Better Futures for All Families

Common Threads of Parenting Can Connect Us

Bring two or more parents together—particularly mothers—and conversation frequently reverts to the highs and lows of raising children. The flow is almost inevitable, like water seeking its own level. Navigating the various physical, financial, emotional, and administrative challenges of raising young children becomes a common denominator, mostly free of politics or ideology. There is a great deal of connection in the face-to-face moments we share while waiting in the day care pick up line, at the pediatricians’ office, or on playground benches. Most of us have, at one point or another, dealt with diaper rash or worried over a feverish toddler. When these things come up in conversation, we nod. We commiserate. We understand. We are parents too.

But Differences Emerge in our Day-to-Day Experiences

What might not be so readily visible in these encounters is the extent to which our individual circumstances add or subtract a degree of difficulty in navigating the Parenting Olympics: the simple act of clothing, sheltering, feeding, and otherwise raising healthy, thriving children. A personal example: a recent visit to urgent care with my child left me feeling a bit hassled, certainly, but also accomplished. I found a facility that treated children, was open late, had both x-ray capabilities and a reasonable wait time, and fast food my kid would eat on the way. I didn’t even stop to check if the provider took our insurance. We’d been there once, years before. Surely they’d still be in-network— and they were.

A mother with an infant walked in around the same time and I hurried to hold the door open for them, flashing back to those difficult early days. But after some discussion at the check-in desk, she and her baby left without being seen. Given the impacts of the pandemic on children’s access to health care, not to mention the recent Medicaid unwinding, it’s not a leap to assume the issue was with insurance, health care costs, or both. Calmly, almost as if being turned away was not a new experience, they walked back out into the night, this time, the mother pushing the door by herself.

The parenting medal I’d mentally awarded myself lost some of its shine as I began ticking off the advantages at my disposal that are not available to everyone:

• a job with paid medical and family leave that helps me address my family’s health concerns
• reliable transportation that meets my daily and emergency needs, an access gap for too many people
• stable health insurance and enough savings to pay modest out-of-pocket costs
• a flexible spending account that encourages me to deduct those out-of-pocket costs as part of a complex tax code (and one that disproportionately benefits higher earners)
• digital connectivity that simplifies my daily existence as a parent, in this case, research for providers

Beyond that, I am white, the other mother was not.

There were probably less visible socioeconomic factors at play. Is it any surprise that the system worked well for my family? But more importantly, how can we design systems that work better for everyone?

Engaging Families in Policy Design

The New Practice Lab believes that the most direct path towards an answer is by listening to parents themselves. We have spent the last year engaging in longitudinal, qualitative research with economically-excluded families to help understand their day-to-day experiences of parenting young children- through their own words. We started with community based organizations who work closely with such families, and through them connected with 36 English and Spanish speaking participants in rural, suburban, and urban neighborhoods across two states. We conducted a series of kickoff workshops designed to get to know the families and to begin imagining a system that supports their needs. Through follow-up diary studies tackling topics from commutes to meals to neighborhoods to health care, we have amassed a wealth of qualitative data about their families and lived experience.

Common Experiences, Different Outcomes

Our first brief focused on social connection, and the ways that policy can hinder or help the networks that so many of us rely on while raising young children. Some things we heard resonated with our own experiences. Partners, extended family, friends, and community organizations are the MVPs we often look to in moments where we need support. We know that it takes a village to raise a child, I affectionately refer to my neighbors as “co-parents,” and the importance of "Aunties" in children’s lives cannot be overstated.

At the same time, there are notable differences in the intensity of needs and gaps being filled by these networks across populations, with rippling impacts that just hit economically-excluded families harder. Similarly, differences in families’ financial security significantly impact their ability to weather adverse events, with low income households and households with children struggling more to pay regular and unexpected bills.

Financial precarity amplifies the day-to-day struggles that parents face. After all, many families work around picky eaters and worry about the high cost of housing. However, not all families navigate their child’s tastes while limited to what’s available at a food pantry, or worry whether the neighborhood they can afford to live in poses very real risks to their family’s health and safety.

Learning how these families experience the same ups and downs of parenting, often in the face of resource limitations, can help us understand where they are struggling, where they are holding steady, and what changes might help them truly thrive.

In the coming months, we will explore two important themes that emerged in our ongoing research with families: safety and security, and dreaming and planning.

