shock winds through anecdotes such as the reminder from her son’s Scout group that, “On Wednesday, we build bonfires! Bring daggers,” or the fact even in big cities, you’ll see rows of “under threes” bundled up in huge Mary Poppins-style prams no matter the weather while mom or dad runs inside for a latte or a sandwich. (It’s considered crucial for babies to be able to lie flat rather than be curled over in a buggy or car seat.)

The Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — share the Viking heritage, descendants of the seafaring folks who roamed (and yes, often marauded) across northern Europe from 800 to 1066 CE. Their hardiness is genetically baked in from those beginnings in a harsh environment, and culturally is encouraged today through common practices such as encouraging babies as young as two weeks to take in plenty of fresh air “to help the lungs develop.” Viking children live outside, Russell says, rain or shine. Given the local climate, this often means rain or worse. If the Nordic countries have a shared motto, it’s “There is no bad weather, there are just the wrong clothes.”

Those of us who prefer the warmth of the hearth to unrelenting cold drizzle easily recognize Russell’s shock at the realization that not only will her children be splashing around in the cold and drear, she, too, will be expected to join in and actually play in all that mess. Viking parents volunteer. They go along. They get out there. Danish children are not issued the appropriate wardrobe at birth, she writes, but they might as well be. In some places, posters are put up reminding parents exactly what children need for each season, from the all-in-one snowsuit and Gore-Tex boots for winter, to the balaclava “elephant hat” that all children wear much of the year in varying thicknesses. Wind-resistant, waterproof and thermal clothing come in the smallest of sizes and are simply a fact of life. Luckily, she writes, the thriving hand-me-down culture means no one has to buy all that kit from scratch. Just look around—and pass along whatever your kids grow out of.

In chapters running the gamut from Viking health and safety to school time, to singing and the social brain, Russell touches on many elements that create the unique Nordic approach to children’s lives — encouraging the risk-taking that fosters resilience and self-confidence; the idea that it’s great to cut loose, go wild and get dirty; the view that play is a sign of well-being; the necessity of developing grit, the freedom to mess up and learn from one’s mistakes — all go into creating happy, well-adjusted children.

It is a given in Nordic parenting that children will figure things out, learn to use their bodies and manage their surroundings. They are raised to trust themselves and others from the very beginning. Samfundssind, or community mindset, is the bedrock of Nordic society and from infancy, children are raised to consider the ethos of “the greater good,” even when it means a bit of discomfort for themselves. In Nordic society, fathers are parents and are expected to be involved in all aspects of their children’s upbringing. Real Viking dads change diapers and wouldn’t respect a father who didn’t, she writes.

In each chapter, Russell offers observations that even the most urban, most non-Nordic parent can incorporate to create opportunities for greater freedom and self-reliance for their children, even at very young ages. Her tone is chatty, self-deprecating and sometimes veers a bit cute, but especially for new parents, “How to Raise a Viking” is a delightful, liberating handbook that encourages loosening our grip a bit, trusting our children and each other a lot, and helping our children grow into their richest, most authentic selves.

However, none of Russell’s great examples or clever observations would be sufficient for someone living in a non-Nordic country to raise a child gloriously expressing all the best Viking values. No matter how hard you might try to go it alone, you need a society that supports those values. A quick answer to “How do you raise a Viking?” would be, live in a society that values children in real, practical, unwavering ways, not as entities deserving of lip service prior to elections, but as the bedrock of a society that intends to have a future. This is where policymakers might want to look at “How to Raise a Viking” and check out the lengthy citations in each chapter. It’s no secret that American society must make fundamental changes in how we support parents and children if we are to move forward in a functional, even sensible way. In “How to Raise a Viking,” resources abound that might help move that needle.

Reading Russell’s chapters on government-subsidized child care, parental leave, free healthcare, free education and free dental treatment and a work week that generally clocks in at 33 hours can make the reader wistful for why we can’t have nice things. Yes, taxes are high, but it’s hard to argue with the societal payoffs. (See “happiest country in the world,” above.)

Nordic society isn’t perfect. Some U.S. educators would no doubt take issue with how reading and academic achievement don’t really receive much emphasis until a child is 8 or so, though as Russell points out, children in Nordic countries play for longer, learn later, but still do better in the long run than children in the U.S. and U.K. — and are happier. There are clouds on the horizon, as children in Nordic countries are now getting smartphones and devices at earlier ages, which is causing as much headache and consternation there as it does over here.

In her Epilogue, Russell writes that she knows the idea of the Viking spirit isn’t a package of ideas that can be shipped and adopted wholesale; they are elements to strive toward. By 2050, she writes, economists predict that 40 percent of current jobs will be lost to automation. Right now, we simply don’t know what our jobs our children will be doing in their adulthood. But they will need resilience, adaptability, grit and the ability to think for themselves.

That’s the Viking spirit.

Subtitled “A Cross-Partisan Action Plan to Support Families with Young Children in America,” it builds on a that identified four challenges facing working families:

• Child care
• Financial squeeze
• Time squeeze
• Insufficient government investment

Convergence fielded a group of leaders from a wide variety of organizations and ideologies. The New York Times called it .

They met in person in April 2023 and again in late September, with numerous teleconference sessions along the way, ultimately agreeing upon a set of recommendations that fall under four headings:

• Changing the Story. “We believe the stories about raising children in America are often inaccurate, unhelpful or pushed to the background. We want to change the story. When families flourish, we all flourish.”
• Rethinking Cash Support for Families. “We believe that low-to-moderate income families with young children should have more effective and easy-to-access cash support, while acknowledging fiscal realities.”
• Ensuring More High-Quality Care Options for Children. “We believe that parents should be able to make care choices for their children that align with their family needs and values, and that support their children’s development.”
• Supporting Parents with New Children. “We believe that all parents should have the opportunity to bond with an infant or new child, while maintaining economic and job security.”

