Gov. Josh Stein’s bipartisan Task Force on Child Care and Early Education, announced in March, is a significant step toward prioritizing the needs of North Carolina families, particularly in addressing the high costs of child care. But that’s not the only issue those families are facing today.
Addressing the high cost of child care and prioritizing a strong early care and education system for our youngest North Carolinians is necessary, and that’s why we need additional steps to address a broader set of issues that impact families, especially those with young children. Why? Because people in North Carolina say so.
In partnership with NC Child and Book Harvest, my organization, Capita, recently commissioned YouGov to conduct a statewide survey of families with at least one child 12 years old or younger living in the home.
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The results surprised us. Most families in North Carolina reported satisfaction with their opportunities to access child care. Less surprisingly, they complained about the exorbitant costs of child care. Yet neither access nor cost is their biggest concern.
Families had many greater concerns, most notably their monthly income and the overall cost of living. This includes expenses such as health care, housing, and saving for retirement. While caregiving responsibilities for dependent children were also a significant concern, most survey responses focused on issues related to financial costs and time constraints. These pressures directly affect the stability and well-being of family life, and therefore the conditions in which young children grow up.
These realities necessitate a “yes, and…” approach from our state’s leaders, underscoring the need for the governor’s task force to shift its focus from a strict emphasis on child care to a more comprehensive approach to improving the quality of life for all North Carolina families with young children. Let’s call it a Task Force on Family Well-Being.
A more comprehensive approach can also help us focus on issues that easily transcend partisan politics and unite leaders and voters on a consensus for moving forward.
Lest you believe that North Carolinians don’t agree on anything politically, a recent Aspen Institute-Gallup report shows that Americans (and certainly North Carolinians) cherish family above any other value. I believe that we’re Americans, North Carolinians, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and children first, and Republicans, Democrats, or Independents second (or third or fourth).
No political party has — or should have — a monopoly on family policy. Most of my neighbors here in North Carolina share similar values, cherish their families, and want to feel that the government has their back when it comes to raising the next generation, regardless of how they vote.
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Strengthening families economically and otherwise — rather than focusing solely on specific program types, such as child care and early education — should become the central focus of our state’s work to improve children’s lives. The most significant factors in the healthy development of children are the quality of responsive, reciprocal relationships with parents, grandparents, and other family and loving adults — among the strongest buffers to today’s toxic stressors for children. Easing financial and time pressures on families today can make a huge difference for children’s well-being now and when they are adults.
Many aspects of day-to-day life are unaffordable. In fact, the survey showed that child care doesn’t top the list of highest priorities for North Carolina’s families with young children. Overall, affordability and time are significant concerns for families, with child care being just one factor.
How can we encourage more affordable family housing across the state? Can we find ways to help more families buy their own homes? How might it affect children’s lives and level the playing field if the state government helped pay for extracurricular activities like youth sports and the arts, which have become increasingly essential for competitive college admissions? What if we invested more tax dollars in afterschool and summer care and enrichment activities, a deep pain point for families, well after their children reach school age? How can we better support the explosion of “sandwich generation” caregivers?
Aligning policy with our collective values is a win-win for all elected officials. The late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democrat who represented New York and served as an advisor to Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, promoted the importance of the American family throughout his career. He argued that our domestic policy had long focused on individuals, neglecting the family as “the fundamental group unit of society.”
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In today’s public debates, we often prioritize funding streams and government programs rather than take a holistic view of family life and the broader systems and conditions that mold it.
Simply put, all of us want a decent quality of life and the opportunity to meet our family’s basic needs without having to spend all of our time working, especially within a patchwork of unstable, low-income jobs.
North Carolina can set the pace for the entire country in developing better policies to support families. We have the resources. Our state’s families see the needs perhaps more clearly than some of our elected officials.
If we’re looking for ways to heal our nation’s political divisions, let’s begin with our families. I can’t imagine anything more important, and as our recent survey of North Carolinians indicates, neither can anyone else from the mountains to the sea.
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