Safety and Security

Safety and security are highly valued among families in our study, unsurprisingly. If asked what we want most in a house, a school, or a neighborhood, most people would probably rank safety and security above many other things, and with good reason: community safety, or lack thereof, has real impacts on childrens’ health and well-being. Families in our study reported multiple threats to feeling safe and secure, from community violence to financial precarity and challenges meeting the basic needs of their families.

This is not for lack of significant effort, but lack of sufficient resources. Basic needs may be met (barely), or only with painful sacrifices– a parent skimping out on her own meal, or through rationing of food.

Our next brief will explore how the pervasive feelings of insecurity influence family economic mobility, and the difficulties families face in reaching for the next rung of the ladder when it’s taking everything they have not to fall off.

“What don’t I like about where I am? I can actually write a book the crimes/murders/drugs on every corner I can't even let my son come outside and play because shots are always going off. I’m really trying my best to get out of here but financially I can't as of right now. FOR NOW.” – Luna, mother of one

“When we were on EBT we were able to to go Hyvee or Walmart which is a half hour away. We would get about $300/$400 at a time. Now we are no longer on EBT so we have to budget every two weeks when we get paid to see how much money we even have for food. I utilize the food shelf but with my work schedule it is hard to get there. My Mom went for me last week and delivered everything to my house. Otherwise I just buy ingredients at a time for the meals I plan to make. Usually by the end of the two weeks we are eating the cheapest food we can." – Bianca, mother of one

Dreaming and Planning

The families in our study have ideas, big and small, about ways to level up for themselves and their kids. Jobs with better hours, pay, and flexibility topped the list, along with the training that might be needed to strengthen their place in the workforce. Higher paying jobs are unquestionably important for families. Remote work and flexible hours can improve quality of life, especially for families, but tend to be more prevalent for workers who earn higher wages and/or are white. The goals expressed by our participating families are not impractical or unrealistic, and yet obstacles remain, as do questions about the costs and benefits of going all in on “hustle culture.”

There may be “better” jobs out there, certainly- and New Practice Lab fellows have worked towards understanding what makes for a good working life- but getting them takes time and effort, and who will watch children in families that are already stretched thin? Many parents we heard from already juggle jobs with hours that do not align well with their childrens’ routines, endure long commutes to get to those jobs, coordinate multiple trips just to get food on the table, and rely on a patchwork of child care that is either unaffordable or places demands on friends and family.

Navigating these routine challenges eats into any time they could invest in upskilling or a job search, and would deprive them of a consistent source of joy and satisfaction: quality time with their children. Americans consistently rank family time as one of the most important things in life, in fact almost three times as many people say time with family is the most important thing as compared to “being successful in your career.”

This second brief will focus on our families’ experiences living between the rock and the hard place of dreaming and planning, and the realities of economic mobility.

“I get a lot of support from the salvation army when I need clothes for my son. I've gotten a lot of support when I started going back to school, there were training programs for students ages 18-24. I wish they continued the age group over 24 because school can be really difficult for adults to pay for especially if they are paying for other expenses including their own children going to school.” – Kyla, mother of one

"My ideal work, situation will be for me to work five days a week. But for now I have a constraint because I just graduated from college and I need to take my board exams so I'm taking my time to study to take my exam. So I don't actually work weekdays, only pick up weekends to work. So based on that, that has really impacted my family, because I'm not able to do things I'm supposed to do for my kids and my family." – Grace, mother of three

People want what is best for their children, but differing socioeconomic factors may help or hinder their success on any given day. Absent the voices of economically-excluded families in policy design and delivery, it’s far too easy to blame them for the challenges they encounter, despite the fact that they have the least input into existing systems or policy making process. Consequently, policy is designed around the edges of these families’ existences, rather than for and with them. The resulting programs treat people as problems to be solved, without considering what they really want and need. Then, when the system doesn’t deliver good results, we balk, we blame families, and we turn away.

Our broken process places undue burden on parents, delivers insufficient benefits, and stigmatizes families who are resource poor, who are immigrants, who are less educated, who are minorities, or who are unmarried or young. This kind of “othering” plays into longstanding and harmful narratives about who deserves help, and how much, and takes the place of meaningful progress towards solutions. The New Practice Lab hopes that by elevating families’ voices and lived experience in the policy making process, we can start working towards a world of open doors and opportunities for everyone, where there is much more to raising children that connects us than sets us apart.