As movements continue to fight for universal, affordable child care and paid family and medical leave, and for workplace reforms through union organizing and forms of activism, prominent politicians like Republican Vice-Presidential nominee J.D. Vance question women’s place in the workplace. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he vowed to represent the in America. In the past he has critiqued the Democratic Party as being run by “childless cat ladies,” and argued that women should be having children rather than working long hours.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay has covered gender and racial inequality in society throughout her career as a writer, editor, organizer and nonprofit leader. In just a few short years she went from executive editor of the now-defunct blog Feministing to executive editor of Teen Vogue, where she oversaw a massive transformation in its coverage, from just fashion-as-usual, to fashion plus all the political, social and identity questions young people were facing. She resigned from that role in 2022.

Her third book, , takes on the problem of women’s burnout from juggling both the unpaid work of family life and the demanding paid work in thankless, profit-driven jobs, and defends women’s right to ambition. The question, she asks, is where should we channel that ambition? Early Learning Nation contributor Haley Swenson sat down with Mukhopadhyay to discuss her journey to understand work and ambition differently in the years since she first “made it.”

Haley Swenson: I’ve read you for such a long time, going back to when I was a college student and you were writing for . And then I remember a few years ago, during the pandemic, everybody was like, wow, look at Teen Vogue. We were seeing articles about socialist feminism and dreamers and DACA and prison and policing and everyone was saying, what’s going on over there? And then I found out you were the executive editor, and I said, aha, that’s part of what’s going on over there. Ìę

And I remember thinking, “Wow, she’s really made it!” So maybe we could start there. Tell the readers a little bit about that experience, of “making it,” getting that big management job, and how the reality of that led you to this book.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: I think I also felt like I had made it. You know, I worked really hard to get to a place where I would even be considered for a position like that. I should have felt this tremendous sense of satisfaction, and I did. I really was proud of the work we were doing, and I was happy to have the job. But there was a deeper part of me saying I worked really hard to get here, and now what? Why am I exhausted? Why do I not have space to take care of myself? And I wasn’t making the kind of money that I felt like I should be making for how much experience I had, and what I was bringing to the table, which kind of made me start to question what all of this was for.

But I didn’t really face that question until the pandemic, when I had this moment that many women had of asking, why do I work all the time? Maybe work isn’t the core organizing value for my life. And there’s a very earnest battle right now to take rights away from women and to say that women should have never been allowed in the workplace. The pandemic forced me to start reporting out what I felt was a reckoning that women were having with their relationship to ambition. I wanted to come in strong with a counter-argument that we weren’t wrong for having ambition, but we were set up to fail.

Swenson: Ambition is a theme that keeps coming back throughout the book. Prior to that pandemic moment, when many of us questioned it all, you talk about how in terms of workplace feminism we had “lean in” and we had “girl bossing,” the idea, as you say, that, “there’s nothing that a little elbow grease and the right shade of lipstick can’t overcome.” What happened in the pandemic that made those ideas of women’s ambition seem so antiquated?

Mukhopadhyay: This was most pointed with mothers. I think that a lot of mothers have been told that you can have it all. You can work and have your family. You just need to organize your time and you’ll be fine. And many of them realized how burned out they were, especially when they lost all of the support they needed to be successful in their careers, like child care, home health workers, housekeepers. When that underbelly of workers that keep many middle class and affluent women afloat dissipated, I think a lot of women had to face that their ambitions were fragile, that they were resting on this care economy and this false idea that you can have it all. And I think that’s the biggest thing that started to unravel.

I also saw this with my single women friends, who I think had been told to put everything into their careers, asking, “Wait, why did I work this hard? Now, none of that matters, because I can’t even go to an office, and I can’t even spend the money I’m earning in a restaurant. My fancy clothes don’t matter. Having a fancy apartment isn’t important anymore, because we’re struggling for our lives out here.”

I think that forced us as a country and a society to ask, what is success? How much do we actually need? A lot of families took a step back from their professional duties to ask these questions. Maybe we got a taste of a balanced life. We got a taste of what it would be like to not just prioritize work at all costs.

Swenson: Sometimes in the child care and paid leave spaces, we say that because the United States doesn’t have robust social policies, you’re really left to the “boss lottery,” where it’s up to your manager whether you can have a balanced life. There’s also this pressure, which you experienced in management positions, of wanting to do right by your employees, the people who report to you, to be that supportive person, to help them develop, but at the same time you have very little power to protect them when push comes to shove. What’s your vision of what management could look like?

Mukhopadhyay: I’m interested in building off of the work of the great feminist theorist Barbara Ehrenreich, to develop her idea of the professional managerial class as this middle layer of management that could become radicalized and stand with other workers. Something promising that we started to see during the pandemic, was white collar workers, or knowledge workers, coming into consciousness about their own labor conditions.

I see an opportunity to think about management less as a climb to the top, and more about people. We should grade managers on that, on how well you build your team and relate to them and support them. And that should be as important as your ability to come up with creative ideas and to execute.

The old model of management isn’t really working right now. Even just for the most basic economic reasons, we really need to start thinking about models that do empower and include larger groups of people to feel purpose-driven.

Swenson: At the end of the book, I was feeling so optimistic. You cite so many examples of workers who aren’t taking it anymore, and are either forming unions or just saying enough is enough and radically changing their lives to be more about community and less about work.

You offer the idea of instead of channeling our hustle energy—our ambition into personal success—trying to channel that into collective change in the workplace. That seems like a starting point for any of the kinds of changes you want to see, so we are no longer set up to fail. Can you explain how you see us replacing the old feminist dream of having it all with the goal of “just having enough”?

Mukhopadhyay: It really has to be a collective reckoning to say that we’ve had enough of how we’re treated in the workplace. We’re not going to do it anymore. The expectation is that if you have it all, you have to do it all, and I’m not going to do it all. And if you want me to do it all, you’re going to pay me equitably for it. And that may mean making some personal sacrifices. It means that maybe you don’t put yourself up for that promotion. Maybe you don’t, and I’m talking directly at the camera to myself right now, take that third freelance gig.

Maybe you have to say, I don’t need to keep pushing and pushing, because the more I push, the harder it is for me to actually enjoy what I have and to not make myself sick and stressed out and depressed in the process.

The easy narrative here is to say, well, this is why women should never work. The whole problem with that is whether you’re working outside the house or inside the house, you’re still working. And most women don’t have the choice to be in the house or outside of the house.

I know many women that would love a little more leisure time, but I do not know any woman that’s not out here hustling. This system was designed to make us miserable, to set us up to fail. But [pushing back] is also something that we need to do collectively. You can “quiet quit” as an individual, but if the person next to you at work is going to pick up the slack, you’re not creating a collective environment where we’re all saying together, “this is what we’re willing to put up with, and this is what we’re not willing to put up with.”

Swenson: Speaking of the moment we’re in right now, politically, has anything changed for you, in terms of your sense of what’s possible, or your optimism about the direction we’re headed in. How is the prospect of a second Trump term affecting your thinking?

Mukhopadhyay: I think that there is such a naked war on women and women’s ambition. J.D. Vance has openly condemned the idea of women in the workplace, women’s independence, . This is part of a working world order and mindset where women are second-class citizens, where their creativity is clamped down on, where their actual human rights are being restricted. And that is very dangerous.

And it’s not that feminists are against ambition. It’s not that we’re lazy and it’s not that we don’t believe that women should be ambitious. What we’re saying is it’s too hard and we can’t do it alone. The solution to that cannot be that we don’t try. What are the conditions for us to successfully try? And that’s why I think this moment is very linked to our fight for democracy and for women’s human rights.

It’s not a coincidence to me that we’re having this profound backlash on women in the workplace, that so many mothers were pushed out of the workforce during the pandemic at the same time we saw the overturning of Roe v Wade, and the rise of the, quote, “trad wife.”

One of J.D. Vance’s quotes is, “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.” And that’s really effective messaging. It isn’t liberating for me to work 90 hours a week, but then neither is forced motherhood.

Swenson: So what is the message you have for women?

Mukhopadhyay: I think a lot of books right now are saying, don’t give up the fight. And I am saying, yes, but pick and choose your battles. You are not alone in what you’re feeling. And I think that one of the problems with neoliberal, lean-in feminism has been that we have put the culpability for women’s progress on the individual woman. You alone cannot change the parental leave policy in your company or in your state. You alone cannot overcome the unequal pay gap. So much ink has been spilled about that moment when you ask for more money, like that’s the core of workplace feminism. “Speak up in meetings and make sure you ask for more money.” And I would never tell someone not to do those things. I just want us to give ourselves a pat on the back. We’ve done enough. But we alone can’t solve these problems. So what does it look like to use our ambition to build a community of support, around the kinds of lives that we want to live, and the kinds of work we want to do?

While Helen Russell’s clever, well-researched exploration of the parenting culture of Denmark and other Nordic countries might not fully map onto the experience of most families in the U.S. or U.K. (Russell’s original home), it offers refreshing insights that can help parents relax a bit, give themselves heaps of grace and have much more fun raising their family. For societies like ours that are confronting crises in practically any arena that concerns our children, Russell’s deep dive into the “Viking way” offers practical, doable approaches that entire nations have proven can work in creating healthy, happy families.

Russell had been in London, “living the city dream” as an editor for MarieClaire’s U.K. online edition when her husband was offered his dream job working for Lego in Denmark. Both were feeling overworked, overwhelmed, burned out and ripe for a change. Denmark had just been voted the happiest country in the world (not for the first time) and she was intrigued. The couple emigrated and soon found themselves parents of “the redhead and the IVF twins,” which placed them in the thick of Nordic childrearing culture.