To learn more about the process, Early Learning Nation spoke to six of the collaborative members as well as , director of the Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families.

Getting Past Skepticism

Going into the process, Bruce Lesley, president, , had his doubts. “I was like, ‘I don’t see how in the world you’re going to get this person and that person on board,’” he recalls. “I was very dubious, but Abby did a masterful job of really herding cats. She kept us on task, striving toward the mission, defining that mission and exploring where the common ground is, not letting people focus on the differences.”

(Podcast, First Focus on Children)

, president & CEO of the (NBCDI), acknowledges that she, too, was initially skeptical, but also curious, and she welcomed the time spent “talking about and disagreeing about, but ultimately coming to a place of commonality” on what it means for families to flourish. “If we don’t start there,” she says, “then we often just recycle the same unhelpful strategies.”

Even McCloskey wondered whether the group would cohere around a framework. “It felt scattered at first,” she says. “I found myself wondering, ‘Why are we talking about this thing at such a high level when there are such urgent needs right here on the ground?’” Over time, however, what seemed like a cumbersome exercise did help the group gel.

Katharine Stevens, founder and president of the , says “I’ve been part of these groups that talk about ‘consensus,’ but it’s consensus by mass bullying.” She objects to the approach where pundits “define a problem as the absence of their chosen policy solution.”

Stevens, whose organization is often identified as right-leaning, came away from the process pleasantly surprised by her interactions with Indivar Dutta-Gupta of the left-leaning (CLASP). “We didn’t expect to connect at all,” she says. “But I would say we ended up connecting on almost everything.”

Rachel Anderson, principal of , who works with faith-based organizations, says most families care more about their well-being and their kids thriving than they do about a given policy, so she came to the process with her mind open to various solutions.

Reconcilable Differences

Mariah Levison, CEO and president at Convergence, says the organization’s collaborative problem-solving methodology has fostered breakthroughs in numerous policy settings, commenting, “We’ve seen past participants do transformative work in their respective fields, and we are eager to see where this group takes things.”

The presence of a professional mediator helped. “This is the first group I’d ever been part of that had that,” says McCloskey. “It felt less like driving towards a particular policy end and more about building trust and relationships.” Stevens also credited the , saying David Fairman, senior mediator, could probably help in the Middle East.)

“Despite some very real differences in opinion,” says Dr. Dana Suskind, founder and co-director, , and author of “.” “Every single person was there to make a good-faith effort to find consensus. In some ways, that was very surprising. But at the same time, it helped reinforce what I’ve always believed: that we all want the best for our children.”

Anderson confesses she found it very moving to see all the participants adding and moving their sticky notes around until it became a collective vision. “That was the moment when I thought, ‘Okay, we will accomplish something,’ she says. “And in classic good group process, once you’ve achieved something together, then you feel like you can achieve the next thing. It allowed us to unsettle the fixed ideas about what policy should look like.”

According to Dutta-Gupta, “We generally worked to find any common ground rather than negotiate compromises. That meant identifying the pieces of policies that conservatives might advocate for and progressives thought would move things in the right direction.” For example, while he personally doesn’t like the idea of limiting paid leave to new parents because of the many events in people’s lives requiring such leave, he came away satisfied that his position was acknowledged and, more importantly that “the basics of what children deserve have everything to do with them being children and nothing to do with who their parents are.”

“At least people agreed that something should be done,” said Lesley. “In a lot of ways, that in itself is progress. We all agreed we should do things to help families with caregiving.”

Holistic and Optimistic

A “holistic care agenda” emerges as one of the agreed-upon values of the “In This Together” report, but what does this term mean? For Austin, it corresponds with her organization’s , saying, “It’s not just about child care or early childhood education,” while Suskind cites  and calling for an “AARP for parents,” adding, “It’s the set of public and private policies, informed by brain science, that empower and help all families to meet the developmental needs of their children.”

Stevens highlighted the way the report puts forward a concept of child care that includes and even emphasizes the role of parents in caring for their own young children.

For Dutta-Gupta, a holistic care agenda “appreciates the enormous public good that care confers our society, and invests in people and systems to ensure that each of us has meaningful, well-resourced and publicly funded care options whenever we need care.”

For Anderson, the term entails an acknowledgement that “there are multiple interventions that will benefit families and achieve good goals. The core ones in this report — cash support for families, paid parental leave and investing in child care as a relevant form of family support — all have a role. It’s not productive to pit one against the other.”

Lesley defines ‘holistic’ as thinking about all the needs of kids rather than in silos. “How can all those things work better together? So how can health care programs work in tandem with child care and nutrition and housing, so that we really do maximize the full potential of children and benefit families?”

The Next (Baby) Steps

Does the Convergence report herald a bipartisan golden era for family policy? Unlikely. Nor is this a particularly easy issue for consensus. “I’m not sure that in our politics today there is any low-hanging fruit,” McCloskey admits, but at the same time, she sees “a tremendous amount of innovation and engagement on family issues right now. In light of this momentum, she believes the time is right for re-upping a National Commission on Children similar to the one commissioned in 1987 by Ronald Reagan. Its report from 1991 paved the way for the enactment of the and the .

“If you really think about what’s happened since,” Lesley notes, “with the exception of the American Rescue Plan, since then, there really hasn’t been anything for kids on that scale.”

In many important ways, our nation hasn’t progressed that much since the Beyond Rhetoric era, but as Suskind observes, “We now have a wealth of scientific evidence pointing to the relationship between a child’s earliest experiences — both positive and negative — and their brain development, their school performance and a host of lifelong outcomes. This is science that simply cannot be ignored.”

Child-related tax credits are typically modest in size, but the studies found that for low-income families, receiving this boost sooner rather than a year later can have all sorts of benefits: persistent higher family income, fewer dealings with the child welfare system, improved academic performance and increased earnings for children turned adults. The research is part of an emerging understanding of the first few months of a child’s life as a pivotal window for boosting low-income families and possibly children’s social mobility, a period where even relatively small cash transfers might be “changing something fundamental about family structure and well-being that has long-lasting consequences,” said Katherine Rittenhouse, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin and an author of one of the studies, in a 2023 interview.

