For those of us who cover and care about childcare* policy, or progressive social policy in general, I have a report out today that is for you.

It took Vermont a decade**, but they were able to pass near-universal childcare in the state. Even though New Mexico is the darling of the childcare conversation (for good reason), I’ve long believed that Vermont doesn’t get enough attention for the work they did: building a coalition, bringing in the business community, and passing meaningful legislative reform that will build legitimate childcare infrastructure in their state.

It can be all-too-easy to dismiss Vermont’s childcare progress as a one-off. Even as someone who has written close to a dozen national news articles about the state’s childcare system, I’ve found many would rather view New Mexico (and now New York City) as the innovators in the childcare policy space.

→ Even Vermonters don’t give their childcare innovation enough attention. One Vermont operative who I spoke to pointed out that U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders had posted on X about New Mexico’s free childcare for all with the line, “The rest of the country should follow New Mexico’s lead,” and yet he had no mention of the progress that had happened in his home state with Act 76.

But I’m hoping some of that inattention changes now.

Today I have a report out—something I am nicknaming a “research novella” because it’s written like a magazine piece but with the research and deep detail of a case study. It’s about the ten year journey to bring childcare to Vermont, though really it starts a number of years before that with laying the groundwork with Universal Pre-K. The goal is that other advocates and state leaders read this, find the lessons that resonate with them, and do the hard work of deciding what childcare policies could gain some traction in their state.

It goes through a few steps along the way: what the initial and small legislative wins looked like, how the childcare plan was decided upon and what became the focus (bringing in the educators and securing steady public funding). Then the inevitable pivots during the pandemic and the struggle to get national attention and funding (they wound up relying on in-state donors instead). I interviewed business leaders who changed their minds about what “supporting” childcare would look like, and spoke with the political team about the endorsement process and what it meant to keep political pressure on the state legislators who would be voting on the bill.

Finally, I report on the legislative showdown in 2023, including many interviews that have never been made public before. Legislative change is hard, and it’s not without its bumps and detractors, but anyone who wants to know how the legislative sausage is made can jump right to Chapter 7 and find out.

I realize—with a sort of pragmatic compassion that a longtime writer has for their work—that not everyone will click on the link, grab a cup of coffee and cancel their morning plans to read this (though if you do, hi! I appreciate you so much!). So while I hope you will read this piece when the timing allows, I am also planning on previewing many of the sections via Substack this summer and making an annotated version available.

So please consider subscribing (if you haven’t already) and sharing this with someone for whom childcare policy (or just policy in general) is in their wheelhouse.

I’ll close with a quote from Howard Dean, who was so kind as to read the report and call it “masterful.” Back in 2003, I was a huge Dean fan and worked for a Member of Congress who was an early endorser of his campaign for President. I got to meet Dean then and it was thrilling, the way so much of working on Capitol Hill was thrilling for me in those days. So even if you don’t want to take my word for why you should read it, you might be willing to take his:

"If you want to understand how to fix America’s childcare crisis, look to Vermont—and to Rebecca Gale's masterful new report. This is a story about the unstoppable power of community. Rebecca brilliantly captures the voices of the parents who spoke up, the providers who shared their truths, and the business leaders and organizers who fought side-by-side for a better future. It’s a policy triumph, but more importantly, it's a deeply human, page-turning story that offers a brilliant roadmap for every other state in the country." — Governor Howard Dean

The full report is here.

Look for more Substacks this summer on the how and why of what meaningful state-level change can look like.

*The AP recently switched childcare to one word, so in the spirit of trying to follow such standards, I am doing so too, though the report was drafted ahead of this change, hence the disparity.

**It really took a bit longer than this, as a lot of the groundwork began in the early 2000s, but it was a decade of a sustained campaign on childcare that set Vermont up for where they are today.

“I love my job,” is one of the first things Ashley Ross says, as she sits down to talk about a looming pay cut that she might be facing. She’s worked at Gan HaYeled Preschool in Northwest D.C. for almost twenty years, and was recently promoted to split her time between a pre-K classroom and as a Teacher Resource Coordinator, where she can work with other educators to solve problems that arise in the classroom or at home. She had a Child Development Associate (CDA) Credential when she began, and along the way she went back to school to earn an Associates Degree, for which she got a pay bump. But the real change for her—and her family—came in 2022, when D.C.’s Pay Equity Program provided funds to allow early childhood educators like Ross to make salaries equivalent to their public school counterparts. Ross’ salary jumped from $43,000 to over $60,000 and is now $67,000. The additional income has allowed Ross to buy her own home and enroll her children in after school activities like boxing and gymnastics.

For child care workers all over the District of Columbia, the D.C. Pay Equity Fund, the $75 million program that allows early child care educators to be paid similar salaries to their D.C. public school counterparts, has been “life-changing” and “shocking” and “gave me room to breathe” as described by educators when explaining what the salary difference did for themselves and their families. The program was unveiled in 2021 and educators began seeing the wage increases in 2022, and were also given access to free or low cost health insurance, through the HealthCare4ChildCare. The Pay Equity program has been lauded as a model program for how early childhood retention could be improved, creating stability for educators who have been traditionally underpaid in this role, primarily women of color, in an industry that has one of the highest turnover rates in the country.

But Ross is one of the over 3,000 early educators who will be drastically impacted should the D.C. Pay Equity program absorb a $60 million budget cut, which Mayor Muriel Bowser has proposed doing in her budget, released this month. It would be a huge mistake, according to advocates.

“We’ve scored a touchdown and now we’re fumbling the ball,” said Jamal Berry of Educare DC, an early childhood center in the District. “States like New Mexico and New York are moving in this direction,” he gestured forward with his hands, “and we are moving backwards.”

Without those extra funds, Ross’ salary would drop precariously, to the point that coming to work in D.C. wouldn’t make much economic or logistical sense. She lives over an hour away by car, and with her preschool experience, education and credentials, she could likely find a job in the public school system, with benefits and a stable salary, where she lives in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland.

“Yes, everyone loves the Gan,” she said, referring to the preschool. “It’s a special place. But everyone has to live in the real world. They have to pick between the love for their job or their income. Without pay equity, it doesn’t make any sense,” she said. Her partner encourages her to think about the long term, and it’s a hard question for her to ask about what this means for her should she face a dramatic salary cut. “If they cut the money for me, what is the plan?”

For the D.C. Pay Equity Program to be fully funded in 2026-2027, it would need $92.4 Million, said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. The program has grown more expensive because of its success. While the program had a lower utilization rate in those first few years following the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s since exploded in popularity, more teachers were enrolling, staying in their positions, and going back to school for their associate’s degrees and bachelor’s, with the goal of being able to earn a higher income upon graduation.

A report from Mathematica shows that after the first year of PEF implementation, there was a 7% increase to the workforce, with an 11% increase in 2024, and a 23% return on investment, as measured by quantifying the full social benefits of the program.

LaVonda Butler-Means is one example of that increased utilization. Butler-Means had seen her salary jump from $43,000 to over $50,000 with the D.C. Pay Equity Program, and she’d taken the extra step of enrolling in an accelerated associate’s degree program at Bryant and Stratton College, based out of Buffalo, New York. She took out student loans and she estimates she paid around $26,000 for the program, though she was able to get a small scholarship to help cover some of the expense. Her goal, she explained, had been to stay at the Gan and receive the $10,000 pay bump when she graduates this May. But without D.C. Pay Equity, she would have to find another position.

“There is no way I can go back to make what I was making and sustain life,” she said. If she had to switch jobs, she would leave early education and go into a high school setting, where the jobs and salaries appear more stable, though she knows it’s by no means a lot of money for the amount of work she does on any given day. “I don’t even know why teachers make so much less than anyone else. It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

Gunderson anticipates that the impact of gutting the pay equity program would be felt most keenly in the infant and toddler classrooms, which are the most expensive to maintain because of high staffing ratios. “They’re the first to go,” she said. Without a dedicated funding stream for the program, each budget cycle the choices are being made to fund one human services program, or cut another.

Advocates are gearing up for a fight to save the program. D.C. had its own Day Without Child Care on March 18th, followed by a National Day Without Child Care in May, encouraging child care providers to close or operate on a reduced schedule to show the impact of their services. But as compared to 2024, when advocates were able to turn out support and save funding for the program, it’s been harder to galvanize support for saving the pay equity program.

In 2024, the Gan preschool had offered a late start for all students and staff to give teachers the option to protest the changes for a day without child care. Ashley Ross had been one of the teachers who’d gone down to the Wilson Building, where the D.C. Government meets, to hold up signs advocating for saving the D.C. Pay Equity Program for a Day Without Child Care. This year, individual teams have the option to go if they have sufficient coverage, but it will be up to them to decide and find the time.

When asked if the parents feel some outrage at the cuts and how it could impact the teachers who look after their children, Butler-Means shrugs. “Some take it really seriously,” she said. “Others it doesn’t matter to them as long as their kids have somewhere to go.”

This essay has been adapted from the story published in The 74: Pay Equity Fund for D.C.’s Early Educators Faces Possible Elimination

One of the biggest myths out there is that tax policy is boring. People hear about it and their eyes glaze over, the accountants are never the exciting people at a party, and something about tax law feels incredibly grown-up and out-of-reach for people to wrap their minds around as something that could be BIG and make a huge impact in the lives of everyday people.

I’m here to disabuse you of that notion. Just as my friends at The Purse have reminded us that mastering personal finance, meal plans and home budgets are both cool and accessible, I’m hoping that you’ll bear with me on a particular tax policy that can change lives, change outcomes and literally end child poverty if we utilize it right.

It’s called the Child Tax Credit.

This might be more familiar to most readers as “the checks that came in 2021,” apropos of nothing but an emergency pandemic, to support families with young children. What poverty scholars have since learned is that making the child tax credit refundable (meaning available to anyone regardless of income) and advanced (arriving ahead of tax season) was that child poverty rates were CUT IN HALF.

HALF.

For children who were living in impoverished conditions, without enough food to eat, these checks were a godsend.

For families like Lauren McNally’s, a state rep in Ohio who I interviewed, these checks meant they could catch up on bills and spend more on groceries. “It helped us pay off some credit cards and helped us with groceries, child care and car payments. Basic things,” she recalled. “We didn’t go on a vacation with it.”

Fast forward a few years, a change in administration, and the tax cuts coming out of Congress are largely designed to favor the wealthy. Even the expanded child tax credit - upping it from $2000 to $2500 per child, has limits on who can access it. Who is left out? The poorest families.

Read: Who Are the Kids and Families Left Out of The New Child Tax Credit?

But state legislatures are where some of the innovative magic happens. That has been true for child care (hello, Vermont and New Mexico and now possibly New York) and will also be true for the child tax credit. State legislators are looking to replicate the anti-poverty success of the child tax credit from 2021.

And not just the usual suspects in blue states. Red states too.

I wrote about states expanding their child tax credits for The 74. Even though these tax credits aren’t as large as the federal ones (and states have an obligation to balance their budgets each year, unlike the federal government which can take on debt), they are still becoming more popular and states are getting savvy about how they are structured.

As one expert said:

“It’s a domino effect,” said Neva Butkus, a senior analyst who leads the state child tax credit work for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Butkus observed that there are clusters of states that tend to follow one another, such as those based on geography, and that conversations surrounding the child tax credit (CTC) among state lawmakers transcend political affiliation. She points to the CTC in Ohio and one that passed in Georgia as examples of forward momentum in red and purple states. “We are seeing it become more commonplace, and lawmakers across the aisle are seeing the value in the credits, as affordability becomes more of a focus.”

So what does this mean? A few things:

—We know what good policy looks like to solve problems like child poverty, which have dramatic ripple effects for a child’s future life and education. But a generous child tax credit will be good for families, even those like McNally who aren’t hovering at the poverty threshold, but are struggling to raise kids while prices continue to go up and wages stay stagnant.

—States continue to remain the innovators. Absent federal action, look to the states. In this current policy climate which has shifted away from robust social policies, it will be up to individual states to fill the gaps. My own work tends to focus on policy solutions, and for the last year it’s been states, states, states. Localities, too, can make a difference. I’m headed to San Antonio, Texas next week to learn more about their publicly-funded PreK program, paid for by an ⅛ cent sales tax increase, approved by voters.

—One advantage of the state legislators is that many of the people making the policy are much closer to the day-to-day lives of the people who will be impacted by it. I spent the earlier part of my career on Capitol Hill and still retain faith in the public servants who choose to run for public office, but it’s a much different set up when you have a staff, an office, and a slew of benefits and advantages that the everyday people lack. State legislators are often operating on their own, with minimal staff, and low salaries. Many have regular day jobs to pay the bills. It’s not lost on me that these are the legislative bodies who are more attuned to solving for a challenge like poverty and stagnant wages.

Read the full story here at The 74.

Let me begin by saying I am not a sports reporter, but it was fun to be one this past week and talk to some pretty awesome Olympians about how hard it is to juggle their training and competitions with the needs of their kids. Heck, one of them even took the call while picking up a child from kindergarten. (Olympians, they are just like us!)

Except - when it comes to supporting parents in the Olympics we still aren’t doing enough. And I don’t know who is surprised to hear this - where are we doing enough to support parents? - but it seems like this should be something relatively easy to solve, especially given the depth and spending of corporations interested in advertising alongside the Olympic Games.