After 10 years in her new homeland, Russell still maintains sufficient outsider status to offer observations that are helpful, thought-provoking and sometimes hilarious. Her culture shock winds through anecdotes such as the reminder from her son’s Scout group that, “On Wednesday, we build bonfires! Bring daggers,” or the fact even in big cities, you’ll see rows of “under threes” bundled up in huge Mary Poppins-style prams no matter the weather while mom or dad runs inside for a latte or a sandwich. (It’s considered crucial for babies to be able to lie flat rather than be curled over in a buggy or car seat.)

The Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — share the Viking heritage, descendants of the seafaring folks who roamed (and yes, often marauded) across northern Europe from 800 to 1066 CE. Their hardiness is genetically baked in from those beginnings in a harsh environment, and culturally is encouraged today through common practices such as encouraging babies as young as two weeks to take in plenty of fresh air “to help the lungs develop.” Viking children live outside, Russell says, rain or shine. Given the local climate, this often means rain or worse. If the Nordic countries have a shared motto, it’s “There is no bad weather, there are just the wrong clothes.”

Those of us who prefer the warmth of the hearth to unrelenting cold drizzle easily recognize Russell’s shock at the realization that not only will her children be splashing around in the cold and drear, she, too, will be expected to join in and actually play in all that mess. Viking parents volunteer. They go along. They get out there. Danish children are not issued the appropriate wardrobe at birth, she writes, but they might as well be. In some places, posters are put up reminding parents exactly what children need for each season, from the all-in-one snowsuit and Gore-Tex boots for winter, to the balaclava “elephant hat” that all children wear much of the year in varying thicknesses. Wind-resistant, waterproof and thermal clothing come in the smallest of sizes and are simply a fact of life. Luckily, she writes, the thriving hand-me-down culture means no one has to buy all that kit from scratch. Just look around—and pass along whatever your kids grow out of.

In chapters running the gamut from Viking health and safety to school time, to singing and the social brain, Russell touches on many elements that create the unique Nordic approach to children’s lives — encouraging the risk-taking that fosters resilience and self-confidence; the idea that it’s great to cut loose, go wild and get dirty; the view that play is a sign of well-being; the necessity of developing grit, the freedom to mess up and learn from one’s mistakes — all go into creating happy, well-adjusted children.

It is a given in Nordic parenting that children will figure things out, learn to use their bodies and manage their surroundings. They are raised to trust themselves and others from the very beginning. Samfundssind, or community mindset, is the bedrock of Nordic society and from infancy, children are raised to consider the ethos of “the greater good,” even when it means a bit of discomfort for themselves. In Nordic society, fathers are parents and are expected to be involved in all aspects of their children’s upbringing. Real Viking dads change diapers and wouldn’t respect a father who didn’t, she writes.

In each chapter, Russell offers observations that even the most urban, most non-Nordic parent can incorporate to create opportunities for greater freedom and self-reliance for their children, even at very young ages. Her tone is chatty, self-deprecating and sometimes veers a bit cute, but especially for new parents, “How to Raise a Viking” is a delightful, liberating handbook that encourages loosening our grip a bit, trusting our children and each other a lot, and helping our children grow into their richest, most authentic selves.

However, none of Russell’s great examples or clever observations would be sufficient for someone living in a non-Nordic country to raise a child gloriously expressing all the best Viking values. No matter how hard you might try to go it alone, you need a society that supports those values. A quick answer to “How do you raise a Viking?” would be, live in a society that values children in real, practical, unwavering ways, not as entities deserving of lip service prior to elections, but as the bedrock of a society that intends to have a future. This is where policymakers might want to look at “How to Raise a Viking” and check out the lengthy citations in each chapter. It’s no secret that American society must make fundamental changes in how we support parents and children if we are to move forward in a functional, even sensible way. In “How to Raise a Viking,” resources abound that might help move that needle.

Reading Russell’s chapters on government-subsidized child care, parental leave, free healthcare, free education and free dental treatment and a work week that generally clocks in at 33 hours can make the reader wistful for why we can’t have nice things. Yes, taxes are high, but it’s hard to argue with the societal payoffs. (See “happiest country in the world,” above.)

Nordic society isn’t perfect. Some U.S. educators would no doubt take issue with how reading and academic achievement don’t really receive much emphasis until a child is 8 or so, though as Russell points out, children in Nordic countries play for longer, learn later, but still do better in the long run than children in the U.S. and U.K. — and are happier. There are clouds on the horizon, as children in Nordic countries are now getting smartphones and devices at earlier ages, which is causing as much headache and consternation there as it does over here.

In her Epilogue, Russell writes that she knows the idea of the Viking spirit isn’t a package of ideas that can be shipped and adopted wholesale; they are elements to strive toward. By 2050, she writes, economists predict that 40 percent of current jobs will be lost to automation. Right now, we simply don’t know what our jobs our children will be doing in their adulthood. But they will need resilience, adaptability, grit and the ability to think for themselves.

That’s the Viking spirit.

There’s a reason why women in this country feel that so much pressure rests on their shoulders, that parenting is hard, that too many expectations are heaped onto them and that if they don’t hold everything together Macgyver-like with pluck, grit, duct tape and dental floss, their worlds could fall apart.

The reason is because it’s true. Maybe not the part about the duct tape, but the reason so many women feel they must take on so much work and caregiving is that the United States doesn’t have a robust social safety net the way many other industrialized countries do. We have no federal child care infrastructure and no federal paid family leave plan. We’ve skipped over the safety net chapter on how to run a country and instead, we rely on women to pick up the slack.

Calarco, who works as an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, made headlines in November 2020 when her quote: “Other countries have social safety nets; the U.S. has women” went viral. It resonated while still getting to the heart of what makes being a caregiver in this country so incredibly frustrating: it’s hard, it’s time-consuming and women are expected to do it while being given no support, financial or otherwise. It also served as the basis for Calarco’s new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.

Calarco spoke with Early Learning Nation about everything from the outdated Supermom myth to the role humor plays in perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes.

A lightly edited and condensed Q+A is below.

Rebecca Gale: Your book talks about the United States’ insistence on maintaining the illusion of a DIY society — that each of us should make our own decisions and take care of our problems without help from anyone else. But given that people actually need caregiving support at some point in their lives, why do you think this illusion has endured for such a long time?Ìę

Jessica Calarco: This DIY society is beneficial for the billionaires and big corporations and their supporters who profit from maintaining this idea and the illusion that we don’t need a social safety net. Think of the big universal systems – child care, health care – they cost money. Who is paying the costs? We would be raising taxes on very wealthy people and corporations, which is threatening to people as it reduces social inequality in ways that manipulate the rest of us: exploitation. They have an interest in maintaining the illusion that we can get by without maintaining a social safety net. There is this belief that goes along with supporting the DIY model that not having a social safety net makes us safer because we are likely to make better choices without that safety net.

RG: Really?

JC: Yes, this is the idea of neoliberalism economically. It originated in Austria in the 1930s, then was imported to the U.S. for manufacturers to use to push back against New Deal policies. They were imported to the U.S. and used to train economists like Milton Friedman, who then went on to shape policy for decades.

RG: So does this DIY model contribute to the way we value care and why women are expected to make up the difference?Ìę

JC: Part of this gets back to the DIY model. If we don’t have a social safety net like universal child care and universal health care, we still need those kinds of care. Within this kind of system, care work is too intensive to be profitable. This quickly becomes unsustainable, which means that it’s not ever going to work within our profit-based economic system, without high levels of government investment, charging high costs to consumers, or exploiting people and paying too little for their work.

We have pushed the labor-intensive work disproportionately onto women. You can see that in industries like child care, home health care, services, retail and house cleaning. And we push this onto people who are highly vulnerable: women, prisoners and immigrants. We have an interest in this DIY model: the more we create conditions where people are forced to take the job reinforces the perception that this job must be less valuable.

Women hold 70 percent of the lowest wage jobs. The jobs held by women get further devalued over time. We treat care work as the moral or emotional benefit that must make up for what is not paid. So, you have this system where women are earning far less than men do.

RG: One framework you discuss in the book is that low-income women are unable to say no as they need the work, especially those in caregiving roles, so they say yes, even to situations that may be untenable to them.Ìę

JC: Yes, we see this especially for low-income women, disproportionately women of color, who have nowhere to turn for support. It is a two-way trap. I give the example of a woman named Patricia in the book. She’s a low-income Black mother who has a number of young children, also working a full-time job. She is carrying the burden on that front. She decides to cut back to working four days instead of five. Once her extended family finds out she has the day off, she winds up driving folks to the grocery store and doctors’ appointments. She wants to find a way to say no, but says “I’m their only hope.”

We have decimated communities so they have so few resources to go around. They know the people they love have nowhere else to turn. Patricia worries, ‘what if I need help one day?’ She ended up divorcing her partner, had five young kids at home, including newborn twins, and when she was home recovering from a c-section, she ended up needing that support from her network. She was glad she had not pushed them away at that moment and opted instead to help the other people around her as well.

RG: You have an entire chapter devoted to this concept of “Good Choices Won’t Save Us.” I know that ties into the neoliberalism you mentioned earlier, but let’s unpack that further. Is the idea that if people made the right choices, they’d never have a need for a social safety net?

JC: Yes, exactly. This gets back to the idea of the Neoliberal myth of the DIY society. Neoliberal economic theory states that societies are better off without a social safety net because if people don’t have a net to protect them from risk, they will be less likely to engage in risky behavior. The less protection you have, the better choice you make. This has been fully debunked – a social safety net does protect people.

People are told, if you just make good choices, you will be fine: marriage, college, a STEM education, waiting to have kids. The appeal of that kind of mythology makes sense. In such a precarious world, it feels good to have a sense of agency. The problem is that correlation is not causation. The model that we have is based on the people who are able to make good choices. If someone is able to get married, buy a house, go to college and get a degree in a STEM field, they may have better outcomes but it most likely has to do with the fact that they had the privilege to make the decisions in the first place. It’s not that choices don’t matter, but we have to be cognizant of the level of privilege to make those choices that we equate with the path to success.

