One of the greatest differences between the U.S. and nations that lead the pack on family outcomes is an understanding that, as the Nordic Council of Ministers says, "the well-being of children is strongly linked to that of their parents." In the U.S., we often segment out the child from the parents. Think about the way that we focus on 'school readiness' by what the kid can do w/o considering factors like housing stability. We want a playground for the kid w/little consideration for how parents can socialize.

🧵Ok, we need to talk about this. We've reached the point where in a well-intentioned attempt to do ANYTHING about child care, the administration is taking an action that may be actively counterproductive. Let me explain.

nytimes.com/2023/02/27/us/… First off, I have SO MANY QUESTIONS about how this is going to work. Options include "company child-care centers near construction sites or new plants, paying local child-care providers to add capacity at an affordable cost for workers, directly subsidizing workers’ care costs"

Just like community centers, I strongly believe local government should set these up!

Some do. I went to an "open center" in Helsinki, and it was simple and lovely.

(Indoor options do exist in the U.S., but usually the hours suck or they're expensive)

foreignersinfinland.fi/post/everyone-…

https://twitter.com/emilykmay/status/1629863401496141824

(My Helsinki experience: )

https://twitter.com/ehaspel/status/1580148121568301059?s=20

🧵I had a fascinating experience today at this Helsinki playground that reinforced for me just how backwards the U.S. gets its family policy.

(And no, this isn't gonna be another 'if only America was Finland' thread) I went with my daughters to attend a free arts & crafts activity at the children's center adjoining the playground (many Finnish playgrounds have these, and there are different staffed activities every day).

A Finnish father was there with his delightful 15-month-old son.

🧵I want to talk about what the school meals cliff means in real terms.

Let's say you're a family of four making $52,000 a year, with one kid in elementary school and one in middle school.

Right now, your kids are getting breakfast and lunches for free during the school year. When the food waivers expire in 2 weeks, sorry, you're over the limit for free/reduced-price meals.

Your cheapest option now is to just purchase full-price meals.

With prices going up, that means in a typical district you're paying *$1,700* for 2 kids!

wral.com/wake-votes-to-…

"Under a policy of broadly expanded subsidies that limits family payments for ECE to no more than 7% of income among those up to 250% of national median income, we estimate that mothers’ employment would increase by six percentage points while full-time...
nber.org/papers/w30140?… "...employment would increase by nearly 10 percentage points, with substantially larger increases among lower-income families...

...Despite the increased use of formal care, family expenditures on ECE services would decrease throughout most of the income distribution..."

(10%!)

🧵: As a former fourth grade teacher, one thing that bothers me about the current schooling discourse is the sense from some that a couple of weeks isn’t that big of a deal.

The learning school year is a LOT shorter than you think. 180 days actually isn’t.

Let’s break it down. 180 days = 36 weeks.

Take out at least the first week (settling in) and the last week (settling out).

Take out the week before Winter Break.

Assume an average teacher takes about 5 sick days over a year, there’s another week (no offense to subs).

We’re down to 32 weeks now.

We’re about to see which companies put their leave policies where there mouth is when it comes to supporting employees with kids. Which CEOs will say, “ok, your kids’ school abruptly closed for a week, take the time as paid leave and we’ll shave a few cents off our obscene multi-billion dollar profits.”? Which will refuse? It’s a true test of being pro-family, and we should be watching.

I think the left tends to overly dismiss the importance of marriage, while the right tends to overly dismiss the ways in which the raw free market hurts/prevents marriage.

Creating the conditions for marital health - and relational health in general - is an important frontier. I am, of course, talking in broad sweeps here. Marriage can be a problematic institution and isn't for everyone. But it's for a lot of people. The statistics on cohabitation vs. marriage - in terms of stability for children - are truly worth sitting with.

brookings.edu/research/cohab…

Thought experiment 🧵! The fire department is no longer free!
Everyone's on the hook for paying for their own fire service. Problem is, to pay firefighters a decent salary, it's gonna cost $25,000 per family per year. The fire dept realizes most families are just gonna risk it. SO, they lower the cost. $10,000, they say. That seems more reasonable? Some families still can't afford it of course, so they're on their own. But many scrape the $10k together.

Here's the thing, though: on $10k/fam/year, they can't actually pay the firefighters well.