Economists have long regarded family income during a child’s early years as a kind of Magic 8 Ball, the time when economic deprivation can predict a host of disparities that threaten to endure or deepen with time. But few studies have been able to pinpoint why: Is it simply money that makes the difference? Or is it something more murky, like differences in parenting, or neighborhood environments and schools?

For families with babies, tax data offers an elegant way to isolate the impact of receiving extra cash during a child’s first year of life. That’s because infants born in, say, December of 2023 can be claimed on this year’s taxes, providing parents with extra income through tax credits this year. But for babies born just a few days or weeks later in early 2024, parents must wait a full year to receive child-related tax credits. This creates a natural experiment that allows researchers to compare the impact of extra cash on families and children who are similar in all ways except one: some received child-related tax credits when their babies were a few months old, and some waited until their children were at least 15-months-old to receive the money.

In one such study published in 2020 in the reputable , researchers scoured federal tax data spanning four decades along with state-level education data to determine that low-income families who received the tax credit during their first babies’ first year, as opposed to later, had higher family earnings which persisted. Andrew Barr, a professor of economics at Texas A & M and an author of the study, said this suggests that something about receiving the credit during a child’s first year of life supports parental employment. (The study focused on low-income parents with first-born babies.)

The effects of extra cash during infancy were even more pronounced for the children. Children whose families received the child-related tax credits sooner went on to have higher reading and math scores, and lower suspension rates and higher graduation in school. Possibly as a result of those academic gains, the researchers speculated, their earnings were found to be 1 to 2 percent higher as young adults, and continued to increase as they aged.

The authors concluded that the tax credits not only paid for themselves through increased tax income, but delivered more bang for the buck than even the famed Perry Preschool Project of the 1960s, which was also found to boost participants’ future earnings, but cost far more per participant while serving a very small number of children.

In a different study using similar methodology, Rittenhouse of the University of Texas at Austin used California birth records to determine that for low-income families with first born children, tax credits received during a child’s first year appeared to prevent child welfare involvement, which is strongly linked to poverty. , Rittenhouse estimated that for low-income families, receiving a one-time cash transfer of $1,000 during the first few months of a firstborn’s life as opposed to a year later led to four percent less involvement with child protective services during the first three years of life and six percent fewer days spent in foster care. The effects endured until at least age 8, which is the last year studied. “Increasing payments to families during the first year of a child’s life may pay for itself in terms of reduced long-term maltreatment costs,” Rittenhouse wrote.

In both studies, the average tax credits amounted to less than $1,500, which researchers said likely made little difference to families’ lifetime earnings. But they did make up a sizable percentage of a family’s yearly income — roughly 10 percent in one study — which economists believe is key to their effectiveness.

After all, the months following the birth of a first child comprise a uniquely vulnerable, influential time of transition for families, one when “stress is high, expenses are increasing, and working is physically difficult or impossible for new mothers,” as Barr and his co-authors explained in the study.

Because of this intensity, the first year of life is also a time when a lot can and often does go very wrong. The Survey of Household Economics and Decision-Making identified a child’s first year as a time when parents reported being financially worse off and denied credit. The first year of life is also the age when a person in the U.S. is most likely to experience homelessness and also to enter foster care.

The chronic stress stemming from adverse events like these may be especially harmful during a child’s early years, when a child’s brain grows most rapidly and consistent, positive relationships with caretakers are particularly important to healthy development.

Even a little more cash during this tenuous time of transition may go an unusually long way to protecting financially strapped families from derailing, potentially devastating events like eviction or unemployment, which can snowball. “It’s when an extra few thousand dollars can have a big effect,” said Rittenhouse.

Take reliable transportation — something many depend on to work. One study found that more than 40 percent of families who received the earned income tax credit for low-income families have a major car repair within six months of filing taxes. For some, that extra cash from the tax credit could be the difference between having a way to get to work, or not. “Having what might seem a modest financial buffer might be enough to allow [parents] to repair their car, and maintain connections to the workforce, and keep things going in a way that results in better outcomes for them as a family and then the child as well,” said Barr. “This one-time transfer kind of allows you to somehow keep your job, or get a job or do better at your job.”

Recognizing the pivotal nature of a baby’s first year, other developed countries invest in infants by providing paid family leave for parents to bond with babies and by funding child care. For decades the Finnish government has sent expectant families filled with toys, clothes and even a mattress that transforms the cardboard box it arrives in into a crib.��

Here in the United States, where we have none of this, a handful of pilot projects have been trying to make the case for no-strings-attached cash to new mothers. Since January, all mothers in Flint, Michigan can receive $1,500 while pregnant, plus $500 a month for the first year of their baby’s life. Meanwhile, researchers conducting , in New York City, and Baby’s First Years are studying the impact of cash on new mothers and their children. Baby’s First Years is particularly interested in measuring child .

Projects such as these are often small and, for the time being, focused on potential short-term effects of cash transfers. By contrast, the tax studies offer compelling, large-scale, long-term evidence that investing in infants pays off big. “We now have strong evidence that providing income or welfare supports during early childhood improves the outcomes for kids throughout their life course,” said Rittenhouse.

So I checked. 

Apparently some teenagers had wandered onto the Washington, D.C. campus that day and sparked an altercation with a few elementary schoolers. When it escalated and staff got involved, the older kids ran off, vowing to return the next week with a gun. My phone trilled through the weekend as families ground their gears, comparing notes on what their kindergartners were reporting at home and speculating in search of possible details. Most of all, folks seemed to be trying to figure out how they were supposed to feel about a situation this abnormal and whether it was safe to send their kids to school on Monday.