Here’s what I found about having young kids as an Olympian:

—> Olympic athletes can stay for free - room and board covered - in the Olympic Village. But children aren’t allowed. Outsiders are limited. This makes sense from a practical viewpoint - athletes want privacy and time to focus and relax. Kids can be loud and disruptive. But parents who want to compete with their children on the same continent as them will need to make their own arrangements, and housing during the Olympics is not cheap.

—> We see two weeks of the Olympics and it’s exciting, but training schedules go on much longer and involve temporary relocation. One Olympian has been in Europe since October, causing major life disruption for her husband and child, and yet they prefer to be together even though it’s harder to do. Kids come along, not just because they want to cheer on their parents, but because their parents need to relocate. If I had a job that relocated me to the Italian Alps, I’d take my kids along too.

—> So many amazing athletes have been speaking out and making a difference in the way the Olympics and elite sports treat pregnant women (shout out to Alysia Montaño and Allyson Felix here) but the policies have not caught up to what happens after the child can walk and talk on their own. Even the handful of policies the Olympics have for breastfeeding mothers (which is important - yes!) do not replace the policies needed for access to and care for children during the Games.

So what can be done?

—> Some groups are trying to step in and support parents more. For All Mothers+, the group founded by Montaño, provides $5000 grants for parent-athletes to help with the caregiving costs.

—> One sponsor is providing parents athletes with a kit of supplies when they arrive and I have a particular disdain for this sort of substitution from any real policy effort. You want to help parents? Diapers aren’t the solution. Reliable, stable child care and family-friendly policies are what we need, not another cute onesie. (But won’t that corporate logo with the Olympic rings look so cute…? Sigh).

—> Getting the stories out there. The more visibility of the work and care it takes to be an awesome athlete and awesome parent is what we need and I personally feel inspired by the work these women do (dads too!). When I interviewed Montaño*, she said something that really stuck with me:

“The podium moments for athlete mothers are podium moments for all mothers.”

Heck yeah. Couldn’t agree more.

And if you want some people to watch who are doing this dance of kids and sports, check out the For All Mothers+ Bring the Babies Changemaker Grant winners who will be competing at Milano-Cortina:

Kaillie Humphries Armbruster, Bobsled

Kelly Curtis, Women’s Skeleton Race

Tabitha Peterson Lovick and Tara Peterson, Curling

Elana Meyers Taylor, Bobsled

Read the full story on why child care support is missing during the Olympic Games over at The 74, republished on the 19th.

*So it was very cool to talk to Montaño and I had been going through her IG feed as one does when researching a superstar runner who competed while eight months pregnant. I came across this video of her working at her computer, pulling on her running shoes, leaping over a basket of laundry, and going for a long run. Then, she runs back in, pulls on a clean shirt, and logs back online to join a work call. We did our interview late in the day (my kids were home and one even interrupted, as tends to happen) but I also had gone for a run and just changed into a more appropriate sweater for our call. And of course I had to tell her about it, as if my three mile jog was anything compared to her training runs and she was like GOOD FOR YOU and really, that made my day ;)

The first big surprise I had when I was given a tour of New Mexico’s Early Learning Academy was just how spacious and luxurious the staff break rooms were, complete with massage chairs and baskets of free snacks. I met with Crystal Romero, the head of ELA, and she talked about how taking care of her staff is her top priority and that is what allows ELA to have full enrollment.

“Twenty years ago, I had to furnish classrooms by shopping at thrift stores and yard sales, sanding things myself and repainting them,” she says. But New Mexico’s unprecedented investment in child care, first through American Rescue Plan dollars, then through higher child care subsidies and now with universal child care, has changed the way she runs her business and motivated her to expand.

Romero says the extra funding has allowed her to improve problem areas, like staff turnover, which is high in a labor-intense low-wage job like child care compared to other industries. She revamped her on-boarding system to include a two-week immersion where new staff shadowed a more senior teacher. She implemented 30, 60 and 90 day benchmarks to train staff properly, and she included a mentor teacher and coordinator team. Turnover, which had been as high as 40 percent per year dropped to 9 percent, and she estimates is now around 15 percent, lower than the industry average.

“It takes a savvy business person to realize ‘here is how we make the math work [in child care]’,” said , in a story I reported for Vox. He acknowledges that there are fundamentally different profit motives of independent programs like Romero’s that are profitable because of the state support, compared to investor-backed chains, who are obligated to report profits to shareholders, and may not be able to keep the needs of the children and educators above their concerns for profit.

Romero has now expanded ELA to four centers, and she is under contract to purchase two additional pieces of land. They have close to 700 children enrolled and approximately 165 employees. Romero says they are the highest paying child care program in the state, and all employees are eligible for full benefits, including health, vision, dental, and retirement. In October, she announced that every staff member would get a $5 an hour raise, which was met with cheers and shrieks. (She sent me the YouTube video, another indication of the strong online presence they can maintain).

As part of their community program, they host an event each year where every child gets a brand new pair of shoes. “Nikes and Air Jordans,” she explained. “We gave away 500 at this location,” she says, of the original Early Learning Academy in West Albuquerque. This year, they sponsored a Make-A-Wish request for a three-year old in their community suffering from a brain tumor, and paid $8,500 to send the family to Disney World. Framed photos along the wall of the conference room, where she and I met, show her with her husband at local University basketball games and community events, on behalf of ELA.

And yet, Romero gets “lots of flack from people who say you are using state money to get rich,” she says. “I don’t see any other industry that receives state money that feels like they can’t do well.”

New Mexico is one of several states that has made child care more profitable for people who work in the industry. I recently covered this issue for Vox - where I delved into the different regulations that are being considered as more for-profit entities enter the space. Romero is very much a local businesswoman - her efforts are very different from, say, a private equity company who is looking to extract profits without focusing on the quality of services delivered or the needs of the staff. Romero has figured out a better way to make child care profitable without skimping on quality - and she has done so by focusing on staff wellbeing and compensation.

(And there are excellent newsletters on some of the concerns with private equity and the child care space, a few of which are here: has written extensively about this, including this report from Zero2Eight, and I’ve covered this on Substack previously too.)

But back to New Mexico. Here’s the fine print of how child care has become more profitable: the state subsidy pays for full-time child care, even if children only show up for three or four days each week. Romero studies her average daily attendance records, and is able to enroll more students while keeping her staffing levels the same, without going over the state-mandated teacher-to-child ratios. She keeps floaters on hand to allow her staff to take breaks, so if more students show up than the daily average, she still has the staff to provide appropriate cover.

This idea is both genius and a bit of a head-scratcher. Child care should be high quality, staff should be paid well, and government support is necessary for it to be a stable industry. And yet it is only the larger spaces, like Romero’s, that could have a system with sufficient economies of scale to bring in a stable of floaters as the daily attendance fluctuates. I think a lot about the home child care spaces who might not be able to compete in the same way - whose ability to flex their enrollment so that they can maximize the state subsidies while providing care isn’t going to be the same. And I also wonder about the child care model of providing full day care, five days a week, if families don’t actually need to utilize that amount of time. Yes, they need to provide adequate staffing, but that model is predicated on the idea of traditional 9-5 jobs, which we know much of the population - particularly low wage workers - doesn’t access.

And yet, there aren’t enough examples out there of providers and states looking to be innovative leaders. I agree with Romero that she should be prioritizing what she is doing - compensating her staff well and providing high quality care for kids. Because of the locations of her child care centers, in lower-income neighborhoods, all of the families qualified for state aid, even before New Mexico expanded child care subsidies to include all families regardless of income.

Part of my reporting at the Better Life Lab is to keep highlighting these states and localities who are doing innovative work. Because supporting child care through government dollars is still a relatively new concept in America. It’s up to us to 1) normalize this practice, 2) point out where it works and where it can be improved, and 3) take a close look at the innovators like Romero. If she is keeping staff turnover low, providing high quality care, and expanding - this is something to watch with a close eye.

Somewhere during the summer of 2016, my husband and I were both working full time in demanding jobs: he at a law firm, me in the Obama Administration at the Department of Commerce. We had an infant and toddler at home and were stretched thin. Much of what I remember about that period is being hungry and exhausted, and always carrying a notebook with me because if I didn’t write things down I would instantly forget them.

We’re making a change after this year, I recall thinking. Hillary Clinton will win the presidency and then I’ll become a freelance journalist, covering all the major changes her administration will bring. I’ll have more flexibility and we won’t be as stressed. It will be great.

Well, spoiler alert, the HRC part didn’t turn out the way we’d expected. But I did become a freelance journalist. And one of the best places I wrote for was for the team at the Better Life Lab at New America, as a reporting grantee. They loved smart policy journalism and I was thrilled to write for a team that was easy to work with, helped with story placement, and even paid me pretty quickly when it was done. (That last part seems straightforward, but anyone who has written for money will know that it can be hard to get paid in a direct and easy way and the places that do follow through on that are special gems to hold onto forever).

Several years, another child, another two administrations later, and now I work at the Better Life Lab. One of my favorite parts is working with writers on the reporting grants. And I’m here to encourage you, as someone reading this newsletter who thinks they have a story to tell, that you should consider applying. Yes, you.

And here is my list of reasons why:

1. For the novice reporter: if you feel you have a story on caregiving you want to see out there, or think it should be told - you’re probably right, and it’s worth asking if this is something you want to share. Brigid Schulte, who was the first person to recommend me for reporting grants, also has a phrase I go back to: good stories find homes. If you think you have one, apply. If you’re new to the process, we help you with pitching and placement. We need and want new voices - for narrative change to be effective, it takes many of us at the mic.

   

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2. For the mid-career reporter: Maybe caregiving or child care or elder care isn’t your beat. Maybe you have dabbled in this topic but you’ve typically focused on other areas. We want to help you expand and cover something new - this is why funds are here, to help give more writers an understanding of the how and way care touches all our lives.

   

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3. For the experienced reporter: If this is something you regularly cover, this is a chance to do something different. We’ve had reporters use funds for travel, extra research, pitching “reach” publications or just simply making more money for a quality story.

   

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4. For the designer, illustrator, podcaster, videographer: Stories aren’t print only, and they don’t have to be limited to words. We have funds set aside for multimedia stories, and we’ve been proud to support short documentaries in previous rounds. And it was through our reporting grants that we tried our hand at graphic stories - a medium that I’ve since come to love and hope to do more of.

   

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5. For the caregivers. First person stories are incredibly powerful and they show us how individuals make a difference in this field. One of my favorite reporting grantees’ stories came from Tonia McMillian - a longtime caregiver who wrote about the need for child care providers to have access to health care. Nothing speaks more truth to power than the lived experience.

So what are you waiting for? We are looking for solutions-oriented stories that highlight what’s working—and what’s possible—across the care spectrum. Solutions-oriented stories matter because research shows they resonate more with readers (or viewers) than stories that indicate all doom and gloom without a way forward.

Grants are open to all formats, including print, photo, video, podcast, and more. Selected journalists will receive funding, editorial guidance, and placement support, and join a vibrant reporting cohort. Stories will be commissioned on a rolling basis starting November 2025.

—> You can apply here. Please feel free to forward and share with others. A helpful FAQ is here - and if there is something I missed, drop me a line and let me know.

—> Quick note: if you like what you read, please consider liking, commenting or sharing this post. It helps this newsletter find new readers, and it’s free to do!

I don’t think there is a single parent in the world that doesn’t want their kid to have what we consider “quality” care. That care can come in many forms - by the parent themselves, friend or relative or hired person (“the nanny”) or in a formal setting like someone’s home or child care center. The latter has been dubbed “day care” by our colloquial English language, and yet “day care” often has its own heavy assumptions about what it is and what it does.

In the early 2000s, researchers began to realize that young children in child care weren’t just blobs but actually had rapidly developing brains that could sponge up information and form relationships and establish that je ne sais quai of social-emotional learning. When I was growing up, social-emotional learning wasn’t a term we discussed in school. Now, it’s everywhere: in schools, child cares, academic publications, and bestsellers in airport bookstores and blockbuster movies like Inside Out 2. The message, varying to some degrees, is that SEL skills are what kids can learn when they are young, and they can determine what allows one kid to succeed in life while another falters. It’s become our modern day marshmallow test.

The focus on SEL for young children comes at the same time we have an uptick in two-income families and single-heads of household seeking out care solutions for young children. Child cares (or daycares) aren’t merely a place to park your child between work hours - they can now become the ground floor of the SEL skills one needs to become kindergarten ready.

So this means we’ve become far more interested in defining quality in early care and education. And while the adage of what measures is what matters is true in education just as in any other industry, it also means we have some unusual ways to determine what quality care looks like. But care is not one of those things that a family can swap out as easily as an Amazon return or read a Wirecutter review and press “purchase”- it takes time and needs to fit within a family’s needs and budgets.

When I read this fantastic essay of ’s I asked if she would be open to my sharing it with readers of . I go out of my way to read Ivana’s work because (in addition to being a great person and writer) she also brings forth a viewpoint that isn’t always front and center in the care conversations: an Ivy League lawyer turned stay-at-home homeschooling parent, she reminds us that parents make all sorts of choices for what’s best for their families. And what makes sense for one family may be the opposite of what another one chooses. On paper Ivana and I may be opposites, but when it comes to digging into care policies we have a lot more common ground.

Her essay is below. I highly recommend subscribing to her newsletter, The Home Front, as well.

The Home Front

Analysis of issues impacting the home, parents, and raising children.

By Ivana Greco

Daycare: Let’s Talk about Quality

by

Before I start discussing daycare - which I’ve found to be a very sensitive topic - a fews disclaimers:

1. I am not anti-daycare. My older two sons were in daycare while I was working as an attorney. My oldest son started daycare at four months; my second son around seven months. I don’t think they were harmed by being in daycare. My younger two children are home with me, and while I enjoy spending the extra time with them, I would not hesitate to put them in daycare if family circumstances required.