RG: What about childbirth? That’s a pretty binary viewpoint. Plenty of people undergo all the risks involving gestating and birthing children, and have little control over those outcomes.Ìę

JC: This is why this kind of model deeply ignores that there are risks that good choices can’t manage. Whether it’s childbirth or environmental risks with climate change, there are plenty of risks we can’t manage as individuals. This kind of messaging runs the risk of gaslighting people. They should be able to figure out what the choices are and how to protect themselves from risk.

We see this with mothers and adverse outcomes in childbirth and child rearing. As if there is a right choice to make, and it’s your fault if you didn’t figure it out and make it.

RG: Let’s talk about the sexism jokes. Your book explains that some men rely on humor to cover their own misogynistic tendencies, and you’ve posited that such humor actually makes things worse. Why is that?

JC: These were two pieces that were surprising to me. When I talked to men about the inequalities in their lives, they were quick to write it off as a joke. Even when they were making choices that looked deeply egalitarian, it was treated with a level of humor and a lack of seriousness.

I did a lot of reading and research on gender and sexism in the context of humor. Couching sexism in humor makes it more poisonous, because it becomes more palatable to men who can buy into the ideas without thinking of themselves as bad people. It also makes it harder for the women to push back. They’re told: ‘Stop being a nag. Can’t you lighten up?’

Sexist humor seems benign, though I would argue it can be deeply damaging. It is harder for women to push back in their context of the relationship and broader society they’re part of.

RG: Can you give an example?

JC: Andrew Tate is a former Mixed Martial Arts fighter turned YouTuber who is banned from a number of different public platforms for his misognystic messaging, like ‘Women should be men’s property in marriage.’ One of the problems with that is that if he is able to write it off as a joke, it makes it harder for those who have been harmed by that rhetoric. It gives men an easier way to buy into the softer ideas by saying ‘at least I don’t believe the extreme version of it.’

RG: My favorite chapter in your book is the one that concentrates on the Supermom Myth. Why do you think this myth persists, even as so much research and general wisdom seems to contradict that idea that women should be doing it all?

JC: We tell women in our society that they are the best protectors for children. If all else fails, it is their responsibility to make sure children are safe. In a society with a lot of risk, there’s a lot to protect them from.

This kind of messaging—where women are supposed to view motherhood as the top protector from the threats of the world—is that it primes them for fearmongering. It can persuade women that they need to go above and beyond. Some are cloaked in religious messaging like Critical Race Theory, or transgender kids and public schooling, or similar fear mongering along those lines.

It can take more secular forms too, like the fear of downward mobility; the idea that ifÌęyou don’t get into the right college your life will be a disaster, or if you don’t have that investment banking job, your life will be ruined.

These fears can lead mothers to sacrifice themselves. Even if they have the resources for full-time child care, these fears can lead them to decide to stay home full time, believing that is the way to protect the child.

RG: But why are mothers the ones to shoulder this burden?

JC: We have these twisted ideas about biology because women have historically done that work, as opposed to recognizing the socialization influences. For example, girls are trained to be mothers from the time they can hold a baby doll. All the evidence suggests that young girls are pushed into these responsibilities at a young level.

With early socialization, these roles get more ingrained and it becomes easier for women to do that work. In the Supermom Myth, if moms have the most experience managing the responsibility, it can feel threatening if dad isn’t doing it as well. One of the saddest things we found about the pandemic research was the way angry dads were exacerbating the situations at home.

We did a big national survey in September 2020, and asked how often are you yelling at your kids? For college-educated white fathers, the numbers were off the chart. Those are the dads that were able to work remotely during the pandemic. In couples where both parents could work remotely part of the time, dads didn’t have the experience of working for pay while caring for children, which led to high levels of frustration. In one example from the book, on the days a dad was home he was angry, yelling at the kids. He didn’t have that kind of experience to navigate the challenges, so the mom was deeply worried and took on all the child care herself.

RG: When people read this book, and as you lay out all the concerns for the way we structure society so that an undue burden falls on women to act as the social safety net, what’s your takeaway?

JC: We have managed to maintain this illusion of a DIY society by pushing the risk and responsibilities onto women. Some women, often more privileged women, are able to push that risk onto underprivileged women. But the engineers and profiteers of this system have managed to persuade enough of us that the system works, which makes it incredibly hard to create the safety net that we need and deserve.

People are inclined to secure the resources to protect their own families even if it comes at the expense of others.ÌęWe need to be up front about how a better social safety net could help to improve all of our lives – even as it reduces some of the inequalities between us.

My hope is that by understanding this system, it can help people see where this DIY model comes from and how it’s hurting all of us, especially women. We need to demand a system that can work better for everyone, and reject some of the myths that tend to delude and divide us.

Today, children across all racial identities are increasingly likely to live with a grandparent. The share of children living with their grandparents has doubled since the 1970s (from 3.2 percent to 8.4 percent), and more children are being raised by their grandparents today than ever before in U.S. history. The majority of these kids live in multigenerational households, where they receive care from at least one biological parent in addition to a grandparent. A growing minority of those kids live in “skipped-generation” households, that is, where their parents are not present and grandparents, especially grandmothers, are taking on the chief responsibility for their grandchildren’s care and well-being.

In – A Twenty-First-Century Story of Love, Coercion and Survival, University of Washington Professor of Sociology LaShawnDa Pittman dives into the emotional, financial, medical and legal struggles of their daily lives. Pittman conducted extensive interviews with 74 Black grandmothers heading skipped-generation households in the Chicago area. Pittman argues that they represent the growing number of families made up of our country’s two most vulnerable populations — children and the elderly — and that they have very few legal rights, while facing public policies not designed for families like them, as well as a host of intersecting inequalities and barriers.

Early Learning Nation magazine contributor Haley Swenson interviewed Pittman about the book and about what child care advocates and providers should know about the rise of grandparent-headed households.

Haley Swenson: Why did you feel it was important to focus on kids in skipped-generation households in particular with this book?

LaShawnDa Pittman: When I started this research, I was interested in Black grandmas raising kids. I had not gotten as nuanced as multi-generational or skipped-generation arrangements. It took just a few interviews for me to realize that these were very different experiences. I was primarily interested in a story of resilience and coping, and I felt like these women in skipped-generation households were having to cope in very different kinds of ways from other grandmas.

One thing that became really, really clear was that child-rearing institutions, like educational and health care systems, are not set up for [these skipped-generation families]. I was having conversations with them about just how difficult it was to navigate those institutions. That’s mainly because of grandmothers’ legal marginalization, relative to parents and to the state. Grandparents have no inherent rights to their grandchildren. That illuminated a piece of the puzzle for me, and I thought that was a really important story to tell.

We know that the bulk of grandparent caregiving happens informally, but even inside of that informal bucket, we include both no legal relationship at all and legal guardianship of various sorts, and depending on which state you’re in, that’s called different things. Sometimes it’s temporary. Sometimes it’s not. The decision to become a legal guardian was often driven by the need to navigate the childrearing institutions, to get healthcare or child care for the kids, or the need to protect children from their parents.

And then we’ve got formal arrangements, which include some relationship to the child welfare system. The child welfare system has increasingly relied on relatives to provide care, and in many states they get less support for that care than non-family foster care providers. It really became apparent that the relationship with the child welfare system is something that is shaping contemporary grandparent caregiving in a way that prior generations just did not have to deal with.

Swenson: In one of the final sentences of the book you say Black grandmas are like “canaries in the coal mine, warning us of the dangers of transmitting social injustices from one generation to the next.” I think one of the ways the book shows that happening is with messy, almost impossible-to-navigate social and family policies.

Because of their legal marginalization, grandmothers describe immense red tape to get access to basic care and financial support for their grandkids. What are some of the things that these grandparents have to go through and negotiate in order to get by, whether that’s by keeping their jobs, or accessing benefits their grandchildren should be entitled to receive?

Pittman: When it comes to resources, it’s like, well, if I don’t get these resources, my grandkid could be taken, but if I do get these resources, then perhaps it exposes me to a whole set of issues that I wasn’t anticipating, and my grandkids could be taken.

​​Even with their best efforts, their best efforts have no match for the sort of structural issues that they face or that they were already facing [before taking in their grandkids]. They’re largely Black women, or indigenous women, who were already economically marginalized. And there are two kinds of issues they face when they raise their grandchildren: How do I hold on to what I already had, and then how do I secure the additional resources they need?

On housing, here is a kid that’s now living in my home that I did not expect to be here. For some folks, it might mean not having enough room, for others, a safe enough community or home. For others it was the child welfare system requiring they have so much space and so on and so forth. So, they have to deal with these housing issues. Some grandmothers in my study have housing assistance, and so then [the change in their household] becomes an issue. How do I hold on to something that’s incredibly difficult to get in this country? There was a freeze on Section 8 housing in Chicago for well over a decade. We all know subsidized housing is becoming a thing of the past. There’s less and less of it.

One of the things I found that was really, really hard to hear about were the ways they were given misinformation about what was required in order to both utilize or hold onto their housing assistance. So, there are federal protections for grandparents raising grandchildren, in terms of not requiring legal guardianship of the kids that they care for, in order to have that assistance. And yet they were often told by street-level bureaucrats, the housing authority or landlords that they needed legal guardianship to have them in their houses. And there are all kinds of reasons why they don’t want legal guardianship. They might hope they don’t have to do this for long, or they don’t want to hurt their children, the children’s parents, who might be relying on some of the benefits they get to raise other kids.