🧵While we're busy debating the finer points of child care policy, I want to take a moment to reiterate THE ALTERNATIVE. Doing nothing -- i.e. not passing Build Back Better -- would continue to devastate the child care sector and working families with a runaway-train of closures. Programs are closing or reducing their capacity left and right -- family child care programs, faith-based programs (oh yes, faith-based programs) -- and the sector is actually LOSING employment. The trendlines are terrifying.

marketplace.org/2021/12/09/the…

Why Child Care Quality Matters, A Personal Anecdote: My 4.5 y/o daughter had a rough morning yesterday. She had been home with us all last week because of a COVID exposure (she didn't catch it), and was clingy and sad when I dropped her off at her child care center. / I heard later on that she was doing well, and when I picked her up she was grinning and laughing. (this is usual)

Her teachers told me that they had seen she was having a hard time and given her some extra love, including 1:1 time with one of them, and then she perked up. /

🧵: One very neat impact of #BuildBackBetter's child care provisions is on a population you wouldn't expect -- school-aged kids! A whole lot of parents of elementary schoolers will find it much, MUCH easier to afford before/after-school and summer care.

Let me explain. At the moment, school-aged children are eligible for child care subsidy under the Child Care Development Block Grant (basically, the subsidy system all states use). Most people don't realize this, but 45% of all kids served via subsidy are school-aged!

childcareta.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/…

📢ONE MORE TIME FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK📢

washingtonpost.com/business/2021/… "Rossignol said she has lost 24 staff members since the pandemic started. Nearly all told her they quit because they can make more money elsewhere. She pays $12.15 to $14 an hour, depending on experience. Among her former employees...

I think part of the problem with the 2-5 y/o mask requirements is that it treats that age band as one block. A two y/o has VERY different capacity to understand & comply with masking than a four y/o. Even within a year, a 24 month-old and 34 month-old are not the same!

https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1439273070116671494

I don't have a good answer, and I fully understand the tension and competing interests. I'm not interested in debating mask efficacy for kids. But I do wonder if starting masks at age 3 (or 4) might better honor child development while still meeting public health goals.

Quick Thread: One thing I think we should start saying more loudly: the solution to the child care teacher shortage CANNOT BE COMPROMISING QUALITY.

This is, unfortunately and predictably, what panicked providers and policymakers are increasingly starting to consider.

https://twitter.com/ehaspel/status/1400467122720055299

The very next paragraph in that article from Iowa is:

One solution might be lowering the minimum age of staff members, said Bill Robinson, president of the Garnavillo Day Care in Clayton County. He asked DHS to consider it.

“Currently, you can’t have children younger than 16...

QUICK THREAD: I'm seeing this chart go semi-viral among people saying "look! schools and child cares are actually really risky!" So I think we should talk about what we're talking about -- which is that, yet again, definitions & denominators really matter. First, let's talk definitions.

As @ByMoriah points out "in this data=2+ coronavirus cases in two weeks in the same setting"

And the data page also notes "The school building category includes all staff and students involved in any activities in the building in and out of...

THREAD: The way we talk about cases in child care programs & schools is continuing to inflate COVID fears and making it much harder than necessary to get our youngest students back in the classroom. Here's a really good example:

sfchronicle.com/bayarea/articl… That sounds bad! 13 child cares & schools (out of how many, we of course aren't told). But in this case the ignored denominator isn't even the sin, the scatter plot is. The Chronicle article tells us that 30(!) cases are linked to 1 preschool. Obviously, that's not good! But...

KIDS & COVID: Media mistranslation in action. So, you may have seen the below article going around - it’s an AP story that has gotten picked up by a ton of outlets.

Scary headline!

Will it surprise you to learn there’s more to the story? Let’s dig in.

abcnews.go.com/Health/wireSto… The subhead is really alarming: “At least 41 schools in Berlin have reported that students or teacher have become infected with the coronavirus not even two weeks after schools reopened in the German capital.” Whoa! But I was curious...

CHILD CARE & COVID ROUNDUP, 8/21: In my opinion, there is a massively under-reported story going on, which is just how *few* outbreaks (multiple related cases) are happening in child care settings, despite being open through our long hot pandemic summer. Let's go around the horn. First stop, Oregon. You may recall the below story went semi-viral at the end of June.

Well, you should also know that since June, this represents one of only THREE outbreaks in child care settings in the entire state.

(Source: oregonearlylearning.com/wp-content/upl…)

wweek.com/news/state/202…

THREAD: Yes, it sounds Kafkaesque to open school buildings that are closed due to safety concerns for kids to do virtual schooling from.

And at the same time, I've become convinced it's wholly reasonable. I'll explain.

washingtonpost.com/local/educatio… First, let's get this out of the way: there's no question, as @DanWuori points out, that this is another manifestation of the risk shift to undervalued care workers. By definition, a child care/after-school staffer is more at risk than a teacher at home.

nytimes.com/2020/08/04/par…