2. This is not a post about policy proposals. I imagine my left-of-center readers will read this and have one set of policy ideas they like and my right-of-center readers will have another. Feel free to post your policy opinions in the comments, but that is not the point of this post.

3. This is also not a post about daycare before baby turns one, which I think has different considerations (and which I will address in a future post).

4. This is a post about how different daycares are different. Some daycares are great, some are good, some are bad, and a few (thankfully rare) are terrible.

With that extensive throat-clearing out of the way, onto the substance!

When discussing daycare, we hear often about the price. To give just one salient example, Zohran Mamdani — the front-runner mayoral candidate for New York City - has pledged to create a free, universal child care system. Daycare is certainly pricey. The Department of Labor maintains a National Database of Childcare Prices, which found that median price varies a lot, but is certainly high:

The price of childcare, to be sure, is very important. Quality also matters a lot. While quality is mentioned in debates surrounding childcare, questions about quality often play second-fiddle to the question of price. Why?

One reason may be that almost all parents believe that their daycare is high-quality. A 2016 study by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that 59% of parents believed their daycare to be excellent, and 29% thought it was very good. Only 12% of parents believed their daycare to be fair or poor.

This, by the way, is similar to how parents view their local public schools. Most parents are satisfied with their own children’s education (even when they take a more pessimistic view of school quality generally!)

Unfortunately, many parents are wrong that their own children’s daycare is excellent, at least as experts measure the question. For example, one respected study found that only 11% of measured daycares were “excellent.”

A second reason that this topic is hard to discuss is that experts disagree on how to measure daycare quality. Rachel Cohen Booth at Vox has an excellent article on the topic titled: A critical fight over “quality” child care could shape millions of kids. In it, Booth explains that states have attempted to use a rating system for external childcare. The rating systems are known by the lengthy name/acronym — of course there’s an acronym — of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems, or QRIS. The following quote may give you a sense of the complexity of what these states are trying to measure:

These systems, which vary significantly across states, award ratings based on multiple dimensions, including teacher qualifications (such as holding a child development associate credential or a degree in early childhood education); learning environments (including safe teacher-to-child ratios, classroom cleanliness, and availability of age-appropriate books and toys); administrative practices (like documented emergency procedures and business management systems), and the caliber of child-adult interactions (measured through classroom observations).

It’s hard to know how the average parent understands these QRIS ratings (if they even know they exist). I did not know about the QRIS ratings when my kids were in daycare, and if I had, I’m not sure how seriously I would have taken them. Obviously I wanted my children to be in a safe and clean environment, but my main focus was on the “caliber of child-adult interactions,” or …. are the daycare teachers going to be nice to my kids??

In other words, it’s very hard to boil down daycare quality to a rubric. Much of it depends on fit: do the child and the caregiver match well? Is the environment well-suited to this particular child and this particular family? How flexible is the daycare around a specific child’s medical or behavioral complexities?

To give a couple of examples of how this plays out in real life, a Korean family that speaks Korean at home may prioritize a daycare provider that can speak to their toddler in Korean (or not: maybe the family is seeking early English language exposure in a daycare environment; it all depends!) A family with a toddler that they suspect will eventually be diagnosed with autism (autism is often not formally diagnosed until school-age, even if the signs may be present earlier) may find large group care to be profoundly challenging for their child.

A third reason we might be hesitant to discuss daycare quality is that it can be a very distressing issue. I’ve spoken above about how a lot of daycare quality depends on a match between provider and child … but there are also daycares out there which are simply unsafe. In providing some examples, I want to underline that daycare abuse is rare, and not something the average parent needs to worry about. However, it does happen. Here’s a snapshot of what Google news returns when I searched for “daycare abuse” while writing this post:

Picking one of the stories — and warning, this is graphic and disturbing - here is what one of the accusations included:

Police at the time asked [the witness] to reenact what she saw [the accused defendant do] using a doll. That video was shown to the jury after she described verbally what she witnessed.

“I was stunned, honestly, because I’m like, the way that was his body that just hit this thin piece of mat, and she had hit him so hard that his body ... excuse me,” Morris said while getting emotional. “His body had bounced enough ... that I could hear him wheezing for air. And I didn’t know what to do.”

This, obviously, is horrifying. Again, this kind of abuse is statistically very rare, but even once is clearly too much. How do we prevent this kind of abuse? There are a handful of tools: background checks, licensing, inspections, etc. But no system is ever going to be 100%, and that is always a difficult reality to face.

A fourth and final reason it is hard to address daycare quality issues is that it is often class-based, and Americans tend to shy away from discussing class issues. An upper-middle class family living in a wealthy, urban area with many childcare options to choose from is going to have a very different perspective than a working-class family in rural America that may only have one daycare center within a reasonable drive. For the former, the most relevant consideration may indeed be cost, since they have a number of good quality but expensive options to choose from. For the latter, cost is a big concern, but quality is also a big deal if the only local daycare provider isn’t good or isn’t a good match for their particular family. A family where both parents are working shift work jobs and risk getting fired if their toddler gets sick too many times …. and has to drop off a visibly ill child at a low-quality daycare … is probably going to have a very different perspective on ideal child care scenarios than two white-collar parents who have flexibility in working from home when their baby is sick.

Why does it matter? What’s the harm of focusing more on daycare price than on daycare quality? In a nutshell: I think that until we can openly and frankly discuss differing childcare quality, it’s going to be very hard to understand the stark divide between how different families view daycare. Think of questions like: is daycare harmful or helpful? What is the ideal family policy surrounding subsidies for daycare? Do parents want their kids in daycare or at home? How do we tailor childcare policy for specific regions and families? None of these can be answered — or even really tackled in a meaningful way — without a deep understanding of what good childcare looks like for different families, and how the quality of their local daycares affect them. Price is easier to discuss, because it’s objective. But without truly grappling with messy questions about daycare quality, we’re going to be left with only an incomplete understanding of how our fellow Americans understand childcare choices … to the detriment of both our social and political fabric.

Thank you again to for sharing her essay with readers of .

Last month, it was the book Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe. Judging the book by its cover, on which a girl is slumped in prone position on a couch with her laptop open, I figured I wouldn’t really enjoy it.

I was wrong. Very wrong. Margo doesn’t have “money” troubles. She has CHILD CARE troubles.

The plot of the book, which I will lightly outline here without major spoilers, is that Margo becomes pregnant at 19, decides to keep the baby, and then cannot find a child care arrangement that allows her to work and care for her child at the same time. So she turns to OnlyFans, where by going topless and creating an engaging persona, she makes enough money to be home with her baby.

From the book:

“Margo had two days off before her next shift and no penetrating new insights into the childcare conundrum. Nannies and babysitters were around $800 a week, whereas day care was only $300, but day care was, as the name suggested, very diurnal, just obsessed with daylight. If she had a respectable job being a secretary or something, she’d have an easier time finding childcare. But she was a night worker, which somehow denied her the right to affordable childcare. It made no sense! A night care would be even easier to run - all the babies would be sleeping!”

“How was she supposed to make a living? She was willing to work hard, she was willing to never sleep, to wear an ugly uniform, to be mildly degraded day in and day out. She was willing to do whatever was required. But she needed to believe it was possible.”

-Excerpt from Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe, published 2024 by HarperCollins.

At book club we were our deliciously judgy selves. First, over the debate to keep the baby, which is a separate topic for another Substack. Second, over the decision to resort to OnlyFans and topless photos to make a living. None of us would do that, right?

Except - wait. Margo breastfeeds her baby. She wants to be home with him. She was sexually harassed at her waitressing job and is revealed to be an engaging and caring mother. She feels largely ignored by the world and, borrowing the phrase from this great Alison Pugh article, “despersonalized” and unseen. What other choice does she have in a country that has no paid leave policies*, no child care support, and no safety net for people when they are in bed recovering from childbirth and nursing an infant? Taking to OnlyFans, which she could do from the safety of her own home and make far more than her waitressing tips, seems like a sound economic decision, even if it’s a questionable moral one.

I would do it, I told my book club. If I were in Margo’s situation without strong family support, no government support, limited work options, and zero child care options - I would likely do what she did.

Of course, this is easy for me to say. I had my first child at age 33, long after college and grad school were done and with the privilege of health insurance and a two-income household. I even had paid family leave from my newspaper job**. I lived in a place with ample child care options, and though they were expensive, we could manage. I can’t actually predict with any certainty what I would have done in Margo’s shoes except to note that we keep putting people in this predicament over and over because we continue to live in a country that has no policies surrounding care for mothers and young children.

We KNOW how to change this. We know what quality child care looks like and we know the benefits of giving people time to heal and bond with their baby. We also, all of us from ALL sides of the political spectrum, know that it takes money to live with a roof over one’s head and put food on the table.

I’m not recommending women turn to sites like OnlyFans to make a living. But I also think of how much care policies play into the decisions people make, and one is at their most vulnerable point when ushering a newborn into the world.

In the book, Margo draws a line between which parts of her body she will share on her OnlyFans site. She makes her own moral code and decides how she will stick with it. This is what we all do when making hard decisions - we figure out our limits and then we reevaluate when we need to move the goal posts.

If we want to empower people to have more agency in their decision-making, then we need to take a hard look at the care policies in this country and invest in improving them. The United States is largely an outlier in this - we are the only developed country without a paid family leave policy and we spend some of the least on child care, compared to our counterparts. We’ve had opportunities to change this, in 1971 with the Comprehensive Child Development Act, and in 2022 with Build Back Better. Each time our country decided NO and kept the status quo in place, even as families clamored for something different. Even as the price of child care kept rising, and the benefits of paid family leave became clear, our federal policy didn’t budge.

But it doesn’t have to be this way - not for Margo, and not for us.

—> If you enjoyed what you read, please consider liking this post or adding a comment. It’s free, and it helps me find new readers for this Substack!

*The story does take place in California, which is one of the 13 states to have a paid family leave policy, but it’s not a stretch to assume that the eight weeks at 60-70 percent of her waitressing pay wouldn’t have allowed her to pay her rent.

**I was very lucky to have paid leave, but at the time it wasn’t a formal policy. It was a “take some time off and we will see you at Thanksgiving” arrangement with my editor. Which, at the time, I found generous. Mostly because, like Margo, I didn’t know any better.

[END]

Last year, around this time, I sent out a Substack about my decade-long relationship with something called 10Q. To coincide with the Jewish new year each fall, a series of 10 questions are sent out to reflect about your life and time at this particular juncture - hopes, fears, changes, anticipations. Questions like: what were you most proud of and what do you think next year will look like?

The answers are sealed in a (metaphorical) vault and then sent to your email inbox a year later. 

After a few years of doing this myself, my husband started filling it out too. Each year, when the vault is unsealed, we share our answers. It’s like flipping to the end of a book to find out what happens: we still know exactly what those hopes and concerns were, but now we know how they’ve evolved.

But this year, for the first time, when I got my answers the feeling was a bit different. Some of our predictions didn’t come true. We had high hopes for a family vacation we have opted not to take. We had great feelings about a school that turned out not to be the right fit. Whatever linear, upward path we had expected to be on wasn’t turning out the way we wanted.

I’ve written about child care and caregiving policy now for several years, and one of the common themes that comes up when talking to parents about their decisions is how much things can change and shift without us even realizing it. That we can have something - a school, a caregiver, a schedule - that works incredibly well for child #1 and then completely flops for child #2. One of the reasons that Pat Buchanan was incredibly effective at torpedoing the Comprehensive Child Development Act in 1971 is because he was able to tap into parents’ fears that their children would be worse off in universal care structures that treated them all the same. His analogy was the Soviet Union, but I also imagine there are parents out there who have a kid that struggles and wonder if they’d do ok in a group setting at a young age.

But the good news here is that the child care programs that are getting more government support are those with diversified options. In places like Vermont and New Mexico, the two states making major investments in care infrastructures, it’s not only a specific type of child care that can receive reimbursements. If you have a child that you believe needs a specific type of care - whether it’s in a center, in a family child care, or in a workplace setting - you can likely get that. (It’s not quite the same as a cash subsidy in most places, but it’s getting close). In New Mexico, starting in November, all families qualify for the benefit, regardless of income. So this benefit is universal, but it also allows for families to choose. It’s not what Pat Buchanan tried to make us think - it’s quite the opposite.

The 10Q answers arrive the day before you’re encouraged to fill out the questions again. Where I had previously written in mine a lot about child care and who will watch and care for our kids, I now write about school. What is the right fit? How do we get there? Who can help us figure this out?

So I want to do a few things in this space today.

First is to acknowledge the under-discussed idea that care needs do not end at age 5 when kindergarten begins. Public schools do offer a very different economic calculation than traditional child care, but they also provide a critical need of caring for kids during the day. Just as child cares require differentiation, so do schools, and we still have a ways to go before this process gets easier for a lot of families.

Second, there are limits to what we can expect in terms of growth being a linear process. It’s a hard reality to look at answers from a year ago and feel that the optimism then didn’t pan out.

Third, it’s not all bad news out there. Since last year, one state has announced universal child care and another is well on its way to implementing one of the most ambitious and effective child care infrastructure systems in the country. States are innovators and they will have data to show their success so that others may decide to take a leap. It’s not quite the same dramatic sweeping change we’d like to see on the federal level, but it’s an important start.