The majority of these caregivers are still working. So, they might ask: How do I maintain my work and take care of this kid, and if that kid is under five, how do I get child care? We know in some places, child care is more expensive than rent. And child care subsidies are not set up for these families. To get these subsidies, a grandma might need to get custody taken from their parents, or her income might hurt her eligibility or her health might be too poor to work the required hours to qualify. And, we know as it is. So, who do they go to when they need to drop them off, when they are the person everybody else comes to?

I saw women who were already marginalized and fragile, vulnerable, having to decrease their work and income. Then I saw women who had to increase work, who didn’t have the health at times to do that, or were retired and had to go back into work. I saw women do more informal work, selling dinners, selling cigarettes, things like that just to get income coming in.

Swenson: There’s a strong belief among many early educators in “whole-family solutions,” not just providing care and education to the kids but giving some wraparound services, job training for parents, healthy food, to the whole family. I’m struck by what you say in the book about how few of these families are even accessing that formal care and education for young children. It’s heartbreaking to think of this whole field of educated, compassionate people who want to be doing this work for these families, and that they’re unable to access the families who really need it, that you describe in your book.

What would it look like if our child rearing systems were remade, to meet families as they are, and to really work for grandmother-led families. What would be different? What kinds of changes would you like to see?

Pittman: If we were actually creating policies that made it less difficult to get the resources that these families need in terms of housing, in terms of child care, when it comes to resources, the outcome would be improved mental and physical health. We talked about the burden of securing these resources, and remember that’s on top of experiencing multiple systems of oppression, from racism to sexism to classism and to ageism. The stress of that, the impact on their mental and physical health, is real.

I imagine that if we addressed that, instead of blaming individuals or the parents for what they aren’t doing, these grandmas would be around longer, and they’d be around with better health, mentally and physically. And that means the kids would be having a better parenting experience. Imagine kids who are getting their needs met, because our child rearing institutions are thinking about the whole family. Without that mental load, they’d all be able to breathe and to get the respite that they need.

UchĂ© Blackstock didn’t plan to become a radical physician, but the pain and death she witnessed at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn radicalized her. After “Jordan,” a young man who looked even younger, died of sickle cell anemia, she contemplated how racism in research, medical education and society has failed to help patients with this painful hereditary disease. His case was far from unique. “My time at Kings County,” Blackstock writes in her new book , “marked the beginning of my reeducation as a physician.”

Early Learning Nation magazine recently talked to Blackstock, founder of , a nonprofit dedicated to redressing the root causes of what she terms “medical apartheid” — which she defines as “a two-tiered system 
 that contributes to bad outcomes for our most vulnerable patients and ends up costing us more in the long run.”

As with the other Community Cultivators we have featured, her insights apply beyond her own specialty and should resonate with educators of and advocates for young children.

Here’s what we learned from Blackstock:

The title of her book works on many levels. There are many kinds of legacies, and one is familial: when Blackstock enrolled in Harvard Medical School, she was following in the footsteps of her mother, who graduated from the august institution in 1976. The elder Blackstock also worked at Kings County Hospital. Her mother’s accomplishment and determination inspired her, but the quality that stood out most was compassion. In part because she herself had overcome a stutter, she “developed a particular kind of empathy for those who are struggling,” the author says. Twin sister Oni Blackstock also became a physician and founder of a nonprofit , which offers training and coaching to promote organizational equity.

Will UchĂ© Blackstock’s two children follow in their mother’s, aunt’s and grandmother’s footsteps? It’s too soon to tell — they’re only 7 and 9. For now, she says, “Parenting is probably my hardest role, and it’s so funny because you don’t even get any training. It’s on-the-job training.”

Medical education has come a long way, and has a long way to go. Simply put, race is a social construct, with no basis in science. There is no blood test to determine someone’s race, and yet Blackstock’s book chronicles a number of moments in medical school when textbooks and professors alike cited myths about anatomical differences between Black and white patients as if they were objective fact. “I now realize that this so‑called objectivity was anything but,” she writes.

As with any curriculum, she stresses, what gets left out matters as much as what’s included. “So in the past, there was this emphasis on what happens within the exam room, but now we’re acknowledging that when you’re talking to your patient, everyone else in their community is in the room with you.” Their family, their job, their living conditions, their education all contribute to health and disease. Blackstock believes all medical students should study public health in order to understand how their patients fit into community and population factors.

Trust is a matter of life and death. Having a doctor who looks like you — or who at least cares about who you are — can mean the difference between living a full life and dying prematurely. Blackstock cites a that finds mortality rates sharply lower for Black newborns cared for by Black physicians.”

More broadly, Legacy details the hazards of “institutional untrustworthiness,” which occurs when major systemic and minor interpersonal failures accumulate to the point that patients justifiably feel that the institutions designed to help them are not worth the risk. The book argues that it is up to these institutions to win back the trust of the Black community, and Blackstock’s prescription includes listening and understanding. “The pandemic,” she says, “revealed all these deep fissures within multiple systems, especially our health care system.” To counter the health risks posed by racist laws and norms, the medical establishment has an obligation to improve its capacity to see these factors clearly and to respond forcefully and empathetically.

Physicians can be advocates. “Health is not just about individual choices,” Blackstock notes. Doctors can recite advice about eating healthy and getting exercise until they’re blue in the face, but these behavioral changes constitute only 20% of what makes someone healthy. The other 80% comprises systemic factors beyond the individual’s control, such as the quality of the air, the affordability of housing, the availability of healthy food choices.

What good is writing a prescription for a patient when there aren’t any pharmacies in the neighborhood? What does it mean to treat bullet wounds without confronting the ubiquity of firearms or the economic factors that lead to gun violence?

Physicians need to recognize their roles as advocates. When Blackstock writes op-eds or testifies before Congress, she’s drawing upon her medical education to improve the health of people she will never meet in person. “I’m not saying physicians need to save the world,” she says, “but we need a system where we do more than just prescribe medications and tell them not to drink and smoke.

The emergency room is in a state of emergency. A dysfunctional and chronically underfunded health care system places an unsustainable burden on the site that should be the last resort for patients. Legacy lays it on the line, calling the American emergency room “the place where the United States’ social problems come home to roost.”

Blackstock says she originally chose emergency medicine as a specialty because it meant being able to serve everyone who walked through (or was rolled through) the doors. “I knew I’d be able to take care of all comers, regardless of socioeconomic status,” she says. “But I didn’t recognize that so many people used the emergency department for primary care services.” Investments in social services, public health and primary prevention — as well as comprehensive health coverage — would eliminate many or even most emergency room visits, she says, allowing ERs to function better for the cases they were intended to serve.

Many of the issues Blackstock highlights in Legacy boil down to the social determinants of health. The book, she says, was conceived as way of helping readers connect the dots between the world around us and the state and fate of our bodies.

The brilliance of Stockstill’s work is in how she brings readers down from the abstract to nitty-gritty reality: How do concentrations of poverty or privilege influence the minutiae of early childhood settings, ranging from how much of the daily routine is completed to how children are allowed to interact with objects brought from home? What societal and institutional expectations are being implicitly and explicitly taught? What does this mean for the experience of teachers? And, what does understanding the implementation level suggest about our policy conversations?

Whether you are a child care veteran or new to the issue, you’ll walk away from False Starts buzzing with thoughts. I had so many I decided to schedule an interview with Stockstill to go deeper.

The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Elliot Haspel: One of the fundamental points you make is that there are several different ways of thinking about preschool, and two of the dominant ones are ‘compensatory’ versus ‘supplemental.’  Can you talk a little bit about that distinction, and how you saw it underlying different characteristics in the two programs you observed?

Casey Stockstill: I think you see preschool as compensatory all over Head Start. I think that’s maybe a controversial claim these days, because I’ve seen a shift. In the sixties, definitely, Head Start was supposed to be a compensatory program to make up for these quote-unquote “shortcomings” of poor families. But the discourse has shifted and I think Head Start describes itself as a whole-child, whole-family approach. They talk about wraparound supports. They don’t want to have a deficit framing, that’s not the intention.

Yet for me, when I was in the classroom with teachers, that is some of the [deficit] language they were using. And I mean, honestly, I’m like, how do you say something is missing without applying a deficit? I heard expressions like, ‘Oh, we gotta take the kids outside because some of their parents might not take them outside.’ ‘They might not be able to brush their kids’ teeth at home.’ ‘We can’t do show and tell. The parents are really busy and don’t always have toys for their kids.’ It’s interesting because some of it is reflecting real scarcity and real gaps. But some of it is not.

What was interesting to me is this framework of Head Start’s going to compensate for challenges at home. It makes a lot of the classroom rules go to the least advantaged kid.

And then I’d say, preschool as a supplement – – that’s more coming from my analysis. It’s something I want us to consider in the way we talk about preschool. I hear it in mom groups, honestly the thinking being ‘I have many options for the kind of child care I could have, or maybe I could even be a stay-at-home parent, should I send my kid to preschool?’ And the thinking is like, ‘Yeah, it’s a positive social experience that will add on to the great stuff you’re probably doing at home.’

Haspel: That makes sense. I’ve always remembered the LBJ quote in announcing Head Start about how it was going to “rescue these children from the poverty which otherwise could pursue them all their lives.” Even though we’ve tried to move away from that, it’s still in there from the very beginning. One of the impacts of segregated classrooms you write about is that they aren’t neatly captured in the observational checkboxes that are used to rate the quality of classrooms. As you know, there’s been a debate in recent years around how we think about quality in ECE settings and how we think about Quality Rating & Improvement Systems (QRIS). So given that, what do you think your research suggests for the future of quality?

