A Republican and Democrat Walk Into a Bar...
Finding common ground on child/family policy with Ivana Greco
Last month, I attended the Capita Seminar, Care in America: Historical Perspectives, Future Visions, in Durham, North Carolina. The goal was for people who think, write and work on care issues to come together and learn about the history of care in America, discuss the current climate for policy changes, and brainstorm some ideas for where we may be going.
One of the people I connected with at this seminar was
, whose work I’ve long admired and covered. Ivana and I have some similarities in our understanding and valuation of work, care and family issues - and we come from different sides of the political spectrum. But working and talking with her does give me hope that there is more commonality on supporting families than not. While the political parties may disagree on delivery systems and priorities, investigating the overlap is worthwhile.Ivana and I had a conversation, over email and google docs, for Substack, shared here:
RG: Ivana, one thing you mentioned to me was that the conservative movement talks about a lot of the same issues the progressive movement does, but they use very different language. Instead of talking about “care” and “care work,” they talk about “family policy” and “motherhood and fatherhood.” Can you tell me more about why you think the language is different?
IG: I’m not familiar with exactly how the language on the left-of-center evolved, but I believe a well-meaning desire to be inclusive drove the current progressive language around “care work.” I sympathize with the goal of being inclusive. First, not all children have an involved father. There are many kids being raised by mom alone – or by grandparents, other extended family, or foster parents. Additionally, many young children are in external child care because their parents or guardians work, because their parents are hoping to provide them early education opportunities (including learning English!), or for other reasons.
The Left tends to use “care” as an umbrella term for all of this. Care by family, care by foster parents, care by child care workers, etc. are all in the same category called “care.” The Right does not do this. There is an understanding among most conservatives that care by family vs. care by others is different: the caring of a mom and dad for their baby is not the same thing as the care of that baby by someone else. That’s certainly not to say that daycares are bad. My two oldest children went to daycare. I don’t think daycare damaged my older kids! (Though you can certainly find public figures on the Right – with whom I disagree - arguing daycare is bad).
Both kinds of care involve very similar tasks: changing diapers, giving bottles, going for stroller walks, etc. But there are differences. Most obviously, daycare workers are paid, and parents are not, but there are other important differences, including the link between parent and child, the (hopefully) life-long nature of that link, the potential presence of siblings, the web of inter- and intra-generational family members, etc. I think for conservatives, family policy is focused on the family, and while questions about external child care are inextricably linked with family policy, they are not seen as the same issue.
RG: How do you think both sides of the political divide could come to an understanding that they might be speaking about the same thing?
IG: I think a focus on the granular details could really help. Often there are disputes over general philosophies, like: should we view “carework” as an umbrella term with umbrella solutions? How much emphasis should be placed on creating government funded-universal daycare? Do we want to make sure every child is in standardized, publicly-funded preschool as an extension of the public school system? These are big and important questions and I think we will continue to see significant divides over them.
However, I do see a lot of room for agreement on smaller, more granular issues, like the appropriate amount of regulation for small, in-home daycares, or support for “friends, family, and neighbor” care. To get there, we need to focus on the actual details of those things, rather than being caught up in the bigger overarching debates; the focus of these big language divides.
IG: Rebecca, do you agree with that? How do you think the language evolved? Where do you see room for compromise?
RG: What’s fascinating to me is that I don’t hear a lot about the care work from the Right, and when I do, it’s cloaked in terms that have become reactionary - even if it’s not the intent to do so. It’s hard to talk about the care and connection a mother and father give a child without sliding down the slope into IT MUST BE THE PARENTS and IT MUST BE THE MOTHER and then, MOTHERS SHOULD NOT WORK. And women who have spent years leaning into their careers are incredibly worried about being sidelined as soon as a bump begins to show.
But a lot of what we’ve found is that so much about caregiving exists in 1) a gray area, and 2) often without pay involved. Some of the conversations about who cares for a child have become a thinly veiled referendum on what kind of parent or family you are. It’s really hard to approach this without people getting their hackles up. We have generations of parent-shaming to undo, and we’re just getting started. We also know from the postpartum support community that such shame has very real consequences for parents and families.
I also think - and I speak very much from my own experience on this - that it’s very hard to understand the nuances and blurred lines of care until you’ve done it yourself. I recall interviewing a Member of Congress who said that when she got to the state house, she was surrounded by septuagenarian men who were very far removed from child-rearing. (By contrast, she had two young kids at home). I wonder how much of the black-and-white take on care and child care has to do with people who don’t really fully understand what it entails and how there is not a neat and clear-cut side to come down on. People with families, or aging parents or ill relatives understand that care is a constant give-and-take compromise, some of which depends on your own kid and family structure.