Fourth, Substack! I was relatively new to the platform when I wrote the 10Q last year and now I’ve come to value it (and all of the readers each week) as something crucial for sharing quality journalism and opinion. Thank YOU for reading. For commenting, for sending emails and clicking the little heart button. It makes doing this work all the more rewarding, and I hope to keep exploring how to utilize this space, write more and engage with readers for this coming year.

Do You 10Q is free and the questions are available to anyone to fill out between the days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - which falls on October 2nd this year. I highly recommend it to anyone who has some time to fill it out. Answers are private unless you opt to make them public; or in my case, share with your spouse.

—> Thank you for reading! Please consider liking this message or leaving a comment. These types of engagements are helpful for Substack to share my work with other readers.

Five years ago, Leslie Forde was the mom who had it all: success at work, strong marriage, a toddler and newborn baby. But when she returned from maternity leave, having it all became much more complicated. She wasn’t sleeping, and when she went to work, she wasn’t succeeding. She did what so many of us in the throes of raising young children find ourselves doing - taking a step back to pause, reframe, and adjust.

For Leslie, this reset has meant starting Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs, a research-driven organization supporting mothers’ mental health through individualized support and workplace interventions. She’s out with a new book, Repair with Self-Care: Your Guide to Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs, in which she overhauls the idea of “self care” as something that goes far beyond just meeting our basic needs.

I’m about 10 years too late to this conversation, having spent the last decade wondering why having it all seemed so elusive. In every phase of my working life there has been someone who seems to have the same young kids and working spouse, yet can get more done in a day than I can. But as I’ve gotten further along into the caregiving experience I have seen that what Leslie talks about is spot on: we aren’t really able to have it all for a sustained period of time, and that’s ok. And when we redefine “all” to include time for our own mental and physical well-being, then it makes sense that our priorities will shift. But it’s our obsession with being productive and efficient that drags so many of us down, when it’s really those inefficient, creative, enjoyable moments we should be striving to have more of each day.

I have a strange habit: when I read a book I really enjoy — like really, REALLY enjoy — I turn back to the beginning and read it again. Not for any productive or deep reason other than the fact that I enjoyed it once, and want to read it one more time to enjoy it again. Leslie talks about how we’ve become socialized to feel guilty about how we use our limited amount of discretionary time. This is where that pull to be efficient and productive comes back - why reread when one can fold laundry, learn to sew, prep dinner, clean cabinets? That would certainly be the wiser, smarter way to spend an afternoon. There may be nothing that has less time-use efficiency than rereading a book one has just finished. But what Leslie found is that those moments to shore up our creativity and deep thinking are what we need more of, certainly more so than being caught up on a to-do list.

So I am happy to share a conversation that Leslie had with my Better Life Lab colleague (who has her own Substack, , that I highly recommned you subscribe to). Haley was kind enough to share with readers of . The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Haley Swenson: Tell me about Mom's Hierarchy of Needs and your journey to writing this book.

Leslie Forde: Everything changed when I returned from maternity leave after having my second baby. I went from managing two departments to a situation where multiple team members had to take unexpected FMLA leave. The market conditions had shifted, and I was being asked to bring my most strategic, clear-thinking self to work—which is literally what I'm paid for—while I was completely depleted. I was sleeping in 90-minute increments with a newborn and toddler, and physically not doing well.

There were warning signs I was ignoring. Days I didn't remember driving to work. Times I'd race through the parking garage, run up to the mother's room, and realize I'd left the breast pump at home. I started hallucinating from sleep deprivation, and it was apparent to others—for the first time in my life people asked if I was okay.

What was once a dream job became completely unsustainable. Even though I was a VP at a public company, I felt too vulnerable to say I was struggling. I mean, I'd just been away for 12 weeks. How could I ask for more time or different arrangements?

So I did something I never thought I'd do—I downshifted. Took a role with one direct report, a 40% pay cut, and negotiated a four-day work week. It still took over two years to recover and regain clarity after that burnout.

During recovery, I was approached by a mental health startup founder who asked, "Why are moms so stressed?" And I said, "How much time do you have?" In that moment, I just said, "There's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and there's mom's hierarchy of needs." It rolled out, and I felt it. I drew it on paper, got curious about what it would look like for others.

Haley: What does that hierarchy look like?

Leslie: At the base, we prioritize our children's health, milestones, well-being, activities. The next layer: household responsibilities, making the home feel and be a certain way. Then professional roles. All those bottom layers—the reason we never get to the top, which is self-care, involving sleep, movement, stress management, healthy relationships—is because what we prioritize at the bottom is never done. It's perpetual.

Pre-children, you're in that mode of "when everything else is done, then I'll call that friend, see that movie, pursue that PhD, take that walk." But after kids, there's no "done." There's no “done” to children's well-being, certainly no done to housework. That was my wake-up call.

If I'm trying to do something impossible—wait for leftover time to take care of myself—and it's impossible, then I need to be ruthless about carving out time in my schedule.

Haley: Your book description says this is not a work-life balance book. What are we shooting for if not balance?

Leslie: I don't believe work-life balance is feasible, and everyone who tries to achieve it is deeply disappointed when they can't. What I think is possible is managing energy in a way that allows you to serve your highest-importance goals with more fidelity, in a way that feels good to you, making trade-offs less significant, and giving yourself space for restorative self-care.

That piece is not up for debate. You have to move, care for your body, mental and physical health, emotional well-being. It doesn't have to look like a spa day—very few of us get those. It doesn't have to be an hour of therapy plus workout daily. Even if it's five minutes when your kid is quiet and you splash cold water on your face, or close the bathroom door and put your child in the pack-and-play with Play-Doh—it has to be part of your day-to-day life fabric. It can't be episodic vacations twice a year, which aren't exactly relaxing for moms with little kids anyway.

Haley Swenson: You ask moms to make a shift from thinking about time management to energy management. How did you get there?

Leslie Forde: You'll see this concept in psychology research—the idea of flow, getting into that state where things feel effortless, you're in your zone of genius. It's usually through a male lens, not through motherhood or caregiving.

There are times when you can multitask without sacrificing much, but there are times when you feel really drained. Many of us feel drained by 8 AM because we've already thought a thousand times, solved a million problems, dealt with sippy cups, chased kids around getting dressed, handled tantrums. You haven't started your day and already feel like you've lived a thousand lives.

If you understand what those drains look like—some personal to who you are, some about making too many trivial decisions when your body has a biological limit—don't spend it on sippy cups. Come up with routines. My kids had their own colors for cups and plates. I know which plates I use for which things. I'm not reinventing that because I don't want to think about it multiple times daily. There's a tax on my clarity.

You can choose your own system and continue pouring energy into what you want to obsess over. I obsess over food—I love cooking and meals. But other food decisions are routine because the mental energy cost is too high.

Haley Swenson: This connects to mom guilt around time with kids. Many working mothers think, "I need to spend more time with my kids, so I can't go to the gym." But what's the quality of that time if you're depleted?

Leslie Forde: Exactly. What's the quality of presence you can give? What's your patience level? We've all snapped when we didn't want to, because 15 things happened before that moment that added to this reservoir of depletion. You snap over something you wouldn't snap over if you were in a better state—if you were on vacation, if you'd have had eight hours of sleep.

Understanding that and choosing to put yourself in a better frame as much as possible, or knowing when you're not and making alternative arrangements—that's key. Physical energy is really hard without decent sleep. Pregnancy, postpartum, hearing a baby cry every two hours, worrying about kids, getting them up at dawn, perimenopause, menopause—women have this long period of sleep deprivation.

Sleep deprivation was part of how I lost my mind postpartum. We have to protect against it, even if it means not going to something you'd love to attend because it starts at 9 PM and you have to be up at 5 or 6 AM.

Haley Swenson: You include intellectual self-care as a category. Tell me about that.

Leslie Forde: I realized I'd become so narrow—narrowly expert on my job, then narrowly expert on my babies. I wasn't as broad as I wanted to be anymore. When this Mom's Hierarchy of Needs idea came to me, I wanted to be creative again. I'd always been a writer, but in my career, I was a business writer. Growing up, I wrote poetry, was a dancer, and a painter. I had this creative youth that was meaningful to me, but I erased and pushed it out as an adult because it was inefficient.

When I realized I was hungry to be creative, to put my own thoughts out there—not just company thoughts—to have the vulnerability and growth that comes from sharing my own ideas, I had to learn. I had to invest in self-education, and I was excited about that. I felt fed by it, fueled by it. I realized I was starving for intellectual stimulation, learning new things, pursuing interests through their twists and turns. That had always made me happy, so it was missing from my life.

Haley Swenson: Moms today are so tuned into their kids' needs for enrichment. We often go from home to work and back home again, thinking about building experiences for our kids, but not ourselves.

Leslie Forde: I would only caveat that I don't think we have space to step back. I feel like it's iterative. Maybe you get five or ten minutes of reflection here and there. Maybe instead of cleaning counters during nap time, you sit and look out the window. In the midst of being fully engaged with no time to yourself and very little sleep, you're choosing to carve out spaces for growth and health right in the middle of it.

Most of us can't go on weekend-long retreats to get back in touch with ourselves. If you can, go for it, but knowing that's out of reach because of time, money, childcare—find variations that work within how your life really is.

Haley Swenson: How do you think about the relationship between individual self-care strategies and broader systems change?

Leslie Forde: Well, there are two sides to that answer. We do need to take care of ourselves, as best we can. There's very little discretionary time, and we're socialized to be guilty about using it. I can break that cycle for people, help them see we're at greater risk for stress-related illness of every kind. All the self-sacrifice means we're less healthy, have shorter lifespans or health spans.

But the real answer is public policy change. It'll happen when we're grandparents, if ever. Knowing it won't happen in your lifetime frees you to make different choices. There are systems of work: changing norms, how managers reward people, what high performance looks like, moving away from responsiveness as a proxy for commitment. That's faster than public policy change but still hard.

Individual changes do impact systems. If you decide you absolutely refuse to pay late pickup fees, or miss your workout daily, or give up seven to nine hours of sleep, you make other choices. Some trade-offs impact work. People change careers. You see brilliant women stepping out of traditional ladders.

More people are reclaiming agency over how, when, and where they work. The pandemic blew doors wide open for structural change. Now hybrid work is common where it never was before. That's systems change resulting from people opting out, saying no, choosing different paths. Employers realized they had to rewrite rules to retain engaged workforces.

Haley Swenson: What's your main message for mothers reading this?

Leslie Forde: You won't like it—the answer is you have to do less. You can outsource if you can afford it. You can "spouse source" if you're partnered. You can eliminate things, leverage family, community, benefits, whatever money you have.

Most importantly, understand that if your goal is growth—and for many of us, especially in communities of color, from immigrant families, we don't want to just subsist—we want lives we're proud of, impact on the world's problems or people closest to us. If you're ambitious and want to honor that, you'll have to stretch in ways that don't always feel great, make trade-offs that don't feel great. But if you understand what the rules should look like for your life, you can choose your adventure and path.

The real work is understanding what causes stress we face—mental load, decision fatigue, time scarcity working together to take our brains apart daily—then finding interventions that work. Not every intervention works in every season, especially if you're single, have a special needs child, or are caring for a disabled adult. It's about having a toolkit to rebuild your life to reduce stressors while honoring your ambitions.

For more of Leslie’s work, sign up for her Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs inspiration newsletter here and click on the link to see some of her past articles as well.

—> Did you like this interview? Leave a comment or a like and let me know. These types of engagements are helpful for Substack to share my work with other readers.

It’s not true. Not everything is doomed.

New Mexico this past week announced that they are going to provide FREE child care to EVERYONE regardless of income. This is, in policy-language parlance, what would be considered a UNIVERSAL program. Meaning everyone qualifies for it, just by being who they are.

Universal programs have a lot of advantages - there is less paperwork and bureaucracy to figure out who is involved. They can produce services with higher quality because they have a steady stream of resources and serve people from all socioeconomic levels.

But the biggest reason to be excited about a UNIVERSAL program that makes something FREE is that it becomes VERY popular.

And once it’s popular, it’s hard to undo.

Once people begin receiving something for free, they tend to want to keep it that way. Libraries and parks have stayed around for a long time for a reason, people like them and have come to expect them.

And once people begin using free services, especially services geared toward kids, they start creating more infrastructure to improve the quality. (Parent Teachers Associations everywhere exist for this reason.)

There is a reason that the drastic budget cuts in this Administration’s agenda targeted Medicaid, and not Medicare. Medicaid is a means tested program. Plenty of people understand the value of the program and the need to provide a social safety net, but don’t personally use it. So cuts to a program that serves a less economically secure population aren’t going to impact the Administration's base in a meaningful way.

They can make cuts to Medicaid, and get away with it. It doesn’t make it right, but it’s a political reality we live in, where referendums on policy decisions are decided vis-a-vis elections.

But Medicare? Nope. They weren’t going to cut that one. Both Republicans and Democrats rely on Medicare. Seniors on Medicare vote. They know what their prescription medications cost and they will know if those costs go up. Medicare is a universal program, available to anyone of the right age (plus a few other avenues for illness and disability, but age is the big driver here). When the political scythes start swinging, they tend to avoid Medicare cuts.

(Side note that a lot of the Medicaid changes won’t go into effect until after the election, in late 2026, with the big cuts coming in 2028. So we could still see a future groundswell of outrage coming that has implications for future policymakers.)