Stockstill: I think, yeah, this is being talked about. I’m happy to see it discussed. But I feel like the discussion is more ‘how can we tweak these QRIS systems to make them fold in equity?’ I think we need more discussion and more of an examination. I hope my book pushes that along a little bit, because I feel like quality is how we sleep at night. People often seem to care about segregation because they’re worried that poor kids or kids of color are more likely to be in low-quality programs. The assumption being: as long as we get those kids into high-quality programs, this is all fine. And so much of the texture and the feel of classrooms for children is not captured at all in quality systems.

So yeah, I don’t know if it’s a rethinking or, more unlikely, QRIS would be abandoned. But I’d like to see more of incorporating families’ feelings about their school. Are they getting what they need out of school? I do like the discussions of equity; like, you shouldn’t be able to be a five-star or “high quality” program and be expelling and suspending Black children at a higher rate.

Haspel: Absolutely, it’s a live conversation. I think there’s not one clear answer. I think this book really does contribute to that conversation, too. Because you show so clearly that you can look at a program that has the things that check the boxes, but if they don’t have the other characteristics in place, they are not necessarily getting the quality for the kids.

One thing along those lines: I was really struck by the part where you talked about the daily routines. How many books Great Beginnings had read, how many books Sunshine Head Start had read and so on. Is it fair to say that segregation is getting in the way of learning opportunities or the building of that academic foundation that we’ve been increasingly asking early childhood education to provide?

Stockstill: Would I say, were the Head Start teachers doing a good job? Yes. Were they doing what they should have done with the group of kids that they had? Yes. However, like all teachers know, you have to teach a whole group of kids and that includes focusing on the ones that take most of their attention. So there were kids that could have sat through a book, that wanted to read more, wanted to have more engagement, but could not because we have clustered so many of the challenges of poverty and structural racism in one class.

And I just really want people to see the link between doing that and having these schools that are all affluent and mostly white. Like Great Beginnings, which is able to be the way that it is because it’s not asked to serve kids of color and poor kids. And they chose to use what I saw as time and attention to spare on reading. So yeah, I think it does play a role in school readiness for both groups.

Haspel: One interesting difference was the way that the Great Beginnings teachers much more tightly controlled the play in the classroom, like directing free choice time versus the autonomy that was given with Head Start kids. It really reminded me that a lot of the discourse — and you even mention this — around intensive parenting being the dominant parenting philosophy. So my question is, why do you think that the Great Beginnings teachers were being so much more prescriptive? What do you think was underlying that?

Stockstill: I think they see it as encouraging well-rounded skills. And they talked about social exposure and liking the kids to mix up their playmates. So you know, Ms. Erika in the book talks about like, ‘oh, if I see one girl only plays with this other girl, I want to make sure she can connect with other kinds of people, so I’ll make sure she’s paired with one of the boys.’ But yeah, I definitely see intensive parenting in it, too, this idea that we need to curate children’s experiences.

Haspel: Speaking of the teachers: We talk a lot in the field around compensation as being the key factor in recruitment and retention. And it is, of course! But you talk about Great Beginnings teachers — who don’t get paid a whole lot more than market rate — who had such low turnover. So is there something that’s missing, do you think, in the workforce conversation?

Stockstill: Yeah, I mean, it’s an uncomfortable conversation. But kids, behaviors and families — what families are needing or demanding or assuming that teachers can do — that is workload! That is a teacher’s workload and their workplace environment. The Head Start teachers had better benefits from what they told me, but the pay wasn’t great, and all of them worked second jobs. And then at Great Beginnings, they had [worse benefits], similar pay and they also worked second jobs. Yet they have this satisfaction. That’s not even just about being a preschool teacher. But it’s the Great Beginning teachers saying, ‘I want to work at this school for life, I’m a lifer.’ They would say that the kids are so great, the families are so great, my co-workers get it. They also really appreciated lesson planning autonomy.

I find this fascinating because we are trying so hard to deliver a good preschool experience for poor kids. The way that gets done is kind of like other social programs for kids in poverty. We layer on paperwork and requirements, because if we paid for something to happen in that classroom, we want it documented that it happened.

So Head Start has meal counts and tracking interventions and developmental checklists and 4K curriculum. All this stuff that in many teachers’ view, takes them away from the job. It adds stress without adding benefits. Teachers know it is hard to find a preschool where you’re gonna make great money. So if you’re going to be low paid, they are like, where can I find respect and support for my craft of teaching? My new project is actually a deeper look at how teachers experience workloads across 60 segregated classrooms.

Haspel: You have this great quote: “In the U.S., we ask for preschool to do something we don’t ask of any other institutional experience. Through one fantastically enriching year, the hope is that poor kids will be equipped to succeed in navigating underfunded, unequal institutions as they progress through the rest of their lives.

Public discourse is normalizing pouring more into the fourth year of a child’s life than into their first, second or third years of life.” Broadly speaking, then, how do you think society should properly position preschool?

Stockstill: I’m so tired of the preschool discourse and I was so into it. By the way, that’s part of what inspired the project: working as a teacher aide in a Head Start being like ‘this is great. These kids are gonna benefit so much that they wouldn’t without this!’ All of that.

I was completely inside of that discourse watching presentations from poverty scholars about how ‘look at the impact we can have. If we just spend this money, we spend this X amount on a 4-year-old, it gives these returns. It’s cheaper for society to invest here as opposed to elsewhere.’

I’m tired of that narrative. It’s an efficiency narrative. I know that’s not popular, because we don’t have unlimited funds. But I see child care as part of families, villages. I want to see that we’re making a lifelong investment in citizens. Because, you know, hopefully, we all want an educated, thriving citizen base and workforce. And that starts from birth. I want families to have options for affirming, respectful, exciting child care from birth.

Haspel: Here’s my last question for you. If the book has the impact you want it to have, what’s gonna look different when you and I talk 10 years from now?

Stockstill: We’ll have more preschools that are not segregated by accident. We might have some [segregated preschools] left that are culturally affirming, providing a protective kind of a buffer effect for families of color that want that. But we’ll have a lot more class- and race-integrated preschools.

We are hopefully at an inflection point where we’ll continue expanding and integrating preschools [as part of a system that starts at birth]. Unlike K-12, where we built so many schools in an era of segregation by law and then we’ve been trying to undo that, we’re not done building preschools. So we have the opportunity to make them fantastic for kids, right? But we have to ask slightly different questions, I think, than what we’re currently asking.

Mark Swartz: Why is it called The Art of Talking with Children?

I tried to bring in research-based principles about what we know works for conversation, especially with young children, and all the different ways that it can build empathy and confidence. But the more I’ve worked with kids (and as a parent myself), I found that there really isn’t just one way to do things or even multiple ways of doing things. It is so much about the authentic relationship between the adult and the child and the family.

Rebecca Rolland: What about the with in the title? Why talking with instead of talking to?

Originally, it was The Art of Talking to Children. But I prefer with, because I am trying to get across that message that it’s the back and forth between the adult and the child that makes for a richer conversation.

Swartz: You say that play has been sidelined. What’s behind that observation?

Rolland: There’s a lot of discussion these days about kindergarten being the new first grade. Academics are pushed earlier and earlier. One, children aren’t necessarily developmentally ready for the concepts that are coming at them so early. Two, play is a fundamental part of children learning, especially at the early ages.

Swartz: I keep hearing experts say that play is learning.

Rolland: Right, and when we say, “Here’s play on one side and learning on the other side,” we’re actually missing a big opportunity for children to enjoy learning and to learn more through play. Really, they should be braided together much more. If we focus on a playful approach rather than an information-heavy rote learning type of style, children will be able to think more critically into actually learning in much deeper ways. Unstructured, or free play, where they’re just allowed to create their own goals and to collaborate with their friends actually does build their executive function skills and other skills.

Swartz: Is playful learning just another way of saying being a fun teacher?

Rolland: I do think that play goes beyond fun, although obviously play and fun are pretty interconnected, but it has more to do with the way we’re encouraging children to think.

Swartz: Can you say more about that?

Rolland: Rather than converging on one right answer, try to think in a generative fashion, so to think of all the possible answers, and to “play” or experiment with different ideas and different solutions. A lot about play is tinkering, which means taking a more relaxed approach to correctness and efficiency, and instead prioritize things like the ability to consider multiple solutions to the same problem. And not in a race, but in more of a back and forth with other kids or with adults.

Swartz: There’s not a right answer all the time.

Rolland: Even the right answer might have holes, or the right answer might only be right in certain circumstances.

Swartz: Can you explain the difference between mastery and performance?

Rolland: Mastery is where children feel okay about making mistakes and actually embrace mistakes as part of learning, and where multiple responses and types of responses are encouraged. It’s linked to better learning outcomes, and it’s also linked to more motivation and more children feeling socially engaged and feeling as if they can have better friends and all of that.

The alternative is performance culture, where children want to get things and they want to be first. You might think that would be better for academics, but in fact it’s linked to worse academic outcomes and lower engagement for children. So maybe this emphasis on mistake making and journeying and learning actually does enhance academic outcomes. It doesn’t draw away from it.

That’s what started my questioning around play and learning and thinking. The playful approach actually supports children socially as well as academically. are generally credited with highlighting the culture of mastery, which is linked to self-determination.

Swartz: How does noticing our interactions with children help us improve those interactions?

Rolland: Simply taking the time to notice, not necessarily even to write down, but to notice and reflect—that goes a long way toward being mindful about how to make conversations more meaningful and more interesting for everyone. It can be as simple as noting in your mind, “Oh, this to me was a great conversation. I felt really connected to my child or children.” And thinking about, well, why might that be?

Swartz: The book presents the ABCs of Rich Talk, starting with A for adaptive. Why is that important?