And yet, though we all marinated in collective anxiety that weekend, folks settled down fast. After all, this was just the way things are now in the United States, right? In fact, come to think of it, the school had a number of lockdowns last year because of active shooters in the area, right? And since the school was promising to ask for extra police patrols, campus might even be safer than usual, no? By Sunday night, nothing had materially changed about the situation, but folks had talked themselves out of worrying. 

In other words, they’d convinced themselves that there really wasn’t anything to see here. Just another iPhone ding, just another piece of childrearing freight for families to take aboard as the week started — like a banal, gothic footnote tacked on to the weather forecast. Ding! Families should plan extra time for dropoff on Monday morning, as there’s a chance of severe thunderstorms and a heightened likelihood of gun violence.

. But that doesn’t mean that we should pretend that it’s normal. No school, no community, no family — no child — should normalize active shooter situations at schools. 

Of course, that sort of pretending is pretty much the standard national ask for today’s parents of young children: please accept that our crumbling social present is simply as good as things will ever get. To make it through the day without hyperventilating, we have to pretend that gun violence, including in and around schools, is both inevitable and acceptable. We have to pretend that widespread opting out of vaccines is a reasonable, respectable position despite the for our children. We have to accept imaginary information about how our kids are actually doing academically despite ample evidence to the contrary. We have to accept that elected officials want to yank books with LGBTQ characters from school libraries under the guise of something they’re calling “.” 

And those are just the near-term fantasies forced upon us. Look down the road at the world we’re preparing for our children’s futures, and there’s so much more daily make-believe required. We have to pretend that it’s fair that most of our kids will generally need at least a B.A. to get reliable access to middle-class incomes — and that . We have to act like autocratic — and increasingly — threats and behavior by a former, and perhaps future, president is just part of the normal push and pull of politics. We have to accept that that would-be tyrant’s fellow partisans will to check his erratic behavior. And most of all, we have to pretend like the — — air is normal, that our collective disregard of the climate crisis will somehow just work itself out. 

This is an exhaustive amount of cognitive dissonance to carry around, and, critically, it’s supplemental to the already substantial work of raising children. Activists, researchers, policymakers and educators who care about improving children’s opportunities and outcomes are eventually going to have to wrestle with this dismal situation. 

Parenting is, at its base, a project of hope. It requires adults to temporarily take control of a life project, their children’s, that is not, fundamentally, their own. It requires guiding kids only as much as necessary, until they’re ready to chart their own path. And above all, it involves preparing them to be honest and constructive participants in the world they share with others. But it’s hard to get there when so much of daily parenting requires self-deception. 

, this dynamic goes a long way towards explaining why young Americans are cynical about their country, its politics, and its future. ? 

The teenagers never followed through, as it happens. Maybe the additional police patrols deterred them that Monday. Maybe for good. Maybe just for now. But the next Thursday, there was another shooting at 3 p.m. about a half-mile from campus. It was just off the route we use to bike with our kids to school. I’d go a different way, but that would send us through a corridor that suffered a rash of shootings in the past few years. For families, from the country’s abnormally high levels of violence near campuses. Just this month, there was at both of my kids’ schools. 

Sigh. Well, I’m sure we’ll muddle through — or at least we’ll pretend like we are.

Chris Riback: Dr. Bisa, thank you for coming to the studio.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Thank you. I’m enjoying being here already.

Chris Riback: Well, I hope it only goes up from here. It’s a lot of pressure you’re putting on me. Tell me about BCDI-Atlanta. What’s the community like?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: We are the only actually affiliate in Georgia of the National Black Child Development Institute. And our community, I love that it’s so diverse because we have a lot of childcare providers, a lot of social workers, a lot of medical professionals, a lot of legislators and leaders who are part of our affiliate group. And so they’re members of the organization and/or they’re partners of the organization. So the community is amazing because people come together for the needs of Black children and families.

Chris Riback: Tell me about your three key focus areas: early care and education, literacy and family engagement. Tell me about the challenges and how you’re dealing with each one. Let’s start with early care and education.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Early care and education, our goal is to increase the diversity of early care and education, especially when it comes to leaders, and whether that mean in the boardroom or actually in leadership roles and positions, because we know that representation matters, and it’s not just about skin color, but it’s about the diversity and what you do and what you can bring in terms of information, advice, resources. So we know that diversity is key, but in Georgia specifically, we don’t have a lot of diversity, almost any, at the higher levels, if you will, especially at the state level.

We don’t have any state leaders of color, especially at the commissioner level. So it’s really important for us to breed leaders. So whatever we’re being told barrier-wise, why there aren’t diverse leaders, we are making sure that we support people in learning those skills. So we have fellowships, and we’re in a couple of programs to help early educators, anyone who’s in a child-serving program to improve their skills. Leadership-wise, educationally we’re helping them earn their credentials, and we’re coaching them through earning their first credentials and providing stipends and just so much to support.

And we’re also helping them to get on boards, develop a leadership profile and an advocacy profile so that they will know how to advocate for the needs of their community.

Chris Riback: And is that the early childhood education fellowship that you were just describing?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes.

Chris Riback: Or is that something else?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes. It’s called Expand ECE, Expand Early Care and Education. Yes.

Chris Riback: Tell me about the two other focus areas, literacy and family engagement.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Our role in literacy, we want to make sure that books are diverse as well, that children get to see. But it’s not just about the diversity of books. The big goal is to improve and increase the literacy skills. Our children not starting school ready to learn, the third grade reading scores are not where they should be. And we want to improve that. Third grade reading scores, unfortunately are connected to the prison rates.

Chris Riback: Connected to so much-

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: And we want to-

Chris Riback: … later on.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: So much.

Chris Riback: All the data’s there.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes. So we want to get in there early and encourage children to read books. And we do that by allowing them to see themselves on the cover and in the books.

Chris Riback: You recently released the State of the Black Child Report Card for Georgia, and I took a look at it. Parts of that were tough to read. You have some challenges.