Back to New Mexico though. New Mexico has invested heavily in child care and early education - I’ve written about this before (both on The 74 and on Substack). But until now this was child care assistance available to families at 400 percent of the poverty line (about $128K household income for a family of four). I’ve done a lot of interviews for people in New Mexico involved in this movement, and I’d ask them if they were actually able to take advantage of the program. The organizers and policy experts weren’t - they made too much money. But now? Now their child care options just got a lot broader. And the policy they were once experts on may become deeply personal.

I’m not trying to make light of the harsh headlines out there - too much violence, political acrimony, and terrible policy decisions with lasting consequences. But I also want to point out that good change is happening, right here, right now in this very country. New Mexico is a small state, it has a great deal of funding available from its Land Grant Permanent Trust which captures oil and gas revenues. That isn’t easily scalable to other places.

But the will and determination for change - that has legs. This was a decade-long effort in the making; the state and Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham deserve all the accolades for being the first in the nation to do something this bold. I hope more places can follow. When they do, I’ll be writing about it.

Re-upping one of my all-time favorite Substacks on the topic, so that we can all proceed a little more gently this year and thank our volunteers (or ourselves, for those of us doing it) for their unpaid time and energy.

There’s a scene in the movie Bad Moms, where Christina Applegate’s character Gwendolyn, the PTA president, castigates Mila Kunis’ character Amy, who has brought in store-bought treats for a bake sale instead of baking something homemade. “I run this school and I can make life a living hell for you and your dirty little children, do you understand me?” Gwendolyn tells Amy while swatting her tray of cream puffs off a table. The implication is that Amy is too busy with work and family to add one more thing to her to-do list, but Gwendolyn’s entire existence is focused on making moms like Amy feel miserable, and doing so in the name of PTA leadership. 

In Are you There God, It’s Me Margaret, Rachel McAdams’ character Barbara takes time off paid work to adjust to living in a New Jersey suburb. She joins the PTA, where she is put to work on a hare-brained project to cut out felt stars for the gymnasium ceiling. By the end, it's revealed that this plan is a fire hazard and a complete waste of time. Barbara, searching for her own balance in the gray area of work and family, finds paid work and makes a bold rejection when the PTA approaches her for additional volunteering. This is her character culmination - choosing paid work over the PTA, which is run by a bunch of foolish ninnies with nothing better to do with their time than cut out felt stars. 

When the PTA shows up in movies, or books, or collective conversation, it’s become a stand-in for women doing foolish work in place of paid work, or women fighting amongst each other, or dressing in extreme fashion and makeup while judging others who show up to drop off in athleisure wear and ponytails. When Annette Bening’s character in American Beauty was being costumed, she collaborated with a stylist to create a “PTA president coif" hairstyle, the implication perhaps being someone who had styled, poofy hair favored by a middle aged woman who must be on the PTA - because why? (And yet Bening’s character was working as a real estate agent, a job more associated with wages than volunteering). 

Why do we as a culture continue to hate on the PTA? Certainly no other example of volunteerism is the butt of so many jokes and vitriol - there are far fewer caricatures of the scout leaders, soccer coaches, potluck organizers, and swim team reps than there are of PTA moms. (Even though there are estimates that between a third to a half of PTA-type volunteers are dads, a number that is expected to grow since this 2009 survey). 

Devaluing the PTA may have more to do with its origins and purpose than an actual antagonism toward the work it performs. We live in a country that largely ignores the work of care and places a far higher premium on work performed for pay. We have painted those who would choose not to work for pay as having little ambition and nothing better to do with their time - or, what might be the strangest stereotype - highly obsessed with their appearance. 

But that’s not been my experience at all - as a parent, or as a PTA volunteer. And as I started to do more research, I found that the way our country denigrates the PTA says more about the way we devalue care and less about the pragmatic and important function that PTAs serve. 

Before the Pink Pussy Hats, We had the PTA

The origins of the PTA date back to 1897, when two women, Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, founded what was then called the National Congress of Mothers. 

At that time women didn’t even have the right to vote, social organizing was rare, and women had limited access to education and financial resources - like bank accounts. Yet this group organized two thousand women in Washington DC as part of its National Congress, with their goals being primarily focused on child welfare and endangerment. They may not have had pink pussy hats on display, but this was surely the sort of activism and organizing that paved the way for many more women’s movements to come - including the one we are in right now with a formidable woman atop the ticket. 

Then in 1925, the National Congress of Mothers was renamed as the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, and began creating individual state charters. In 1970, the group merged with the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers to become the National PTA. 

Today, 4 million people exist as PTA members in 20,000 locations. The stated mission largely focuses on engagement through school activities, but also networking and support of other parents. Their legislative agenda includes child labor laws, the creation of kindergarten, school safety and hot lunch programs, to name a few. 

Many PTAs largely exist in a support role for our educational system, which is chronically underfunded (by $150 Billion per year according to one estimate), stepping in to hire reading specialists for more support, or creating after school programs without hefty fees, or bringing in an art or music teacher if that program has been cut.

Understanding that the PTA evolved from a mothers movement in the late 19th century gives a useful context as to what political change looked like then, and has helped set the stage for what it looks like now.  The PTA is one of a long line of parent-based groups arguing for political change: grieving mothers formed Mothers Against Drunk Driving in the 1980s, outraged parents formed Moms Demand Action following the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012. Groups like MomsRising and Moms First continue to be change agents in the political sphere, and any policymaker who doesn’t take these groups seriously does so to their detriment. 

And Yet, We Could Do Better

Like any powerful, hundreds-year old movement, there is controversy and criticism surrounding the PTA. Because the movement is largely chapter-based, it means there are disparate skill levels and effectiveness, and because some states and localities fund schools more generously than others, there are wider gaps to fill. 

Lauren Sartain, a researcher at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has a research paper coming out addressing this disparity. When I talked to Sartain - who considered herself to be “not a PTA mom” before actually becoming the local PTA president - she explained that since a big part of the PTA role is fundraising, many of these groups raise so much money that they pay for extra positions. “If a district had to cut an art program, now [the PTA] can pay so the kids have art. Are they raising so much money that they are undoing equity among schools?” The equity issue can be exacerbated if one group (i.e. white parents) starts developing a disproportionate influence on school decisions, or if the whiter districts are the only ones able to fundraise enough to fill extra positions. So until schools are giving more funding across the board, it will often be left to the elbow grease of volunteers to fill in the gaps, leading to deeper inequalities, even those that come about with the best of intentions of improving a child’s school. 

If We Can Agree On One Thing…

Many of us can agree on this: school is fundamental to our kids, and all parents want what’s best for our kids. The role of the PTA may vary from school to school in terms of prowess and power-wielding, but its day-to-day functions are staffed by volunteers doing the exact type of unpaid work our country has spent the last century devaluing but that we know has an enormous impact.

So for this school year, can we all agree to give the sniping a rest and recognize the PTA for what it is? A grassroots movement designed to help our kids thrive. It’s not perfect, and it might vary depending on location, but it should stop being the butt of our jokes, and we should do away with the caricatures of bored, overzealous women with poofy hair. We can call it what it is: a volunteer position with deep roots in child and women-focused advocacy. This type of advocacy has a deep, long history in our country, and I hope that in my lifetime it remains as strong and vibrant as ever. 

This Substack was originally published on September 4, 2024.

I, like many women of a certain age, was a Sex and the City devotee at the turn of the millenium. I saw these women as an emblem of what a successful work and life balance would look like: meaningful friendships, various forms of families, work they enjoyed and enough financial security to have fun in a way that felt both aspirational but also somewhat attainable.

But And Just Like That, which came to an end this past month, was for the most part, a disappointment. I was expecting the same pull-back-the-curtain-and-reveal-big-truths watching experience that came with the first six seasons. What we got instead was some of the same tropes repeated, a lot of silly moments that seemed better suited to a laugh track than a HBO show (Charlotte falling on the naked woman in the art show? Miranda eating all of Carrie’s food when they are roommates because they can’t seem to communicate? Come on, HBO Max, do better).

But there was one moment that I thought: Whoa. Here it is. This is the Sex and the City I know and remember.

In season three of And Just Like That, Carrie visits Aiden on his farm in rural Virginia where — now divorced — he shares custody of his three kids, the youngest of whom is Wyatt, a neurodivergent teen going through a rough patch. Thus far, most of this struggle is off screen; Carrie’s only understanding of it is that Aiden can’t visit or talk with her because he needs to be available for Wyatt.

And in typical Carrie fashion, we see little to no interest on her end to understand Wyatt or to learn what might be roiling him. She instead focuses on doodling cute postcards to send to Aiden and discussing with her friends her abject horror that Aiden’s ex-wife Kathy has called begging that Carrie bring Adderall from New York City. Kathy’s plea becomes a punch line again: Charlotte strolls across the bakery to her Park Avenue moms who can easily find Adderall when so many pharmacies cannot. “I’m practically a CVS!” one of the moms tells her. How funny! How Sex and the City!

Except — wait. What does it actually mean to need medication for your child and not be able to find (or afford) it? Is it possible that some people rely on Adderall not because they want to rear perfect children but because it helps them function, become less impulsive, and regulate their moods?

Nope, And Just Like That doesn’t go there. It’s just a funny line! Haha, Carrie, carrying non-prescribed Adderall in her bra on the plane like a drug mule.

Then we get to Aiden’s farm. Wyatt is painting the house, part of Aiden’s larger efforts to give his son something to do with purpose. The house doesn’t even need painting, says Aiden. He’d just invented this task so they can do it together.

So now the show has me intrigued. I’ve written before about my own neurodivergent kid (and yes, I’ve driven around to multiple pharmacies looking to fill prescriptions and I assure you, there is no laugh track or NYC mom crew coming to save us, just bored pharmacists telling me to check back next Tuesday*). But I’ve also never really seen much in the way of neurodivergent parenting on screen before. And here we were, with a dad talking about trying to regulate his kid’s emotions.

Those of us who live in close quarters with someone who has trouble regulating their emotions know that the wheels are going to fall off soon enough. Later in the episode, Carrie joins Aiden’s family to play Apples to Apples, the most subjective of card games and also a fan favorite at my own home. Wyatt is furious that no one chooses his cards and quits, storming off to play video games. Aiden tries unsuccessfully to pull him back in.

“Nobody cares about me!” Wyatt screams.

“All they have ever done is care about you,” his brother says. “Grow the fuck up.”

“Do you see why he needs it?” Kathy asks, referring to the Adderall that Aiden opposes.

“You want to load him up on pills?” Aiden retorts.

“I know you’re really upset about her seeing this,” Kathy says, referring to Carrie, her eyes wide at sweet Aiden turning into the angrier version of himself, the one that most of us rarely want others to see.

After a taunt from his brother, Wyatt responds by breaking a window with a pitchfork. “Fuck you all” he yells.

Aiden chases after him, yelling that he should come back.

Oof. I think I’ve watched this scene a half dozen times. It was, for me, the first true scene in And Just Like That of what life with difficult kids could be like and how it can be ugly and uncomfortable, without an easy answer. Caregiving was not only difficult, but it was inconvenient. It stressed people out. It was more fun to do for the happy kids than the angry ones.

And then, inexplicably, Wyatt exited stage right. Aiden’s character fizzles out into having trust issues with Carrie. Kathy and Wyatt aren’t on screen again. Even Carrie, whose navel-gazing appears to have no end, has little interest in understanding Wyatt's role in Aiden’s life. The debate over Adderall goes silent.

Where did this go? Swept under the rug for more appealing storylines, I suppose.

But this is what I want to say and why I’m writing this. Caregiving is an appealing storyline. The Wyatts of the world are complex characters. The way Aiden and Kathy handle it is compelling; their opinions and fights and attempts to make things work are why so many of us are drawn to stories in the first place. These stories build empathy and teach us things — we can see our lives reflected back at us, or gain some insight into someone else.

My colleagues Vicki Shabo and Jasmine Heyward at the Better Life Lab have just published new research and survey data this summer that echoes my point. They found that women, moms and all parents want to see their lives reflected authentically on screen. As Vicki writes in Ms. Magazine: [We] are drawn to stories and characters that center people navigating work, family and caregiving challenges, tackling workplace dynamics and providing solutions-oriented stories.

—> The survey specifically found that more than six in 10 viewers (63 percent) express interest in seeing families on screen where someone has a disability or chronic health condition, and several open ended responses touched on viewers’ interest in seeing neurodivergent caregiving on screen.

Basically, bring back Wyatt.

I wasn’t sad to see And Just Like That come to an end. But I still think about Wyatt and his trajectory, about how Aiden and Kathy navigate this and if his siblings still resent him and if Aiden would be able to find a partner that would accept his complicated kid (no spoiler here: it wasn’t going to be Carrie Bradshaw). I wonder what my own kid’s future could look like.

I appreciate that the show was willing to give us that glimpse of what caregiving for neurodivergent teens could require, even when it was ugly and uncomfortable. But I also think And Just Like That would have had more staying power—and been a bit more true to its Sex and the City predecessor—if it had relied more on those authentic storylines and less on the softball ones.

*Pro tip on medication management: the downtown/business district pharmacies are the ones with fewer kids prescriptions being filled. In our experience, they are more likely to have meds in stock.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic upended our work and home arrangements, , a writer on child care issues and now a fellow at the Better Life Lab, identified that American child care was a broken system in need of repair. His first book, Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, published in 2019 details a lot of what goes wrong when we don’t take collective responsibility for care and instead outsource it to individuals to figure out on their own.

But Elliot is back now with a different book, published in August 2025, this time with a sharper argument aimed at a bigger audience.