Rolland: It’s critical to adapt to not only time and place, but to one’s cultural community. The demands and expectations of talk are so varied. Unfortunately, a lot of research is predicated on this assumption that this is the right way, or these people are talking correctly and these people are talking incorrectly. And I think that’s a really dangerous and unproductive conversation to be having.

We’re finding now is that diversity in talk is hugely important, that children benefit from having people who talk to them and with them in different ways. They learn from things like code shifting, from home type of language to school type of language, or from Mandarin or another language to English. This kind of activity is actually beneficial for them, for their brain development and even for them socially.

Swartz: What’s your advice for a parent or caregiver who doesn’t feel comfortable with silly or playful talk?

Rolland: We all have our comfort zones in terms of what we want to do, our personal style, our level of silliness, but we can all be creative with language and with the way we talk with children. You don’t have to make up words or invent private jokes. It might be just that for you, you like to imagine, for example, what will happen to the world in 50 or 100 years. It’s probably better to stick to your own style, while trying to be more open-ended and creative with some of their questions and thoughts. Sometimes children will do the silliness for you.

Ford wanted to continue working after having her kids, but finding and affording child care were impossible. Though some providers would offer a 10% discount to her for enrolling more than one child, she was still facing the prospect of around $650 per month per child, a cost she simply could not afford.

For five years this has left her dependent on the limited income she can bring in working with a few clients while her kids are with their father, child support payments, and occasional help from her family with things like diapers and clothes for her kids. During the pandemic, the expanded social safety net made matters much easier, especially stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit. But as that help has expired, paying rent, affording groceries and caring for her kids are once again exceedingly difficult.

Throughout the world, single parenthood has been on the rise for the last thirty years. In the United States, around , the vast majority of which are headed by women.

In a new book, “The Two Parent Privilege,” economist Melissa Kearney argues that the children of single-parent households are suffering, and that the solution to the barriers they face lies at least in part with reigniting a national conversation about the value of marriage. Though the book has only just hit bookshelves, it has already provoked both glowing praise and critique from fellow researchers.

Professor of Sociology at University of Maryland Philip Cohen says that while those basic facts are not in dispute — that single parenthood has increased over the past decades and that there are unequal outcomes between kids from single parent households and those from two parent households — the question of what to do about single-parent poverty is much more controversial.

Cohen notes that marriage promotion, the idea of investing in public campaigns and programs encouraging adults, especially those who are or will become parents, is not a new idea. Since the 1990s the federal government has spent billions of dollars encouraging marriage through marketing campaigns and promoting more stable relationships between parents through counseling programs. Cohen has found that despite the high cost of these programs, there remains no evidence that they are effective in increasing marriage rates or in reducing poverty. Cohen and other researchers worry that in promoting marriage, they also increase stigma against single parents in poverty, including poor families of color.

Researcher Zach Parolin has found, for instance, that states with are more likely to spend money allocated to them from the federal government for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) on marriage promotion, rather than direct cash benefits to families.

Laurie Maldonado, an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Social Work at Columbia University, says that to her knowledge, no other country has invested public dollars in marriage promotion as a solution to single-parent poverty. Her research shows that the most effective policies for improving the outcomes of children from single-parent households are: access to paid parental leave for both parents, regardless of whether or not they’re together or married; a regular child allowance or cash benefit; and high-quality, publicly subsidized child care.

Maldonado experienced this reality first hand while finishing her PhD, when she went through a divorce and became a single mother, sharing custody of a one-year-old. She was awarded a four-year fellowship to finish her studies by the European country Luxembourg. “Now all of a sudden, I had access to six-month paid maternity leave and my kid could go to an early child care center that was high quality in Luxembourg. And I had access to a three-hundred Euro a month child allowance,” said Maldonado. Though she ultimately remained in New York City to stay close to her child’s father, the stark contrast between what it meant to be a single parent in the U.S. and what it meant in another country stayed with her as she continued her research.

Researcher Rense Nieuwenhuis, who wrote a book about single parents with Maldonado, says single-parent households face a triple bind: they not only have fewer resources, but also have limited employment prospects, and are often penalized by public policies. Nieuwenhuis says while it’s true there are inequalities between single-parent households and two-parent households in all the countries he studies, poverty among single parents is more acute in the United States. That’s entirely due to our policy context. Juho HĂ€rkönen, whose research appears in the book edited by Nieuwehuis and Maldonado, found, for instance, that highly educated single moms in the U.S. (30% in poverty) are worse off than low-educated single moms in the Netherlands (just 26% in poverty).

And furthermore, in countries with robust public policies for children and families, being poor means something very different. “If you compare the situation of a single mother at the poverty line, say in Sweden or in the US, there’s a vast difference in their situation. And that is another way child care comes into play. [Child care centers] provide a quality environment for basically all kids. They get good meals and they socialize. It’s not just beneficial to the employment of the mother, but to the long-term development of the child,” said Nieuwenhuis.

The need for child care support for single parents does not end when their children enter kindergarten. Emily Gravett has been a single mom since she and her husband’s father divorced a few years ago. She and her ex-husband split custody of her daughter, but even with having her eight-year old daughter in public schools and having her daughter just half the time, Gravett still needs access to child care. She has to leave work early to get her from school, and spends hours figuring out where her daughter can go during the summer, when school is out.

Through Child Care and Development Block Grants, about two million low-income families, including those led by single parents, receive subsidies to pay for the high cost of child care. But recent has found just 16 percent of eligible children are receiving child care subsidies.

Mai Miksic is the Managing Director of Early Care and Learning for United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey. In the U.S., Miksic notes, child care subsidies are only available to the poorest families — even those who qualify may lose their access if their income increases even slightly, forcing many parents to choose between taking a promotion or raise at work and losing their child care.

And she says for many single parents, the barriers to child care go much further than affordability. In Pennsylvania, Miksic says, there’s no longer a waitlist for child care subsidies, because those who have access to them can’t even find available child care slots to use them, due to the decline in the child care workforce since the pandemic. Child care is only expected to become harder to find as providers face the end of expanded federal investments through the American Rescue Plan.

Miksic says, existing child care providers may not even fully fit a single parent’s needs, even if they can find and afford them. Single parents often work nontraditional hours, like evenings and weekends, and may not be able to find child care during those hours, due in part to the high cost of insurance for providers operating outside normal work hours. The sector is simply not working for many families, and the need for universal child care in the United States is becoming clearer to the public, said Miksic, even though it has not yet found the support and prioritization it needs in Washington.

“I would love to be able to go back to work,” said Ford, the mother of triplets, when asked what it would mean to her for the U.S. to invest in child care in the way other wealthy countries do. “It’s not just that I’d be earning the money we need, but it’s my whole identity. I love my career. I’ve always wanted to be a trainer. And I want to be a trainer and a mom.”

Kearney, whose new book has reignited this long-standing discussion about the decline of marriage, agrees that publicly funded child care is essential. “The evidence is clear: expansions in safety-net programs for low-income families have led to better outcomes for affected children
 Evidence shows that for low-income children, access to public early-childhood education programs can yield large, lasting payoffs.”

The policies proven to work are good for all families, two-parent as well as single-parent. One compared the child care experiences of single parents and two-parent families. Kids from single parent households were more likely to be in institutionalized child care than their peers from two-parent households, but not by much (65% of kids from single-parent households vs. 58% of kids from two parent-households).

“Good child care that is available to everyone is expensive, in the short term,” said Nieuwenhuis. “But it is an investment. That’s what these other countries have seen. It is an investment in the child, in their parent, in the employee, in the growth of the economy — and it is good for the well-being of everyone.”

Still, the child welfare system annually separates over 200,000 children from their families nationwide. Scholar, activist and author Alan J. Dettlaff calls this “a disconnect in the public consciousness,” as there is far less outcry about the pattern of state-sponsored separation in the form of removing children from their homes and placing them in foster care.

The history of racism in the United States and its ongoing impacts on children and families experiencing state-sponsored displacement are on full display in this collection edited by Dettlaff. Featuring contributions by Victoria Copeland, Maya Pendleton, Jesse M. Hartley, Reiko Boyd and Kristen Weber, traces family separations in the United States back from the era of slavery and maintains that today’s child welfare system is the deliberate outcome, primarily to the detriment of Black children and families.

“The child welfare system is largely a system that responds to families living in poverty,” Dettlaff writes. “If the system were intended to assist families living in poverty, it would provide support in the form of direct financial assistance and other material resources to aid families in meeting their children’s needs.” The impacts of family separations are so untenable that the practice and system that sustains it must be abolished, not reformed.

The contributors cite research showing that forcibly separating children from their parents results in significant and lifelong trauma, regardless of how long the separation lasts and why it occurred. While the body of research specific to the experience of family separation by the child welfare system is small compared to that of parental incarceration and immigration enforcement, these studies consistently document children’s feelings of loss, fear, anger, helplessness, shock and confusion.

Boyd cites describing the physiological responses of children experiencing separation: “Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites—the little branches in brain cells that transmit messages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and—especially in young children— wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.”

All children in foster care are at significant risk of adverse outcomes as adults. Former foster youth are consistently more likely to experience unemployment or low earnings, less likely to graduate high school, more likely to rely on income assistance programs, more likely to have significant mental health and substance use disorders, and significantly more likely to be incarcerated. In addition to these setbacks, their physical safety is in jeopardy. Multiple studies across decades have shown that rates of physical and sexual abuse among children in foster care are two to four times greater than those in the general population. Children in foster care are also more than three times as likely to attempt suicide than children not in foster care.

Nearly 70% of children enter foster care due to neglect, broadly defined by states, which usually refers to a failure to provide for basic needs like food, clothing, education and shelter. Less than one-fifth of children taken from their parents have experienced any form of physical or sexual harm. Today, it is estimated that more than half of all Black children in the United States will be the subject of a child welfare investigation by the time they turn 18. Black youth in foster care are significantly more likely to “crossover” into the juvenile legal system.