One of the recommendations was that you support positive discipline and an end to suspensions and expulsions. And I’ve read and talked with leaders like you about this topic, and one of the statistics that you cited from ProPublica: “While Black children comprise 37% of Georgia’s public schools, Black students are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended as white students.” Any student getting suspended like that hits at the heart, but it does happen more often with Black students. And I believe, you correct me if I’m wrong, Black boys in particular.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Oh, definitely Black boys, yes.

Chris Riback: What’s the why? And perhaps most challengingly, what can be done?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes. The why mainly is people don’t really know how to work with Black children and the challenges that they faced. Since COVID, everyone at this point, no matter where you are culturally or race-wise, you’ve experienced some type of trauma due to COVID-19, right? We were in our houses for a year. But Black children and families are often born in trauma, having experienced trauma. And so educationally, educators don’t always know what to do because the behaviors and the needs are not being met. They don’t know necessarily what to do. And it’s worse now because… I’ve heard the teachers call them COVID babies. That since COVID, they have far more children in their classroom with special needs, especially autism, and some have not been diagnosed.

So part of it is culturally and the challenges that the families face. And if you have a middle class teacher from a two-parent home, and then add the cultural piece to it that they have never experienced what you’ve experienced, they don’t know what to do other than suspend you or expel you from school.

Chris Riback: Is there an education opportunity there?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: It’s definitely an education opportunity there. NBCDI started delivering on the promise. And so through delivering on the promise, that initiative, we were able to get legislation. I’ll say we passed the Senate, and then we pulled back, and we’re repurposing it because we didn’t want to cause some of the other previous legislation a problem. So now we’re working together to revise the legislation to provide wraparound services in schools. Before you can suspend a child, you have to provide them some type of services. So that’s what we’re working on now is legislation to support the educators.

Chris Riback: That’s a terrific idea. Maybe a step between a situation that could be taken in the wrong… Put some opportunity between that situation and the suspension. That doesn’t necessarily have to occur.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: What can we do? Yes.

Chris Riback: What can we do? One other recommendation that you had that I wanted to ask you about: support social-emotional development and mental health of Black children. I’m hearing so much focus on this in Atlanta, but other communities that I’m getting to talk with. Has the problem gotten worse, or is the main problem a lack of historical focus on the issue?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: It’s a little bit of both, but it’s definitely has gotten worse, especially since COVID. And the social-emotional piece is more proactive versus reactive. When we talk about suspension and expulsions, we’re being reactive. But if we support their social and emotional development early on, then we’re helping the child to know how to deal with their own emotions.

When you’re upset, it’s okay to be angry, but how do I handle my anger versus acting it out on someone else? So helping the children and helping the adults in their lives to help the children to know what to do when they have those feelings. Especially Black boys are often called aggressive, but also Black boys are adultified. There’s an adultification of Black boys, so they have all these duties they have to do, and they’re only five.

So there are so many reasons why social emotionally, they’re having the feelings and the actions, the behaviors that we’re seeing at home and at school. And so supporting and being proactive versus reactive with the social-emotional learning and development, professional development, that’s going to help everyone to know how to deal with children and support them in helping themselves.

Chris Riback: What a great message that is. Proactive and reactive.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes.

Chris Riback: You have your work cut out for you.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes, we do.

Chris Riback: Dr. Bisa, thank you for coming by the studio.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Thank you. I enjoyed it. Great conversation.

Chris Riback: Kimberly, thank you for coming by the studio.

Kimberly Early: Thank you for inviting me.

Chris Riback: So tell me about BCDI-Seattle. What’s the community like?

Kimberly Early: So, BCDI-Seattle, we are an advocacy organization. We were founded in 1973 and our founder, she’s passed away, but her name is Bunny Wilburn. We advocate for public policy. We advocate for best practice. We advocate for change. And how does it impact African-American children and families? We want it to be in a positive way. We have a couple different fields that we’ve worked in. One being education, of course.

Chris Riback: Of course.

Kimberly Early: And one of the things that we’ve done in the past, we used to have an African-American hotline, parent hotline. So there’s so many children that are suspended or expelled from school, oftentimes Black children and you don’t know how to-

Chris Riback: Boys in particular.

Kimberly Early: We would have somebody who’s a trained advocate and help them. They would go to the meetings and help them go through the system.

Chris Riback: What a great resource that is, because I will say that concern, the suspension issue, which we’ve all read about, we’ve seen the data is such a challenge. And for each parent, there’s the emotional component. It’s totally new. They don’t know the system, the administrators know the system.

Kimberly Early: Yes.

Chris Riback: What a great resource that is to offer someone to help guide the parents through that system and advocate.

Kimberly Early: Yes, that was huge, because you don’t know. And then they’re a small printing and you’re like, “What am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to be at?” So that was one of the programs we had with education. Another program we had is juvenile justice. And at Greenhill School it’s a juvenile rehabilitation center. We help folks who maybe they want to go back to school and pay for their college education. Another one was childcare, of course, because a lot of our members are in childcare and or education.

So we have a yearly conference that focuses on best practices. And we always have somebody who is African American or of African descent leading a workshop because oftentimes people will go, “Oh, I couldn’t find anybody. I didn’t know anybody.” So we don’t have that problem. And another one was child welfare. And one of the things that we’ve done in the past is have Black foster parents come together and we want to have this go through the legislature. So here’s some information we want to get done. So that’s some of the programs we’ve had. And I just want to say our tagline is like, “Who, if not us, and to take care of our children.”

Chris Riback: It sounds like not only a really robust platform, but really actionable and practical. It sounds like you’re combining the ideas and the education and the empowerment that comes with education, but with practical ability to attack the problems. Is that part of… Am I understanding it correctly?

Kimberly Early: Yes, because you want to make it simple. What can I do as a parent to push against this, push against the system and make it easy.

Chris Riback: To help my kids.

Kimberly Early: To help my kids and not make it easy. That’s something I can do, not something somebody else has to do. Because you want the parents or the community to advocate for themselves. Not, “Oh, somebody is going to save you,” you save yourself. And we’re there along the way to help you with that.

