Chopping Up Family Life Makes No Sense

It’s time to organize policy by families, not funding streams

There was a period in my life where I had one kid in elementary school, one kid in a child care center, a spouse going through major medical treatments, and a close relative dealing with the diagnosis of a degenerative disease. Zeroing out any one of those challenges would have been nice, but would hardly have changed our family fundamentals. And this is the problem with too much of American family policy: it chops up family life by programs or funding streams instead of putting families at the center and creating a supportive ecosystem around them.

Consider paid family leave and child care. In an objective sense–and if you were creating policy from scratch–these two are part of the same tree trunk, made up of the same essential elements, just at different heights. That is, paid family leave is a source of child care for infants. Not only do good paid family leave laws ensure mothers can physically recover from childbirth and that parents can bond and provide care during the earliest months of a child’s life, they obviate the need for an external child care system to do the expensive and difficult work of providing care for infants. This is why in Canada, over 70 percent of employed mothers with a child under the age of one are on paid leave, and in Finland only one percent of infants are in external child care.