The authors chronicle several policy decisions and examples of racialized laws that influence these patterns. “The idea of a white, middle-class parenting standard against which all other families are judged has been embedded in modern child welfare policy since the 1960s,” Dettlaff argues in his introduction. “Due to these racist policies and explicit and implicit biases among decision-makers, Black children are significantly more likely to be reported to child protection hotlines than white children and significantly more likely to be the subject of a child welfare investigation than white children.”

Debunking the myth of benevolence that the general public overwhelmingly affords the child welfare system, the book makes a thorough case that it is harmful and provides hope that a better future can and must exist. The abolitionist stance is optimistic by definition. “Abolitionists seek to create a society where all children and families have everything they need to experience safety in their homes and their communities, free of violence and harm and free of the societal conditions that create violence and harm,” write Weber and Pendleton.

Abolition, this book argues, requires constant critique of all forms of oppression, adapts and changes strategies over time and ultimately builds new and better relationships for one another. While it is about dismantling oppressive systems, it is equally about building new structures that sustain freedom.

Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System forcefully responds to critiques that abolitionist efforts often come with no detailed plan.ÌęIn addition to direct material support, the contributors envision broader structural changes needed to end poverty and advance the safety and well-being of children, like a housing guarantee, free public transportation and free, accessible and meaningful child care, health care and mental health care.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking of the book’s tangible suggestions involves redirecting the funds allocated to uphold out-of-home placements to families experiencing poverty instead. In 2018, that sum was $33 billion. According to Weber and Pendleton, “Decades of research demonstrate that providing direct material assistance to families significantly reduces both involvement with the family policing system and incidents of child maltreatment.”

The Latin origin of the word “radical” is radix or root, and in that regard, this book is a profoundly radical work, digging down to the historic, structural, racists roots of our child care system. As this volume deeply argues, that system is anything but just.

Child Care Justice comprises research-based chapters by guest authors with deep connections to the field of early care and education (ECE), edited by Maurice Sykes and Kyra Ostendorf. The editors and panel of 10 authors were asked to examine the historical, political, economic, educational and cultural barriers that have oppressed and continue to oppress ECE workers. The authors then met monthly to discuss and work together on the chapters, creating a “community of practice” in which they exchanged ideas, provided feedback and emotionally supported each other throughout the process.

The first chapter, “Wet Nurses, Nannies, and Mammies,” was eye-opening in that way that makes one wonder what else one doesn’t know. Sykes, who authored the section, provides chapter and verse of how the histories of slavery and child care in the U.S. have always been intertwined, with enslaved Black women forced to serve as wet nurses to their owners’ children. This relieved the white mothers of the necessity of breastfeeding their own children and set up the view of this fundamental act of caring for children as befitting only the “uncultured lower class.” Household work was stigmatized as the work of “negro” women, history’s “girls,” who were “drawn in disappearing ink.”

From the country’s beginnings, the care of children has related to the commodification, oppression and exploitation of women, specifically women of color. Though the economic model has shifted from “legal ownership to legal, unethical control over wages, status, and economic mobility,” Sykes writes, the caste system and mental model for how child care workers are perceived, treated and compensated is deeply imprinted on the American psyche. He observes, rightly, that it’s astounding how little progress we’ve made since the wet nurse and mammy days in the social status and compensation of those who work in child care. Though Congress approved the 13^th Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, slavery’s residuals linger as the “neo-slavery performed by the servant class 
 workers in child care, health care, home care 
” carried out primarily by women and disproportionately by women of color. This “servant class,” Sykes writes, is the fastest-growing industry in the U.S., with low-wage earners representing 44 percent of the workforce aged 18 to 64.

This current situation is, and it isn’t only born of slavery. It is and isn’t only rooted in white supremacy. ÌęClass as much as race has created the caste system of which Styles writes. The colonial mindset baked into this nation’s beginnings has always exploited the labor, resources and lifeblood of its poorest and most vulnerable populations — regardless of race — to enrich itself and create the ease that allows it to lord its lifestyle over others. Wherever three or more are gathered in the name of privilege, you’ll see them standing on the backs of others poorer, most likely darker and more female than themselves. Plus ça change, plus c’est la mĂȘme chose.Ìę

Chapter Two, “Liberatory Education: We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For,” is grounded in the work of Paolo Friere, the Brazilian educator and philosopher whose “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is foundational to the critical pedagogy movement, which views teaching and learning as the access to social justice and democracy. Through education and consciousness-building, those who had been oppressed become “think tanks and action incubators to transform their world,” authors Alexis Jemal and Sarah Ross Bussey write.

The chapter outlines the Critical Transformative Potential framework grounded in Friere’s work and discusses practical (though not necessarily easy) ways those in the ECE field can address their own inequitable treatment and that of their students, who frequently come from marginalized communities as well.

Steps Forward, Steps Back

Iheoma U. Iruka’s chapter, “From a Pedagogy of Poverty to a R.I.C.H.E.R. Framework,” connects the dots to show how classism is interwoven in U.S. history to ensure the continued power of the wealthy and well-connected. (R.I.C.H.E.R. refers to a framework that focuses on re-education, integration, critical consciousness, humility, erasing racism and re-imagination.) Uruka offers infuriating evidence of the many missed opportunities to right or at least mitigate the wrong of slavery, beginning with the derailment of the post-Civil War Freedmen’s Bureau, which could have been an agent for change that permanently and positively altered this nation’s future. White Southerners engineered the highly effective bureau’s closure by 1872, less than six years after its founding. In that time, the bureau built hundreds of schools for Black people, including those that would later become Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).

Since then, the nation’s history has been one of two steps forward, more steps back for Black Americans, such as the GI Bill that provided financial resources for veterans of World War II to purchase homes, attend college or pursue vocational training — to this day the greatest wealth transfer in U.S. history. The Black veterans who had fought as heroically and endured as much loss as their white peers were, however, were excluded from this opportunity for dramatic economic progress.

Caution: You can’t read this book without sometimes feeling sick. It’s full of hope and possibility, but also undeniable instances showing that the stifling of liberty and opportunity for people of color has never been accidental: It is and has been by design — a fact we must face if we are ever to dig out of this mess.

Multiple Approaches

Each chapter of “Child Care Justice” is penned by different authors, so each is different in tone and writing style, though all lean heavily to the academic. The collective approach has many strengths but also can result in a certain lack of objectivity. In this case, one wishes the authors had been more rigorous with each other in calling for judicious trimming of overlong and redundant passages. Several segments would have been stronger with a greater economy of words.

“Child Care Justice: Transforming the System of Care for Young Children” is intended as a catalyst for change, a call to action and marching papers for a national grassroots movement of those committed to addressing the racial, gender and economic injustices endemic to the ECE field. The transformation of child care is long overdue — as readers of Early Learning Nation know too well — as we’ve been at this for a very long time.

We’re now at an inflection point in our society as the pandemic laid out the fissures in the ECE system in high relief. If you have children or are an employer trying to retain workers, you’re aware of how broken our child care system is. We can’t help but see the inequities baked into the system if we’re even tangentially connected to it. Child Care Justice aims to make certain the reader pays attention and seeks to support them in “working relentlessly to become an antiracist.”

Denisha Jones’ excellent chapter, “Child Care Justice, Lessons from #BlackLivesMatter,” engages with the question of how a movement for child care justice can learn from BLM how to “turn a moment into an international movement.” Job One is to name the injustices that have necessitated the moment and explicitly pinpoint those problems as part of the vision for a better future. We’re at a ridiculous societal confluence right about now: when we most need to be taking a hard look at our history of racism and how systemic racism impacts the child care system upon which our economy rests, politicians and school boards are trying to prevent even talking about racial justice so white people won’t be offended.

In condemning the “woke mind virus,” a segment of American society has become allergic to acknowledging that their — our — past includes profound ugliness. But vision and a new direction begin with pointing out what isn’t working. If they don’t, if racial justice isn’t front and center in the movement for child care justice, all we’re doing is fussing with the salad forks on the Titanic.

Those glass balls are the subject of her book, subtitled Advice for Helping Kids through Diagnoses, Differences and Mental Health Challenges. The pediatrician, cancer survivor, mother, advocate and Instagram phenomenon offers realistic advice on parenting children with challenges while preserving one’s own well-being. Early Learning Nation magazine spoke to Dr. Fradin about her perspective and personal journey.

Mark Swartz: There are so many books on parenting. What’s different about Advanced Parenting?

Kelly Fradin: Most parenting books are about so-called typical children with typical problems, but there was nothing out there for when something goes wrong. How do you help parents through that experience? As a pediatrician, I was looking at the parenting shelves and didn’t see books addressing the challenging parts, when things occur that are surprising or unexpected. Parents often feel isolated during that time. I envision them together on the same pathway, working to help their children get the resources they need to live their best life.

Swartz: How should parents of children with health challenges approach guidance about developmental milestones?

Fradin: There’s a lot of content out there designed to educate parents about what to expect of typical development and what the milestones are. This content is valuable because it serves a public health purpose of helping parents to know when they need to get their children a developmental evaluation, or consider having services like early intervention or special education services for 3-5-year-olds.

So it’s a tool, but many parents feel anxious about their children’s development and also kind of feel responsible for it in a way that isn’t always accurate. Pediatricians can help parents to monitor their children and to promptly identify when an evaluation by a developmental expert may be useful. Parents shouldn’t feel like they’re alone or that they have to be an expert on development because we have, in our communities, built in experts who can help them.

Swartz: A lot of parents feel anxious about their children’s development and end up feeling like failures.