Chris Riback: Do you think that some of that has to do… Some of the advancement that it sounds like BCDI-Seattle has made and the practical tactical help that you give the parents? 1973 is a long time. I mean, you guys were at the forefront and Bunny was really something I bet of an innovator.

Kimberly Early: Yes, she was something else and was like, “This is what we are going to do for our community. And if it’s who not us, we need to be responsible for ourselves and our children.”

Chris Riback: So what’s next? What’s next for Seattle?

Kimberly Early: So one of the things that we’re working on now is working with our childcare providers of African descent. And I’ll give you a little history with that too.

Chris Riback: Please. I would expect so.

Kimberly Early: In 2018, National Black Child Development got in touch with us and they said, “We want to do a State of the Black Child Report Card.” And they were trying to do it in each state. And so in order to make that happen, they were like, “We’re going to come out there, we’re going to help with this, and we’re going to talk to politicians, we’re going to talk to community members, we’re going to talk to organizations and agencies,” and be like, “What are some issues you see? What are the issues as far as what Black children are concerned that you see that are impacting them in negative ways?”

So that was about 2018 through 2019. And then in November 2019, we released a State of the Black Child Report Card. So when we released that, it was at Miller Community Center and they said there’s these five different areas that are impacting children’s health, wellbeing, social welfare, and I’m going to read it from here real quick because I don’t remember all five.

Chris Riback: Go ahead.

Kimberly Early: And they were like… They highlighted racial disparities. So increased access to early childhood education for Black children. Number two, increase financial support for early childhood education programs. Three, ensure teacher diversity reflects the diversity of young children. Four, support positive discipline, practice in harsh discipline for Black children. And five, eliminate the racial achievement gap by equipping educators to respond to the needs of Black children.

So this day that we did the report card, we released it. We said, let’s look at these five things and let’s break it down even more. Like what would we do to increase access for early childhood education for Black children? What would that look like? So people got in groups and they talked about it some more, what can we do? What are some things we need to focus on? And so we took this information, we call it the purple wall, because it’s all this information on the wall and put that together.

And they said, “Let’s have a State of the Black Child Report Card task force to work on some things.” And one of the main things that came out, there were a couple different things, but they were like, “We want to take one of these or more than one and move forward in the community and work on it.” So that one was called educating decision makers in order to create a strong constituency. So what happened? And that was 2020 when Covid started. So they had to switch like everybody else, what we’re doing and how we’re going about it?

So for a year they met and they were like, “What we’re going to do is we’re going to send a survey to Black childcare providers to ask them, how is this impacting you as far as race is concerned, COVID is concerned, what are some issues that are coming up for you?” And we also gave the results of this survey to them as well. And there were three things that came out of this. One was what they wanted to do as a provider is they were saying, “We want to have open, transparent, and accountable work and needed to reverse institutional racism.” The other one is champion better in dynamic benefits for childcare providers. And the last one, the third one was stop the information overload.

Chris Riback: So that’s the childcare side. I want to hear quickly about what you’re doing on literacy.

Kimberly Early: So on literacy, we have Read to Succeed, and that’s another program from National Black Child Development Institute. And with that one, it’s about having children have cultural relevant books, being able to build their own libraries. And I’ll, oftentimes the children’s books can be pricey, like 20, $25. And we want children to see themselves reflected in ways that maybe they don’t see themselves at school.

One of the things we’re doing is adopting different childcare centers and family homes in Seattle and dropping off books like once a month, which we’re going to start next month. And also going to be doing some parent workshops and how do you make stories come to life? Another thing that BCDI Charlotte has, they have something about how do you see where your child is in reading? So we want to work with that program and adopt that one as well to bring that into life.

Chris Riback: The power of a conference like this, you get to learn from others and I’m sure plenty of people are learning from BCDI-Seattle. Kimberly, thank you so much for joining the studio. Thank

Kimberly Early: You so much. Appreciate your time.

Chris Riback: Dr. Fleming-Rife, thank you so much for joining the studio.

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife: Thanks for having me.

Chris Riback: So I think we should start, tell me about your journey. I know that you are in Iowa now, but the history and the getting there I think helps tell the story about the present?

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife: Absolutely, absolutely. I was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa many years ago, and I was a product of Des Moines Public Schools back when Iowa was number one in the country in terms of education.

Chris Riback: Wow.

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife: I left, went to undergraduate school in Colorado, did my doctorate at Southern Illinois. In 2004 I was conducting a study on Brown versus the Board of Education. It was the 50th anniversary of Brown. And in doing my literature review, I read that African-American children were doing better in the South on every academic measure than African-American children in the North. And so I said, “Well, let me look up Iowa’s data.” And I was just blown away that we were so low, we were no longer number one, and African-American children were at the bottom rung of the ladder on every academic measure. And at that point I said, “When I retire, I’m going home.” So I came home in 2015.

Chris Riback: Well, you may have, quote, retired, but I know that you are-

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife: The only difference between working and the work that I now do is there’s no paycheck involved, but it’s from my heart, it’s something I believe that I owe to the children. I was just the beneficiary of a great education, and I think every child should have that. Every child is entitled to that.

Chris Riback: For sure. Before I ask you about what you are doing today in Iowa, what happened in those years between when you were in elementary school, high school in Iowa, and when you looked at the data again in 2004? What happened in there?

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife: I can look at Iowa specifically, it’s only my view that Iowans valued education, and I mean at the state level, the state legislators. It was a part of our DNA. I no longer think that’s the case. And so I look back at the education that I received. For example, I never heard that African-American children didn’t do well on tests. I never heard that. We are also the originators of the Iowa test of basic skills, ITBS. Kids all over the country took that. Everybody did well on that test. So there’s, I think, a lower expectation. I hear a lot of stories that really have no basis in the research, such as, “Poor children don’t do well.” I’ve always known poor children and many of them have gotten law degrees from Yale and Princeton and-

Chris Riback: Went to do just fine.