The case for child care, he argues, is multi-faceted and affects all of us. In Raising a Nation, he offers ten reasons for why a universal child care system would be beneficial for us all — not just the people with young children desperately hunting for care solutions. And in doing so, he systematically debunks a lot of the myths surrounding the long-held narratives about families, work, and gender roles. Notably, he documents the examples of when we have made investments in care in this country and seen it pay off. And intertwined with the lack of investment in child care is the deeply entrenched racist history, dating back to slavery in the Antebellum South when Black women were forced to care for white children.

The book dives both into the intricacies of historical precedent and legislative battles, while still having some laugh-out-loud lines that are a good reminder that care is also one of the most rewarding (and human) things we can do. I was fortunate to talk to Elliot about his process and what he found.

The following Q+A has been lightly edited for clarity.

Rebecca Gale: Writers often write for an audience of one: we think of who the reader is, and communicate directly with them. This book lays out a number of convincing cases for investing in child care, and I’m curious who you see as your reader. Who do you envision will pick up Raising a Nation and say, “Okay, got it, I’m convinced now.” Who is that person?

Haspel: A great question! I’m going to cheat a little, because in some ways I envision an audience of two: a parent who thinks they just have to grit their teeth through the early years, and a “persuadable” non-parent, that is, someone who is invested in bettering their community but hasn’t really thought about child care much. For the first, I think there are so many parents out there who think that child care just has to be this painful period, and they’ve bought into the idea it’s just this individual family responsibility. I remember talking to an Uber driver once, and it came out that he had a two-year-old and was paying $371 a week for child care (I still remember the exact number because it was very specific; also, how many Uber rides just to cover the child care expense for the week?). He commented, “But I know I chose to have the kid and that’s just the way it’s gotta be.” And I wanted to shake him: “No! This is a policy choice! It doesn’t have to be like this!” So he’s one audience.

The other, I think, is more self-explanatory: the fact is that non-parents dominate parents (much less parents of young kids) in the electorate. We’re not winning the system we need unless we help non-parents understand their interest in child care, just as (most) non-parents understand their interest in strong public schools.

Gale:. So of the ten reasons you give your reader for investing in child care, I was familiar with most but caught off guard by a few, notably the patriotic case (caring for children as a patriotic duty) and the security case (our police and military need child care to show up for work). In researching and writing this book, what surprised you? Which cases had arguments that you hadn’t really considered before?

Haspel: The one that I found fascinating was this idea that parenting is a public service, parents are actually contributing hundreds of thousands of extra tax dollars to the public purse when you consider their inputs to their child’s development and the life that child will go on to live (to say nothing of their contributions to Social Security and Medicare!) and thus from one vantage point, public child care spending isn’t some societal largesse but actually making things square with parents. And I hadn’t realized just how prevalent a view that was in the early 20th century. I quote Teddy Roosevelt when he’s talking to the National Congress of Mothers in 1908 and literally says that he holds them in esteem above veterans of the Civil War! Now, that argument isn’t without some maaaaaajor issues — particularly when it comes to seeing reproduction as a means of furthering national interests. But deployed well, I think it’s a real cutting edge [reason] that can make people sit up and say, “Huh. I hadn’t thought about that before.”

Gale: You write that these arguments for child care are really an antidote to the economic case for child care — which is both effective and true, yet doesn’t always tell the whole story. Even in Vermont, a state that has invested heavily in child care, it was the economic arguments that helped persuade the business community to get on board. What about the economic arguments remain both so salient for child care, and what about them do you feel most people get wrong?

Haspel: To extend an analogy I use briefly in the book, consider a locked door. There are different ways to get it open. You can find a key or persuade someone to give you a key. You can also kick it in. Even if you kick it in, you’re likely to make progress: you will have secured more of an opening, more access to what lies behind, than you had before. But compared to a key, you’re far more likely to splinter the wood and you’re far more likely to hurt yourself in the process. There’s a cost, in other words.

I think economic arguments are a version of kicking in the child care door. They help, to an extent. I don’t want us to stop using them at all. I want us to position them as part of a toolbox of arguments that all exist under a values-laden umbrella. But ultimately the economic argument doesn’t get us as far as we need to go.

Think about all the people asserting over the past few years that child care is a public good, a right. Well, the reason something is a public good or a right, like fire departments or the right to public education, isn’t just economic. Is there an economic case for taxpayer-funded, free-at-the-point-of-service fire departments? Yes. Is there an economic case for taxpayer-funded, free-at-the-point-of-service public schools? Yes. But there’s more there: a sense that we really don’t have functional communities (or a functional nation) without them. If we want child care to move into that bucket, then we have to start with the bigger argument, and in a lot of ways over-emphasizing the economic argument actually forecloses on the bigger argument (hence the door analogy), because it reduces child care to this individual service that merely exists to grease the connection between a person and their job. To paraphrase one of the sociologists I quote in the book, there’s nothing transcendent about that. There’s no right implied there. There’s no callout to morality or justice. It’s just not a big enough or deep enough case on its own.

Gale: Even the most resolute opponents of investing in child care would likely find one argument that resonates with them in this book (assuming they are willing to read it!). So what comes next? If we are able to shift mindsets and abandon long-held beliefs that care should be up to individuals, how do you see the next few years playing out? Do we see any movement on the federal level, or will it be a state-by-state effort the way paid family leave has expanded?

Haspel: It’s pretty hard to predict what’s going to happen come January 20th, 2029, but I think it’s fair to say that the remainder of the current federal administration is going to require states to carry the water. And honestly, I’m more optimistic than a lot of people. Look at what’s happened in the states in just the past couple years. Texas put in $100 million of state money to child care and exempted some child care providers from property tax. Montana launched an Early Care and Education Trust Fund. Kentucky made child care free for the kids of child care educators. Small conservative towns in Nebraska and Minnesota have been taxing themselves and using public dollars to secure child care slots. It hasn’t been perfect — the whole mess in Idaho around [child-to-staff] ratios, Missouri had a child care tax credit bill filibustered—but it’s clear that there’s more of an openness among conservatives than there was before the pandemic to the fact that something has to be done about child care.

My hope with the book is that we can help move conservatives from reluctantly admitting that fact to embracing all the ways in which a good (and inclusive!) child care system supports goals they care about when it comes to things like families, faith communities, and yes a strong economy. And I hope that the groundwork laid over the next few years might well put some strong pressure on the federal government to act no matter who is in the Oval Office come 2029.

My favorite line in this entire book (and when I read this, I burst out laughing on the Amtrak) is when you quote British writer Rhainnon Lucy Cosslett who asks: “Why should any of us pay for anything? Why don’t we just, I don’t know, roll around in our own excrement? Because what is society? What is humanity? Let’s just all be chimps, picking fleas off each other. Which is actually quite a nice communal child care model, come to think of it. At least compared to what is available.”

I get it—I love her unabashed reductionism of those who oppose investing in others. But also, this does beg the question of what is the point of all of this if we don’t care about one another? Is that why you decided to include it? Because it’s an interesting way to frame our humanity.

Haspel: I know, it’s just a fabulous piece of prose. But honestly, I use her quote as a way of saying, we could just throw up our hands at the people who drag out the tired “why should I pay for the care of the kid you chose to have?” line. I think we do need to make an affirmative case for our interdependence as a species. I spent a fair amount of time in the final chapter going over this fascinating branch of philosophy called ‘care ethics,’ which I learned mostly about from Elissa Strauss’ book When You Care (which everyone should read btw), and it’s notable to me how little we talk about care and dependency in the discourse when they are such essential and unavoidable parts of the human experience.

You’re Jewish, as am I, so I’m sure you’re familiar with the part of the Passover Seder with the four different children and their questions-- the wise child, the wicked child, the simple child, and the child who doesn’t know enough to ask a question. Even though the wicked child is really obnoxious, we still take the time to answer them and explain. So my call here is to keep our eye-rolls internal and try to meet people where they’re at, because care truly unites all of us across every possible line of difference—no one can get out of giving or needing care in their lifetimes—and therefore care represents to me one of the great hopes for knitting back together our fractured society.

Does hard work pay off anymore?

Short answer: not always, and not for everyone. But I’m getting ahead of myself in summarizing this conversation between my Better Life Lab colleague Brigid Schulte and economist . Brigid interviewed Kathryn as part of our series: “Unequal: The Growing Wealth Gap in the United States.”

For that same series, I wrote about child care (surprise) and you can read my story here.

The facts themselves surrounding wealth inequality are pretty damning: Congress hasn’t raised the $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage since 2009. 16 years ago. This is before I had even married or had children - which in my mind is a pretty dang long time for anything to stay at the same price. And our country subscribes to a system that taxes labor up to 37 percent, but caps investment tax at 20 percent. And it is disproportionately those who make less money that rely entirely on labor for their earnings, while the wealthy can rely on investments for a far greater percentage of their income.

Kathryn describes herself as “feisty” when interviewed on this topic. But feistiness paired with hard data make for a compelling argument. And I appreciate people who dedicate their life and work to something they believe in. (And for those of us still toiling away in policy journalism, I’d put us on that list as well).

With Kathryn and Brigid’s permission, I’m sharing their Q+A with my readers. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity, with gratitude to Brigid and Kathryn for sharing it here. (The longer, original version can be found here).

From Brigid:

To make sense of the current state of the economy, inequality, the beliefs that shape our policies, and the pathway to recapturing the American Dream, I reached out to economist Kathryn Anne Edwards.

She’s super smart and funny, and can make complicated economic issues as clear as day. At the research organization RAND, Edwards and her colleague calculated that, between 1975 and 2018, nearly $50 trillion of wealth transferred from the bottom 90 percent of households to the top 10 percent in the United States. (A RAND update pegged that wealth transfer at nearly $80 trillion between 1975 and 2023.)

Yet, Edwards is an optimist. She co-hosts the Optimist Economy podcast, with episodes like, “A Million Reasons to Raise the Minimum Wage.”

She insists there is a better way, that we can create more ways to reach the American dream. She made me a believer.

Brigid Schulte: So many people are losing faith in the American Dream, that their hard work will lead to a better life. Is hard work enough anymore?

Kathryn Anne Edwards: The question for me is less about hard work and more about the returns to work. Are people getting what they’re due?

Schulte: Yes! That’s it!

Edwards: That's different from, “Does hard work equal success?” Instead, it’s “Are you getting what you deserve?” And that’s where there’s so much more dissatisfaction. Because people are working hard, and they can’t afford housing. They can’t afford food. They can’t afford health care. They can’t afford transportation. They can’t afford care for their young ones or their elderly ones.

So, the idea that “I'm working but getting nothing in return” is affecting a growing share of the population. And that's only going to go in one direction until we do something dramatic about healthcare, child care, elder care, transportation, housing, or wages—hopefully all of the above.

If we don’t, we’ll see a higher share of Americans who feel like they can't afford a decent life. The American Dream is not an unreachable fantasy. It’s just, I have a job, and I can afford to live.

Schulte: But so many people are working really hard, really long hours, and can’t afford to live.

Edwards: We Americans love success, but we also love fairness. And so the question is, are people who are successful today the result of a fair or unfair process? I don't want to cut off the pathways for success to be a function of hard work. And at the same time, I don't like the people who have gotten ahead through something unfair.

That really colors the view of whether or not our inequality is acceptable, whether or not our tax system is doing what it's meant to do, and whether or not we are all given an equal chance.

Think of the estate tax. People are against it. But, in reality, it impacts 0.07 percent of people. I mean, you have to die with $15 million before it is applied. That's a lot of money. I don't think people understand just how few people are in that position.

Then think of unemployment. America lowkey hates unemployed people, or mal-employed people, and thinks that they just need to go out and get a job. But I've always thought that hate comes from a sense of self-preservation. Because if they are actually just hardworking people who had something bad happen to them, then something bad could happen to me. And it's a lot easier for me to judge people who are unsuccessful as being lazy than to admit that I'm just as much at risk for lack of success as they are.

Empathy goes up and down. But we consistently believe in fairness. And that’s good, because the economy today is arguably the scariest it’s been since the Gilded Age, the period right before World War II, when the U.S. was its most unequal.

Schulte: So is the American Dream over?

Edwards: The American Dream isn’t dead. We don’t want it.

Schulte: What?!

Edwards: If we wanted the American Dream, we would have equality for children who show up to kindergarten. Economic inequality is imprinted on kids as young as five, and we don't do much about it and we don't want to.

Do you want universal child care and universal school meals? If the answer is no, you are for inequality because you want certain kids to have a head start, and you want it to be determined by how much money their dads have. So, if that's how you feel, you don't want the American Dream. You want yours and to pull up the ladder behind you.

There's a lot of people who would never be able to admit that they really want to pull up the ladder behind them, but that's what they do. If you phrase it like that, they tend to say, “Oh no, I want my children to succeed based on their own merits.”

But if they did, they wouldn’t want their kids to outperform others in school simply because those other kids were hungry.

They want their kid to get ahead on merit, but they don't quite understand how much advantage has come from their own economic circumstances.

So there’s a lot of educating to do. A lot of fear to walk back.

Schulte: One thing that has puzzled political scientists and others is how many people who aren’t able to live that American Dream of a stable life vote for politicians like Trump who say they’ll help them, but then support policies that don’t, that only increase economic inequality. [The Yale Budget Lab projects Trump’s tax bill will increase incomes at the very top and drop incomes at the bottom.] Help us understand why.

Edwards: Have you read War and Peace?

Schulte: Tolstoy? Yeah.