One thing I’ve noticed since covering child care in Covid-times is the emergence of the care worker as part of the narrative. People wrongfully assume that since child care is expensive that their care providers are well compensated - even though it’s far from the truth. Many make minimum wage or less and have to rely on government benefits, or cannot afford to send their own children to receive the child care they provide. I’ve seen the care worker elevated a lot as someone deserving of higher wages and dignity - which I strongly agree with - but what needs to go hand-in-hand with that is some form of external investment because most parents can’t afford to pay more than they already are. (HHS recommends no more than seven percent of a household income go to child care to be considered affordable, but we know it’s a lot more than that for many people. )
RG: What has surprised me in a lot of these conversations is that there is a lot of room for agreement on supporting families and caregivers more, but there hasn’t been a lot of progress on that front. Do you see one policy decision as being standout as having the potential to rise above the fray and see progress in the next few years?
IG: I’m going to get to your question … but first I want to say one thing. I think a lot of cultural work remains to be done in making the work of the home and the work of caring for others visible and socially respected. In my mind, both the Left and the Right share responsibility for the way this vital work remains unappreciated. On the “left” side of things, I think when women joined the workforce in large numbers (which I applaud!), that went along sometimes with devaluing the work of the home. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, famously argued that “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children” because it made for an unjust society. I still encounter hostility and contempt from people who call themselves “progressives” towards women who are homemakers or stay-at-home moms.
On the Right, as you note, there are some people who argue that women’s place should only be in the home (thankfully fewer than fifty years ago, but they’re still there, and perhaps gaining traction due to various online personas). Both sides deny agency to women who do this work...just in different ways. To make real political progress, I think there’s a lot of work left to be done on shifting the cultural narrative around the work of the home and care, on both sides of the political spectrum. As a society, we need to recognize that this is important work that forms a kind of vital infrastructure upon which the formal economy and social cohesion rests. But we don’t.
Until that happens, I think widespread political movement on this issue is unlikely. However, smaller, more granular changes are certainly possible. The place where I see the most potential for agreement across the aisle is the Child Tax Credit. Such a tax credit - which has bipartisan support - puts cash in parents’ pockets so they can make their own decisions about how to take care of their kids. Tax credits in general are more politically palatable to fiscal conservatives worried about deficit spending and questions of big government, and are also of interest to progressives. I’d particularly like to see a larger tax credit combined with a “Baby Bonus,” or extra money sent to parents when they have a new infant. As a plus, these smaller, more granular changes may also help shift the national conversation - a sort of beneficial, symbiotic relationship between cultural and political change!
IG: How about you, Rebecca? How do we change the culture? And what do you see as feasible political changes that could help us get there?
RG: The biggest change I want to see (hope to see) is that people realize that we CAN change the culture because a lot of what makes parenting very hard in this country is the result of policies that make it very hard for families. There is the hard work of parenting and the fun parts of parenting and we’ve spent so much of our time telling people about the former without really getting the latter.
But it’s hard to talk about that sweet feeling of nuzzling the wisps of hair on a baby’s head if you can’t afford to take time off work.
Or hard to imagine the joyous holiday concert at school if you can’t take time off work.
Or sending a sick kid to school on the bus because you don’t have leave.
Or not being able to afford the care your child needs because your health insurance sucks or you don’t even have that and Medicaid won’t cover you.
The list goes on and on.
My goal would be to have a generation of people say, this doesn’t need to be this hard and we should change it to make things easier. We know costs are a major driver of how hard parenting is, and yet we still haven’t raised the child tax credit or made it fully refundable, and we don’t have that Baby Bonus, which costs the country very little but we know would be a huge boost to families. We know parents need time off work, and we still don’t protect their jobs when they come back. And we know that families make so MANY different decisions on what child care they want for their family - and we support just about NONE of it.
For this to change, we need to make some big leaps in how we think of families and who benefits when people have children. We aren’t there yet, but when I see more people on both sides of the aisle - and in all age groups - nodding along in agreement, I have more faith that we will get there.
Thank you to for sharing her wisdom here and I encourage you to check out her Substack as well: .
***One more note on the excellent Capita seminar, which was moderated by
+ - it was also “low tech.” This meant putting away laptops and cell phones during the sessions. It wasn’t so strict, a la White Lotus, or having to check the electronics at the door, but I took notes using a notebook and pencil. There were far more conversations that came apropos of nothing except having free time. And there is something about actually writing words down on paper that stores it in your head better than typing on a computer does. It makes me grateful that I went to college before laptops were ubiquitous, and also a bit sad to think of my kids already using Chromebooks in middle school. But that’s a topic for another time.
This is so good--we need much more of this type of dialogue. I truly think "family" or "care" policy dialogues are one of the few ways to break through our toxic polarization.
I really appreciated Ivana's point about liberals calling it “care policy” and conservatives calling it “family policy." I’m usually pretty skeptical of language or semantic debates (probably a side effect of working in the mental health/addiction space, where word policing can get intense), but that distinction feels genuinely important.