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife: I think the community has disintegrated. So there’s not that sense of community or that sense of a village being present to support these young mothers and people who do not have the necessary resources. Yes.

Chris Riback: So tell me about the Iowa Village, the NBCDI, Iowa Village. What are you doing there?

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife: Des Moines Public Schools, if I can share this with you first to backend to it some more.

Chris Riback: Please.

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife: So I have continued to read the data. I started going to school board meetings, I connected with the school board members, the school superintendent, to find out what those issues were. Des Moines Public Schools, for example, has since 2014, recognized that there was a serious problem with African-American males. And so they started monitoring males of color. Not just African-Americans, but Hispanics and African-Americans. And so they’ve done that. Two or three times a year, they put on a report, and every year we find out since 2014 that we’re still at the bottom of the barrel. So they have not said, “Okay, we need to do this to remedy the problem,” but they just keep looking at it, not fixing it, not putting forth any efforts. The same way with regards to reading and math.

That’s where the children, I think are not being served. So I had heard about NBCDI maybe 40 years ago or so, and I started looking at it as a source to help us help the children. We have focused on reading literacy. So this summer we started out with a reading literacy program. Summer, we had four volunteers, two were teachers, and one, in fact, the chair of the committee holds a major position at a major corporation. Another-

Chris Riback: So you’re really getting people involved?

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife: People involved, their own time, their own resources, come to the schools and work with these kids directly. So we’ve gone beyond providing books to really sitting down, showing up and sitting down with these children.

Chris Riback: And the parents have to appreciate that?

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife: And the parents do appreciate that, and we’re getting them involved as well. Yes.

Chris Riback: The parental involvement combined with the schools, it takes all of that. Yes. Well, I’m sure that everyone is very happy that you’ve returned to Iowa. We’re happy that you came by the studio. Thank you for making the time.

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife: Thank you so much for having me.

Chris Riback: Hotep, thanks for coming by the studio.

Hotep: Thank you for having me, Chris, it’s a pleasure.

Chris Riback: What is Black Lion and Cubs?

Hotep: So Black Lion and Cubs is a family friendly anime series, more of a culture and art movement that I created, centered around a father and his two children. It’s something that was motivated by fatherhood. Because I became a father four years ago and my children were excited about some of the things I was sharing with them that I grew up on in the 80s. I decided that I could create what they were seeing in a way that was fashioned to represent characters that looked like them and that was also more family friendly, because a lot of the cartoons and anime back then and today were a little too violent.

Chris Riback: Yes, a lot of violence.

Hotep: Yes, a lot of violence.

Chris Riback: And what are the themes that you carry through the narrative? What are some of those lessons that you want to pass on to your cubs?

Hotep: Being a former teacher myself, I’m studied in the things necessary for human development. And one of the big things that I’ve come to understand that’s important is confidence, self-esteem, belief in oneself, all the things that we call in education now, social-emotional learning. Competency, right, that competency. So I wanted to teach those types of lessons to my children at a very early age and help them grow up and develop those types of competencies. It was something that Frederick Douglass said that struck me the most. He said, “It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” And that statement resonated a lot with me, not only as an educator, but now as a father, making sure that I build them strong so that we don’t have to do the repair work that we hear in society, all the mental health and the self-care. All that’s a reactive response to something that could be proactively built in a human being.

Chris Riback: What are some of the episodes in Black Lion and Cubs?

Hotep: So I have two series, two separate series that have already been developed. The first one is called Valley of the Kings. Valley of the Kings is centered around Black Lion and his cubs as they travel throughout North Africa on behalf of the Pharaoh of Upper Egypt, who has sent them to find his queen who has been captured, if you will, kidnapped by the king of Lower Egypt. And so, they’ve been warring for some time, and now the queen is caught up in the middle and Black Lion and cubs have been deployed to help find her. So they traveled to a lot of historical locations in North Africa between Nubia and Egypt.

The second series is called, Sands of Time. Sands of Time is a more interplanetary story where the heroes, once again are called upon by the family of the kingdom of Upper Egypt, but this time the queen. The king of Upper Egypt has fallen ill and now she sends them across the universe to find the ingredients to make a mystical elixir-

Chris Riback: Wow.

Hotep: … to come back and bring him back to health.

Chris Riback: Now you mentioned previously that your kids right now are four and two-years-old.

Hotep: That’s correct.

Chris Riback: So the two-year-old, we’ll forgive him or her if they haven’t seen it. But has your four-year-old seen any of the shows?

Hotep: Oh, yes, both of them have.

Chris Riback: Both of them have.

Hotep: Both of them have.

Chris Riback: How did they react?

Hotep: Oh, they love it. I mean, because first and foremost, the characters are fashioned after them, if you will, so they can relate in the fact that. And they’re named after my children, so that’s number one.

Chris Riback: What are their names?

Hotep: Salahdin and Osaro are their names. So we have Super Salahdin and Awesome Osaro, are the two cubs. So while some kids today know of the newest singers or rappers, or athletes, my children don’t know who these people are, but they know who King Khufu was or King Ramses. They know about Nubia and Egypt, so real historical places and people that is going to bring them a closer awareness to their own culture and history. And so even my two-year-old, to that point, He, “That’s King Ramses,” or, “That’s King Khufu.” He knows it. Or, “That’s a pyramid, a sphinx.” He knows these words and knows these items even at two.

Chris Riback: Well, you’re also quite an entrepreneur. Where can people see the anime, see your work? And what other reaction do you get outside of your immediate family?

Hotep: Oh, well that’s why I’m excited to be here. I wasn’t sure outside of the family what kind of response I would get, but I had the pleasure of being distributed, my cartoon being distributed on a streaming service known as Black Education Station. It’s a streaming service, much like Netflix and Disney, but it’s been created by Black people and all the content features Black people in a prominent role. And so, on Black Education Station they’re in the forefront. They’re the hero and-

Chris Riback: They’re the protagonist.