Edwards: There’s a metaphor I think about a lot. Tolstoy didn’t like that Napoleon was glorified and seen as a great man who changed history. He describes it like a watch. If you look down at your watch, you think the second hand is moving time. But if you turned it over and opened it up, you would see all the machinery. The second hand is just a manifestation of the gears, and not the other way around. Tolstoy felt that Napoleon was a product of his historical moment, not the one making that moment happen.

That’s like now. The era we’re in of American politics is one of both growing inequality as well as blossoming misinformation. And [Trump] is not the source. He's the watch’s second hand. There are gears behind it. What he's doing is forcing into the front of the conversation the lies and myths that people have built for a long time. He's not generating them. He’s just testing their application.

Is it the case that immigrants steal our jobs? That's a lie that people have told for a really long time. So, increase the deportation budget for the U.S. so it’s 50 times the size of the FBI budget. What happens is: we have an unregulated police department that is going to kick out a lot of people who have jobs in our communities.

You're seeing the backlash already in the polling with immigration. At the start of the Trump administration, versus even six months later, the number of people who think immigrants should have a path to citizenship has already increased. There's a backlash to testing out the lies. [editor’s note: Support for Trump’s immigration policy continues to drop, while record high shares of Americans now say immigration is good for the country.]

The truth is there. It's just a matter of getting people to arrive at it.

Schulte: I was just reading some research that found that, as economic inequality increases, so, too, does our sense of individualism. What will it take for us to start caring about, not just ourselves reaching the American Dream, but all of us?

Edwards: Leadership.

Immigration's a great example. America has been on the fence about immigration, holding incredibly contradictory views for a quarter-century. But the surge of undocumented immigrants mainly occurred before 2007. And we have absolutely failed in the two decades since to voice any type of coherent policy about what needs to happen. If you don't have leadership, the vacuum that's left is one that hate fills.

We've had stable levels of undocumented immigrants for two decades. We still haven't passed the peak of 2007. Yet we're manufacturing a crisis to deport them in really cruel ways.

You need to give people an alternative policy and sell it in every way you know how, based on truth and experience, as opposed to letting hate build up to the point where it's empowered by policy.

Schulte: So many politicians have been too afraid to address it.

Edwards: They were all too afraid to say the truth, which is that we need immigrants here. They're in your community. So if they're good citizens in all but name, let's make them citizens, so we don't have employers take advantage of their lack of legal status in order to push down the wages of Americans.

I've never heard a federal politician say that, even though probably the single worst thing that immigrants do in our labor market is be exploited.

Have you ever heard a politician say, “Here is why we need free child care,” or free school lunches, or paid sick days and paid family leave for all workers? We have had little leadership on any of these policies to pursue the American dream. So fear dictates both sides.

But truth is power. Evidence is power.

So is the American Dream really dead, or did politicians just stop fighting for it?

Schulte: So how would you articulate a policy goal to the American people, say, why they should support universal child care?

Edwards: Do you want me to talk to a Republican mom who plans on staying home about why we need universal child care?

Schulte: Yes.

Edwards: I would say child care is a system that includes a couple of components: The first is paid family leave so parents have more time to care for their newborns. And the second is an actual child care system. The vast majority of women would tell you they don't have a choice about whether or not they can stay home or work. Some type of economic circumstance is going to force their hand in either direction.

So if you felt empowered to choose to stay home, you should know you're in a privileged minority. Most women don't have that luxury. You might not like what they choose, but do you want them to stay as trapped as they are?

Did they get paid family leave? Their employer decides. Did they get health insurance? The government decides. Could they afford child care? The market decides. You're taking all these decisions out of the hands of moms. They know what's best, like you do, and yet they don't get to decide.

So when I say I want a child care system, I'm not telling you, “You have to go to work.” I'm telling you, “I want more women to decide what's best for their children.” And not a for-profit child care sector that does a bad job. Not an employer who's going to tell them that they don't deserve to stay home for six weeks. Let the mom decide.

If you strongly believe that women want to stay home with their kids, you should give them a four-month head start with nationally guaranteed paid family leave. See how many go back to work. That's a choice. Without paid family leave, there is no choice at all.

Schulte: I love that, focusing on just how much choice we really have. Or don’t.

Edwards: I can go further. A lot of women who stay at home with their children get to the point where they have a new baby that they essentially don’t get to pay attention to because the four-year-old or three-year-old takes all their time. And some of these mothers really want child care so they get to have more time with the baby.

Schulte: I remember when I was interviewing Pat Buchanan, who was so instrumental in killing the bipartisan universal child care bill in the early 1970s in the Nixon administration. He said, if mothers want to work, it’s a free country. But if you want me to pay for your child care, “No Way, José,” was his direct quote. I’ve heard a similar sentiment from a number of policymakers over the years.

What’s your argument for someone like Pat Buchanan? Who had no kids of his own, by the way.

Edwards: It depends on how feisty I was feeling. On one level, I would say, it takes a lot of arrogance to tell women what they need to do with their children.

Most people are under the gross misconception that what determines a kid's outcome is the type of care they receive from zero to five. That doesn't matter as much as their parents’ income. So to tell a woman she needs to stay at home and not earn money, in an economy where income determines a child's outcome, is a little two-faced. You either need to do something so that income doesn’t play as big a role, or you need to let them work because they're trying to do the best for their children. You, Pat Buchanan, are saying, “The kids of rich women do better, but I won't let you be rich.” That’s not fair.

The other argument is a little bit more feisty: “I find it shocking that a Congress that would repeal the entitlement to cash benefits for women with children would turn around and say, “It's your choice whether to work.” Food stamps, TANF, [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] and Medicaid all have work requirements. So no, they don't really have a choice to work, do they? You've actually guaranteed that they don't. You just don't want to support them. Just say you’re cheap. That you don’t like these women and don’t want to help them. But don’t make it about them and their choices. It’s about you and your prejudices.”

Schulte: That’s pretty feisty.

Edwards: The last argument I would make is that it's a dereliction of duty on the federal government's part to leave so many families vulnerable to the whims of the child care market. “Families don't need you to tell them what to do with their kids, Pat Buchanan, but they do need you to use your ability as a market leveler to make child care more fair and affordable.

“Child care is a market failure. It gets more expensive every year, rising faster than the cost of prescription drugs. So you are not doing your job as a market regulator. Then you go around blaming women for wanting to work. They’re a convenient fall guy for you being bad at your job.”

I’m an economist. I see through that.

I didn’t begin child care beat reporting until the Covid-19 pandemic, when I, along with the rest of world, saw how hard it was to function without it.

And since then, at least two states have invested heavily in child care, providing a neat and handy experimental group to ask the question: what happens when you create a robust child care system? Who wins and who loses?

In my latest article for The Thread, a policy-oriented publication from New America, I explore this theme of who wins and who loses when we invest in child care. I pull from my on-the-ground reporting in Vermont and New Mexico to show the stories of:

-Sherry Boudro, a child care provider whose salary is now doubled, enabling her to save for retirement. At age 60, she has no retirement savings because her work has always been paycheck- to-paycheck (something I have heard from many child care providers, including Sandra Parra in New Mexico, the other state to invest in care and see major changes).

-Michele Asch, a business leader who wanted to solve child care on her own, but realized the “fix it” mentality wouldn’t work on a small scale - child care was infrastructure. “I don’t pay individually to have our roads done,” Asch explained. “I pay into a system to have the trucks come in to pick up [our] soap. [Child care] is necessary infrastructure for doing business.”

But someone recently asked me why I keep focusing on these two petri-dish states that have invested in child care - when clearly there are so many others languishing and so many other band-aid investments that sound good on a press release but do little to solve the major problems of child care.

(The band-aid investments I’m referring to are the ones that make a very small change that do little to improve access or quality to care, or payment or benefits for the providers. Little is better than nothing, yes, but there is a legit concern that by celebrating too many band-aids we’re missing the chance to demand real change. And if you want to read more about why we aren’t demanding change out loud, check out this primer on child care movements in the United States that I wrote with ).

The reason I keep coming back to Vermont + New Mexico is this: they deserve our attention because they are ditching the band-aids and trying to prove that the greater economy and population wins when we invest in children. They are saying: there is enough for everyone to thrive. An economy where we all win—individually and together—is in reach. They are showing that such investment in care can produce significant positive externalities for people, even those not directly affected.

They are actively rejecting the idea that we live in a rigged system built for a few people to prosper. This is well documented by the lack of available, affordable child care for many, and we see what broad changes can be made for families when they are given access to affordable care. Take the case of Teigue Linch, whose child care payments for her twins were cut by over $2000 each month under Vermont’s Act 76. She and her husband started college savings accounts for the twins, and the financial strain they were under has greatly loosened. Or Sandra Parra, the child care provider in New Mexico, whose higher salary means she can afford a downpayment on her home and pay off her car.

States that are taking action are also pushing against the outdated idea that for some to succeed, others must suffer. For child care, this can mean “I found a workable solution on my own so you should too” but evidence actually shows that families and businesses would benefit from more care options. This also includes people who opt out of traditional care and are looking for systems of support, even while not performing wage work. This also - as I have written about before - should include parents who opt to stay at home and care for their kids on their own. It’s something both Vermont and New Mexico haven’t done, and it’s something even generous countries like Finland do not do sufficiently past a child’s third birthday. But if we want a true system of care and choice, this option should also be on the table.

Here is my question for you, dear readers. What notion about child care has been the hardest for you to shake? I’d love to hear what resonates with you and what has evolved in your thinking over the years.

People who live in the D.C. area and read Bethesda Magazine might open this latest issue and find a smiling kid in a Dodgers shirt and harness at a rock climbing gym. He looks like a regular kid, whatever regular means, and rock climbing is a great sport, so what’s the news about?

Turns out that rock climbing, particularly at a gym in our area, can be a really great activity for neurodivergent kids. And the kid being featured happens to be my own.

I’ve written about my own kid(s) before - particularly my middle kiddo who has a life with more twists and turns than the other two. There is a lot of lip service paid to finding one’s own path, or marching to the beat of your own drum, and effort spent carving out a niche or being part of some camp’s inclusion program - but it looks a lot different when you’re just trying to be a regular kid growing up in a world that is confusing, loud and full of way too many expectations.

I had originally pitched this story about the rock climbing gym because I wanted parents to know about it, and see that there are options for kids who don’t take well to the soccer field or baseball diamond. But the editor came back with an ask: would I want to do this and feature my own kid?

I have written about Micah before (notably in Time Magazine) but even then I just used his first initial and didn’t include a picture. Also, while Time is widely read on a national level, Bethesda Magazine is widely read on a local one. Meaning that the people we know and the people who know Micah are the ones reading it.

So I asked him - would he be open to it? And he was, which surprised me. Maybe all my years of harping on the power of narrative journalism rubbed off on him. Or maybe he was just proud of his experience and felt comfortable enough to share it.

We’ve struggled to find activities that work for Micah for years. YEARS. Team sports haven’t worked well, for all the predictable reasons one can imagine: the fast-moving kids, the inflexible rules, the absence of a natural athleticism that comes so easily to others. But we’ve wanted him to do something physical. It’s good for him, it’s good for us - it gets him out of the house and moving his body. But we’d burned through a list of options and kept searching for what might be good.

And then we stumbled upon rock climbing.

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From the story:

In third grade, Micah made a close friend at school, giving us another family to collaborate with in finding a physical activity the boys could do together. They’d heard of Movement, and after a few calls and emails we were connected to Irina.

Most weekends, the two boys share a one-hour private lesson with Irina, 39, who has been at Movement for more than two years. Micah is one of four neurodivergent climbers she works with on a regular basis…Climbing is particularly helpful for neurodiverse kids, she explains, because it helps them increase their understanding of where their body is in space, which is something that doesn’t always come easily.

“Climbing requires a lot of unusual moves that we don’t usually do when walking or running or exercising on the ground: constant change of our center of gravity, weight shifting and balancing, while pulling and pushing. You need to be very in control of your body to be able to deal with gravity,” she says. “And it trains your brain to develop this body awareness better.”

So now that this story has been out in the ecosystem, here’s my own take on the reaction and writing process:

1. Being outed as neurodivergent isn’t the big deal it once was. Anyone who spends time with Micah is going to see that his quirks and intellect would likely place him in that camp, and most of us who live in the big, wide world know someone who would identify as ND and still lead a happy, productive life. When we talk about progress on social issues, it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come as a society both for accepting kids who are different and having resources for them.
   

2. The lure of team sports is still strong, even with a child who can’t do them. Summer means swim and dive season for us and I already see how it takes our household by storm, in a way that Micah’s solitary activities are unlikely to do. I don’t anticipate that he will do any sort of competition with rock climbing, nor does he need to do that to have fun and learn skills in the sport. But it’s a larger reflection of why team sports have such an outsize effect on people and families, and something I want to spend more time mulling over.
   

3. The story ends on a positive note, but it’s not overly saccharine. It doesn’t pretend that finding a good activity solves so many of the problems, nor does it show that the activity itself always goes smoothly. I want to show the good with the bad, the hard with the brief wins, the way that we struggle to find something that works, and struggle again to keep it working for as long as possible.
   

4. It’s a nice reminder of the thrill of print magazines. We subscribe to a few hard copies of papers/magazines but most of our news is online. Still, the ability to flip open a magazine, see a face you recognize, and have it be something you can tangibly hold in your hands is pretty amazing. Long live print media.

And what did Micah think of the entire experience?

