You look so…well rested,” a woman recently told a friend of mine, upon learning that she had a four-month old. “It was like I didn’t have the right to look well rested—I wasn’t being appropriately sacrificial,” my friend told me. Such is the expectation of parenting’s onerousness: Anyone who seems relatively put together must be some kind of freak.
The concept of the American family unit still centers around the notion that child care is supposed to be borne on the backs of each parent, who’s expected to make the necessary sacrifices to provide care. But finding child care for working families isn’t just a personal dilemma; it’s also a policy problem, and an economic one. If parents are seen as the first and—in many cases—the only line of defense when it comes to taking care of children, how are they supposed to get down to work?
A group of advocates is making a full-throttled attempt to turn child care into a collective, social responsibility. On Thursday, the Make It Work campaign unveiled a proposal for federally subsidized child care that would dramatically expand the scope of government aid to 26 million lower- and middle-income working parents, at an estimated cost of $168 billion per year when it’s fully phased in over 10 years. The group is now looking to pressure presidential candidates (cough,Hillary) to respond to its agenda in early primary states. “2016 will be the year that America stands up and demands an agenda that supports working families,” said Tracy Sturdivant, co-leader of Make It Work. The campaign is also calling for paid leave, paycheck transparency, and action on other pocketbook issues that have attracted the support of Gloria Steinem and Sen. Patty Murray.
[For more of this story, written by Suzy Khimm, go to http://www.newrepublic.com/art...its-economic-one-too]
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