Hotep: They’re the protagonists. And there’s no ads. The great thing about Black Education Station-

Chris Riback: Oh.

Hotep: … there’s no ads, different from YouTube, if you will. So my cartoon is distributed exclusively on that network. But outside of that, being here at a conference like this and being able to share with people Black Lion and Cubs and test the market, if you will, the response has been overwhelming. It’s almost as if people have been starved or are thirsty and when they see the characters and the beautiful artwork, they’re like, “Oh, my God, my child watches anime and you don’t see in the anime space, you don’t see many African-American characters or Black characters.” And so for people to see that the response has been overwhelming. I tell people that I’m working on making Black Lion and Cubs the next biggest thing since Dragon Ball Z.

Chris Riback: Well, I know Dragon Ball Z. I have a kid who was of the age when that was particularly popular. Let me say, if you can be half as popular as Dragon Ball Z, that would be an incredible accomplishment.

Hotep: Well, Chris, I’m grateful to you to have this kind of opportunity to share with your audience and others that it exists, it’s here, it’s an alternative. And like you said, if I make it halfway there, my brother, I’m doing well. Doing well.

Chris Riback: Feels to me like you’re doing okay. And even if we didn’t think so, it sounds like you’ve got at least two cubs who think you’re doing pretty well.

Hotep: My brother. Yes, sir. And that’s what it’s all about. That’s what it’s all about.

Chris Riback: Thank you for coming by and talking with us.

Hotep: Thank you. Thank you.

Chris Riback: Joan, thank you for coming by the studio.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Oh, it’s great to be here.

Chris Riback: You have been in this field throughout your professional career. Give me an overview. Where are we today? What are the significant changes that you’re seeing?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: I’ve been lucky, Chris, that I’ve been able to see the field from multiple perspectives, from the policy side, from the public, private sector side, from the university side. What’s been exciting for me is that everyone is trying to make a difference for young children and their voices together, I think collectively, are starting to cut through.

Chris Riback: What are the top issues today around early learning and children and our society?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: That’s a very big question. I think that the most important people in children’s lives are the adults in their lives, the caregivers, their parents, and those who care for them every day. Both of those groups are not being supported the way a country like ours should be doing it. We’ve got a long way to go to make sure that the living conditions of families are promoting responsive parenting, supporting responsive parenting. We’ve got a long way to go before we can be sure that those people that are caring for children every day have working conditions and recognition that will allow them to thrive so children can thrive.

Chris Riback: What is the Rapid survey?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Rapid is a rapid cycle research effort. It’s a survey that we’ve been doing since April of 2020, since the very early days of the pandemic. In the beginning of the pandemic, we were surveying about a thousand parents of young children a week. We then moved to every other week, and now we’re doing it monthly more and more to really hear from them what are the issues that they’re facing, not assume we know, but listen to their voices, have the data that really reflects what parents are saying in real time.

Chris Riback: Do you derive conclusions each month off of that data or you provide the data and then people who want to access the data to find their own conclusions can do that?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Well, it’s a little bit of both. I think that we analyze the data. For example, we’ve done a lot of looking at what parents are saying about material hardship and that they certainly felt during the pandemic things got a little better when we had policies that supported them. Now those policies have lapsed, and so I think families are feeling that. We also wanted to see how they felt that was affecting that material hardship was affecting their family wellbeing and their children. What was the relationship among those? Because we know that economic supports for families matter to child development in the field. We often talk about early learning environments, but the early learning environment for a child is the whole community. It’s the

Chris Riback: Whole community, it’s the whole world. It’s everything that they touch. Speaking of communities and moving towards solutions and what you see out there, are there some innovative solutions or communities that you’re seeing with innovative solutions out there?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: I’m seeing them all over the country, and unfortunately the news at the national level and in the international level is very difficult. We are talking about poly crisis, covid, conflict, climate change, environmental issues. But at the local level, what I see is people trying to come together, set a north star. We want all our children to thrive along that developmental continuum, and we want to bring everybody together with the objective of reaching that north star. It sometimes reminds me of the early days in the country when everyone got together to help raise the barn. That’s the analogy that I sometimes use.

Chris Riback: Yes. What a great image.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: It is an image that, and you see it in small villages all over the world.

Chris Riback: From raising the barn to raising our children.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Raising our children in a collective way.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: That doesn’t mean that we’re taking them away from their families. It’s the opposite. We’re trying to support their families so they can provide better care.

Chris Riback: One last area where I think where it seems that families are needing support is around the climate crisis. What can we be doing? Are there individual actions or collective actions we can be doing around climate and early learning?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Well, it’s interesting that you asked that because we recently included some questions on the Rapid survey about what families were feeling about climate and their overall environment around their homes and in their communities. Over 70% of those parents said they were concerned.

Chris Riback: Wow.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: It’s children all over the world and it’s children of the future who are going to inherit the earth. So I think it’s the issue of the moment. It’s one of the issues of the moment, and that we all have to take some responsibility for changing it. I’ve had people say to me, because I’m doing a lot of work in this area, “You’re doing climate now, Joan?” We have so many issues in the field, but to me and to many of us, it’s a child rights issue.

I think we have to take lessons from the youth of the world who are standing up and saying, “Wait a minute, this is my earth that you’re talking about. This is my future and we’re not going to stand for the way we’ve treated it in the past.” Something is changing. Of course, for many children, this has been an issue for years. I remember my first classroom in Boston where this is in the early 70s, where I saw children coming at three and four already showing signs of asthma because their environmental conditions were not supportive of their health. This for many people is not a new issue. Climate’s made it worse.

Chris Riback: Joan, thank you for the work you’re doing today on that. Thank you for your historical work and for coming by the studio today.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Thank you, Chris, for having me and for being here. Thanks a lot.