Read more

It’s a gray day in May when I pull into the parking lot of the Walatowa Head Start Early Childhood Learning Center in Jemez, New Mexico. Signs along the way had informed me I was on sovereign land belonging to the tribe, signs that are more common in a place like New Mexico than they are in the Washington, D.C. area.

Have I been on tribal land before? (Aren’t we all on tribal land now?) Ages ago, I went to a Pueblo on a trip to New Mexico with my family. But connecting with tribal leaders wasn’t something I was familiar with; it had taken me many phone calls, several people vouching for me, and many rounds of emails to secure this meeting at Walatowa.

As a state, New Mexico has been investing in early childhood initiatives. This was notable, in a country where we invest less per child in early education than most of our peer nations, that this state was doing so on its own.

But researching this took me in another direction - was I aware that New Mexico was one of several states to have Head Start programs as a way to preserve indigenous language? Walatowa Head Start is one of these - conducted entirely in Hemish - the indigenous language of the Jemez. It’s designed to be a cultural lifeline for the kids who attend. Language is more than the words the children and teachers speak. It’s a way to be connected to a longstanding culture, one that many have not always had ready access to, and the customs, traditions and lessons that go along with it.

So at 9 a.m. each morning, the children line up outside, each with a small amount of cornmeal in their hands. Bertha Gachupin, one of the Head Start teachers, leads the children as they say their Indian name, the name of their clan, and then a prayer to learn and understand the Jemez language and have a good day at school, before blowing the cornmeal from their palms.

She invites me to come along to witness this. A child holds out the bowl of cornmeal and indicates I should take some. I do, blowing it out along with the kids.

When finished, they rub the remaining cornmeal dust over their hands and heart. “It gives them strength,” Bertha explains.

Cornmeal is sacred to the Jemez. Each classroom has a cast-iron grinder attached to a desk with baskets of corn next to it. Whenever it’s getting low, without even a reminder, children will go to the machine and start grinding it. Bertha selects a boy to come into the classroom to show this to me. He understands and starts cranking - it’s harder than it looks. But as he moves the handle, more cornmeal is added to the basket.

Of the 34 Head Start and Early Head Start programs in New Mexico, half are on tribal lands; Walatowa is one of three that are designed with formal language immersion programs in their curriculums (the other two are Saad K'idilyé Language Nest in Albuquerque and Keres Children’s Learning Center at Cochiti Pueblo). For tribal communities like Jemez, Head Start provides more than just child care and school readiness - it creates a lifeline to their cultural identity that generations have tried to take from them.

The person running the day-to-day operations at Walatowa is Lana Garcia, who grew up speaking the Hemish language with her mother and grandmother at home. But her school and reading were in English, and Lana went to college to major in English before becoming a teacher in a local public school system near Albuquerque. After moving back to Jemez, her daughter came home from school one day and demanded to know why she’d never been taught the tribal language. “It was painful when your own child asks you that,” Lana said. “There is no excuse in the world, I had thought myself that English was better.”

“The reality of language loss has really scared us,” said Lana. “Our language is really tied to our ceremony.” The school curriculum is filled with activities specific to Jemez: songs and traditional dances, elders who come in to do a story hour, and meals prepared and served on-site that come from tribal customs, like atole, a blue corn drink served hot, Jemez enchiladas, and frybread. The staff speak Hemish to one another and the entire time when they are working. When Lana answers a call in her office, she does so in Hemish, before switching to English when the caller is someone calling about an IT repair.

It’s not uncommon among tribes for a language to be oral-only, like Hemish, (which linguists also refer to as Hemish-Towa, or Towa). Lana explains that they don’t have permission to write Hemish, as it’s considered sacred.

Head Start is a federally funded program, which means decisions about its future are made in Washington, and not in Santa Fe. Though New Mexico has allocated significant funding for child care, including creating the country’s first Assistant Secretary for Native issues, it doesn’t have the capability to fund Head Start should the federal funding sources change. If Head Start funding is zeroed out, there is no back up plan to stay afloat. Lana explained that since Jemez is not a gaming tribe, they have no casino to collect revenue from and no spare funds that the tribal government could provide. Walatowa has also seen a drop in enrollment - before Covid they had 70 children, and now are at 57, and could face a decline in funding from Head Start for being under-enrolled.

But what Lana does have is a strong success record of keeping the Hemish language and culture alive. Some of the skills the children receive from watching and taking part in the ceremonies - such as having a longer, focused attention span - will help them throughout their education.

“When we watch our dances, it is all day,” said Lana. “You’re expected to sit and watch. Those expectations are given to us by the war captains that you stay for the whole day. You stay until the very end.” Lana recalls with pride at seeing several of her Head Start boys take a prominent singing role during a ceremony, and a child who insisted on going to the ceremony celebration on his own, even though his parents didn’t participate. He knew what to do, she explains, because he’d learned the traditions and customs here, at his school.

I recently published a story on Walatowa (of which some of this essay is adapted) and sent the final version to Lana once it was live. By now I’ve written dozens of stories on sensitive topics, where I’ve had to earn the trust of people who are not always accustomed to sharing their life story with a reporter. When I do, there is something of a final verdict that comes in when they see it live: Did I get it right?

It’s beautiful! Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Lana wrote back.

I don’t know what will happen with Head Start funding in this Administration - after claiming to zero it out, they did an about-face and are currently keeping it. I don’t know if Walatowa will be able to have more children attend so they can keep their existing level of funding. But I do know this is a story worth writing and sharing. It shows the power of early education, and the power of community and identity. And it shows the irrevocable proof of harnessing the power of early education to make a difference, for children, families and communities.

A portion of this essay was adapted from this story, “For Some Tribal Communities, Head Start Programs Provide a Cultural Lifeline” published on The 74.

In spring of 2015, I became pregnant with our second child. His due date was New Year’s Eve. Which meant that as I went through all my prenatal appointments and ultrasounds we slowly ate through the very high deductible on my health care plan*. Yet, he took his time and didn’t arrive until January 2016, right around the time that most people were starting to resume life and work post-holiday.

But our deductible had already rolled over.

After he was born, a woman stopped by our room in the hospital, clipboard in hand, asking for my credit card. I paid the balance that day: $3000.

Had he been born on his due date, I’d have been covered. Balance: 0.

I’m now in a place where my childbirth days are behind me. I’m still flooded with affection when I see pictures of my children at the baby phase, but for us the expansion era is over.

But it didn’t stop me from feeling a moment of “about damn time!” when I saw Rachel Cohen’s article in Vox about a bipartisan bill in Congress to have health insurance companies cover all the costs associated with childbirth, prenatal and postnatal care. The Supporting Healthy Moms and Babies Act**, introduced in the Senate, would require private insurance companies to fully cover all costs related to the birth of a child. If you are fortunate to have insurance through your employer or your state, it would be one fewer bill to grapple with at one of the most vulnerable moments in your life.

What’s fascinating about this bill isn’t its straightforward pragmatism - we should be focused on making sure anyone who is ushering a human into this world can do so safely - it’s that the bill is a vestige of bipartisan legislating. It brings together the traditional right-wing pronatalism and pro life sides of the aisle with the progressive left and pro-choice side, who see value in providing free or low-cost health care services more broadly.

So here is why I am excited to see this bill, and also what makes me nervous about it.

—> Some of the good:

1. We have seen the way policies can shape our health care systems. The ways in which private health insurance reimburses people for services drastically shape health care decisions. Before Obamacare, health insurance companies didn’t have to cover the cost of a breast pump. The Affordable Care Act changed this, once the cost of a breast pump became FREE, more women on private insurance requested pumps, and this has been associated with higher rates of breastfeeding.

2. The price tag on this proposal is laughably low. According to an analysis by the Niskanen Center, by having private insurance companies pay for all costs related to childbirth and pre- and post-natal care, premiums would go up by approximately $30 PER YEAR. Spread that over 12 months, and that is less than a cup of coffee.

3. I worked on Capitol HIll when we passed the Affordable Care Act, for a Senator who was a staunch defender of the public plan, which never took flight. Absent public health insurance options, we need more policies that dictate to health insurance companies their need to pay for such things.

5. Finally, it’s about damn time that both sides worked together on something that they each have a stake in: healthy, thriving families. We know that better health care leads to better outcomes for mothers and babies. For all the clamoring about pronatalism and what it means to encourage having more babies and who wins and loses when that happens, I’ll take less rhetoric and more policies like this please.

And here are the reasons why I’m nervous:

1. Private insurers don’t always play well with others. They are some of the savviest in the business at lobbying Congress to turn a profit. In 2023, federal subsidies for health insurance are estimated to be $1.8 trillion, or 7.0 percent of GDP. The Congressional Budget Office did a 10 year forecast and predicted that this will continue to increase, reaching $3.3 trillion, or 8.3 percent of GDP, in 2033. Considering how much government spending goes to these companies, it’s a reasonable expectation that certain parameters should be established - among them, covering all childbirth and prenatal and postnatal care.

2. Introducing a bill is a good start - but it’s not usually newsworthy because the bill has a long way to go before ever seeing the pointed end of a signing pen. It’s notable because it’s a fascinating coalition to tackle a topic that would impact so many families - but it’s still a long way from changing things. Rachel Cohen’s story goes into more detail about the how and why of this coalition coming together.

3. Childbirth is such an important starting point for families. But then it’s over, recovery is underway, and there is still the baby to raise and bills to pay. As much as I am psyched to see this particular policy, it’s still not the sort of comprehensive care policy needed to make things easier with families. This, in my opinion, is more similar to the Administration's idea with the $5000 baby bonus for new parents - that would be a great break for families at this pivotal, vulnerable time, but it isn’t the sort of long-term, sustained investment in families that we still need. But it’s a good place to start.

*I feel compelled to clarify this every time I write about it, but I was incredibly lucky to have health insurance during the births of our kids, and I came very close to losing it when I was laid off during my pregnancy with my oldest, something I’ve written about before and think is a telling example of what is wrong with relying entirely on private companies to do the work of caring for people in vulnerable times.

**Cute title and all, but we should also be very up front about how helping families pay for the birth of a child helps dads too.

In 2022, and I wrote an op-ed in the Columbia Journalism Review calling on every newsroom to add a child care beat. This followed child care’s gigantic leap from parenting section to front page news, after Covid-19 shut down most child care centers and many parents couldn’t work. During those early months of the pandemic, the number of news stories about the child care industry increased by 90 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. This, we wrote, “sent reporters and news outlets scrambling to cover a complicated subject that spans beats and topics—from business to healthcare to education to child development—as well as regulatory systems and funding mechanisms, state and federal.”

Here was our big and bold suggestion:

Rather than selectively engage child care as an add-on or afterthought to those legacy beats, the time has come to make child care its own beat. Complexity and urgency don’t pair well; it’s unrealistic to expect a reporter new to covering childcare to churn out a nuanced story on a tight deadline. Over time, however, a dedicated beat reporter can develop expertise in the nuances, policy implications, and people who shape a subject as complex as child care—all while, hopefully, building public interest and rewarding it with new understanding.

Since that time, more reporters are assigned to a child care beat: people like Jenny Gold at the Los Angeles Times, Chabeli Carrazana at The 19th* and Rachel Cohen at Vox, who regularly write about child care and the caregiving economy for wider audiences. This is in addition to hundreds more outlets that do write stories on child care, as part of their economy or parenting issues. Post-pandemic, more attention is paid to child care as a standalone issue worthy of study and commentary.

One place to have consistently published stories related to child care has been Early Learning Nation. For years, this was supported by the Bezos Family Foundation, led by the indefatigable editor Linda Shockley. If you were lucky enough to publish a piece for Early Learning Nation, you'd join a roster of some of the top journalists to cover caregiving and early education: , Bryce Covert, Kendra Hurley, Mark Swartz and K.C. Compton, to name a few.

About a year ago, Early Learning Nation quietly joined The 74, a news organization dedicated to covering America’s educational system. And this past week, the publication announced a rebrand as zero2eight.

From the announcement:

The crisis impacting the early learning sector is layered. Families are struggling to find affordable, high-quality care. Providers are stretched thin, often unable to make ends meet. The ecosystem of policies and funding is shrouded in uncertainty, creating chaos and instability.

Still, through it all, bright spots have emerged. There are talented educators supporting our nation’s youngest learners in powerful ways. There are researchers, policymakers and advocates working tirelessly to improve the lived experiences of families with young children and early learning professionals. There are programs creatively tackling some of the field’s most pressing issues, like compensation, the rising cost of care and access to high-quality programs. And broadly, the public has become more aware of the need for a strong, sustainable early care and education system.

So why does this matter?

This matters because we need outlets that cover child care as an issue, just as much as we need reporters who want to write about it, and readers who care to read about it.

Placing child care as a vertical within The 74 is also important because it makes clear the connection of early education with the fields of K-12. Those of us who spend time writing about child care have long held the universal funding and accessibility of the K-12 system as something of a marvel. Is K-12 education perfect? No, of course not. But the expectation is there that a child in this country deserves an education and seeing that through should not be up to individual parents and families. As has said, “kindergarten finds you,” referring to elementary schools that leap at the opportunities to enroll kids in classes. Cue the balloons and excitement, elementary schools will do what they can to make sign up easy. And yet, “easy” is not a word typically associated with finding child care anywhere in this country, especially for the nearly half of all children who live in places that are considered a child care desert, which have no affordable child care options.

So I encourage you to check out zero2eight, sign up for their Substack, and in general keep reading quality journalism on early care and education (including right here!). If we want to shift the way our country values caregiving, we need to tell the stories of the people doing the work, the policies we’re enacting and why it matters.