Fradin: There’s definitely a lot of anxiety there. Millennial parents seem to take more responsibility over things like this. Social media is part of it, and the apps that let you monitor your children’s development. One of the reasons people get so anxious is that we don’t parent in community settings as much as previously. Many parents don’t spend enough time with enough children of whatever age to know what’s expected and what’s unexpected. I’ve had parents say, “My one-year-old isn’t talking yet.” I have to reassure them that a lot of one-year-olds don’t talk.

Swartz: To what extent does your book draw on personal experience?

Fradin: I’ve come to realize that my own experience with childhood cancer [Fradin had a rare form of kidney cancer] made me a stronger person and a more empathetic caregiver myself. I have a lot of empathy for people trying to navigate our health care system. It’s quite cumbersome and inefficient. Even with something as simple as physical therapy, you can end up spending a lot of time trying to access those resources and obtain the support you need from insurance or from publicly available programs.

It upsets me to know that the system makes it so hard to access care, and I empathize with a lot of the frustration that parents and people feel when they’re navigating, because I’ve navigated it myself. A lot of the questions I get on Instagram represent holes in our system. These are the questions that people have that they can’t find answers to out there.

Swartz: Those systemic issues come up a lot in the book, and the barriers that families encounter, especially families who don’t have a lot of resources. What did you discover about that in the course of writing Advanced Parenting?

Fradin: Too many parents are thinking, “What’s wrong with me? I must be the problem.” Whereas actually, the system makes it hard. When we talk about the work that parents do as caregivers, we can see the value that they provide in advocating for their children. There’s so much unseen labor that people regard as optional or not valuable.

I interviewed about a hundred parents for the book because I wanted to make sure I gave space to the things that they wouldn’t necessarily bring up during a pediatric visit. And one theme that came up had to do with parents feeling good about helping other parents dealing with the same thing. That help happens through the book, I hope.

Swartz: What are some specific ways that parents help each other?

Fradin: In advocating for their own child, parents can also advocate for all the children who are going to come behind them. They widen the lane and make it a better place. For example, children with chronic conditions used to be asked not to go on school field trips. Maybe there wasn’t the same access to nursing care. But then parents started saying, “That’s not fair.” We have to change the system so that the field trips are accessible by all children, whether they have chronic conditions or not. It comes down to expanding the visibility of this demographic of children and families so that we can all be part of the solution.

Swartz: Inclusion matters.

Fradin: Definitely. That reminds me of a story in my book about a church that didn’t allow children with disabilities to go through confirmation until one child’s family insisted. After that girl was included, the entire church community felt more comfortable bringing their disabled family members. The church became a community hub.

Examples are everywhere. Maybe it’s a school that doesn’t have wide enough walkways, or buses that can accommodate wheelchairs. Everyone can identify systemic barriers that are excluding people from your community—and then take those barriers down.

Now, reading Jennifer Banks’ “Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth,” I have some insight into why. It wasn’t just about avoiding unpleasantness, mentally putting our hands over our ears to shut out the world (though, judging by the number of wine glasses seen in our Zooms, there was plenty of that as well); it was that we needed some creation in our lives. Amid all that death, we needed birth.

Birth is humanity’s greatest unexplored subject, Jennifer Banks writes in her excellent “Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth.” Banks, a senior executive editor at Yale University Press, begins to explore the subject by looking back at humanity’s earliest writings, where, in 2300 BCE, the first identified author sang hymns to the goddess of childbirth, linking birth to creativity, divine powers and her hope for change in the world. In Banks’s introduction — which, for my money, by itself is worth the price of admission — the author writes that birth, for all its recurring presence in the written record, has played second chair to death as humanity’s defining experience. Mortal creatures who wrestle with our own mortality, we are born and then pffft let birth recede into memory, “to that forgotten realm where uteruses, blood, sex, pain, pleasure and infancy constellate.”

In flipping the script, Banks writes that birth is immense, that birth has existential, moral and theological significance at least as great as death. “What does it mean that the greatest power humans have had—the power to create another human being — has been relegated in nearly all periods and all places to a secondary status, turned into a task to be performed by an underclass of people assigned that task on account of their gender?”

The book isn’t a paean to some sentimental or idealized image of motherhood — which, as Banks writes, can be “superficially championed but deeply undermined by mothers’ cultures” when it comes time to pay the bill for the maternity ward, offer maternity leave, feed the mothers’ children or come up with child care. The book is instead an investigation of birth itself — not just childbirth, but birth as creation and creative renewal; an embrace of life and the recognition that each of our births indelibly shape not just our own lives but human life itself. In a provocation that is both wide-ranging and deep, she asks for a set of principles different from the “death-drive that runs deep in Western societies,” imagining a culture less reconciled to its own extinction, “rooted in gestation, intimacy, vulnerability, growth, creativity, reciprocity, change and otherness.”

Banks explores the idea of birth through the works of seven prominent Western thinkers: Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison—who have wrestled with the idea of birth in their own eras and shaped our understanding of our own humanity. She offers their thinking as a powerful antidote to the nihilism with its fatalism, paralysis, cynicism and despair that are the “prevailing features of 21^st century life.”

Hannah Arendt knew a thing or two about nihilism and despair. Born in 1906 in Germany to a family of left-leaning, prosperous Jews, a circumstance that ultimately would see her stripped of citizenship and belonging, with her simple right to exist taken away. During her childhood years while she was running outdoors, reading books and “blithely singing off key,” she and her family were being turned into the “scum of the earth — an undesirable” by anti-Semitic propaganda.

Arendt had been interested in birth before the war, writing that birth and “the miracle of our creative beginnings” are what shape humans and give us our capacity to act creatively in the world. After the war, despite surviving years of unimaginable loss and betrayal, she continued to engage with the idea of birth, now as less of an existential concept than a political one: creative renewal as an act of resistance. She wrote of the connections between birth and freedom and found one English word to encompass that thinking: “natality,” the “miracle that saves the world,” one that decades later gave Banks the central theme for her challenging book.

Arendt’s writings after the war are her attempts to process that cataclysm — how the people she had grown up among and loved had turned against her and her people. Banks’s rich chapter on Arendt could easily be overlaid onto much of our contemporary world. Alienation from one another, dehumanization, racism, cynicism the “fateful repudiation of Earth the Mother” — all fertilize the totalitarian impulse that thrives when people come unmoored from each other. Humanity’s capacity for action, for new beginnings and an embrace of the world repudiate that impulse for tyranny.

Banks gives each of the seven thinkers their due, spending time with each one as she explores their views on birth and their demonstration that each person “in simply being born, creates an opportunity for history to begin again.” She writes of Nietzsche calling for the end of what he saw as the Protestant enchantment with the afterlife toward the earthly, embodied life that comes after birth and imagining a new spiritual tradition embracing birth, life, creativity, sexuality and procreation. Wollstonecraft, with her “soul most alive to tenderness,” recognizes the contradiction of birth’s importance to society and how little value is placed on it. Shelley, with her “Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus,” created the hideous monster “a motherless human life engineered by ambitious male inventors.”

Banks describes how often Sojourner Truth repeated the phrase “care for one another” in her narrations, and her view that a woman giving birth is a “cosmically significant” event, with women as actors capable of changing their worlds. American poet Adrienne Rich saw birth as a source of human power, sacredness and mystery, but critiqued the institutional motherhood that grew up alongside capitalism and its beneficiaries — a legacy some might say explains why we can’t move the needle on getting child care today. Birth was an integral part of Toni Morrison’s artistic vision, from her first novel to her last, and Banks writes that her era, which saw the confluence of the women’s movement, the fight for racial justice and the postwar years produced one of the “richest periods in the history of writing about birth.”

Life is under threat in the 21^st century, Banks writes, but birth is constantly with us as well. Like Arendt, who had born witness to the Holocaust of neighbor slaughtering neighbor, still never lost “a shocked wonder at the miracle of Being.”

“Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth” is not an easy read. It takes some willingness and effort, especially for those of us not familiar with the thinkers whose work Banks shares. But in that it provokes us to think of natality — of birth, creation, nurture, belonging and care — as the antidote to dehumanization, nihilism and despair, it’s an important and beautifully written read.

We meet mothers who work long hours for low pay in big box stores, restaurants and in various care settings. They describe feelings of stagnation, with few opportunities for promotion, pay increases or continued education. They make sacrifices and endure economic hardship in the short term to focus on their kids while they are young.

Cynthia, a mom in Denver, tells the authors, “I ended up in the hospital with a 3-day-old baby, worried about how I will pay rent.” According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in three professionals has access to some paid parental leave. Among low-wage workers, this rate drops to only 4%. Other moms share about the upheaval surrounding the birth of a child without maternity leave, income or accommodations to ease the transition home. One admits, “Child hiding often starts before you even have a job. It may start before the child is born.”

Serena, a college-educated mother and nanny in Connecticut, gave birth to her third child two months early, during the pandemic. Out of fear of losing her job, she returned to work for two families just days after being discharged from the hospital. She explained how it went when her employers found out she was pregnant, “They were really upset. They immediately tried to look for another nanny. I told them I’m gonna have my mom watch my baby, so you don’t have to worry about me being away for too long.” The authors wrote that casual replacement is the ultimate insecurity facing care workers employed privately by wealthy families.

The authentic, unfiltered portraits of working mothers in America, Getting Me Cheap add necessary nuance to national issues like gender equality, equal pay and universal child care. , 93% of low-wage workers have no access to paid family leave for seriously ill or injured family members. Roughly 7 in 10 women in the lowest-paid positions in the United States are the breadwinners in their families, so time away often leads to periods of unemployment, and that loss may be catastrophic.

Many of these women work in child care settings yet cannot find reasonable options for their little ones. Child care aid for low-income families includes income-eligibility vouchers, Head Start and pre-K programs. Most states serve 5%-25% of eligible families who qualify for child care subsidies. Only about 40% of eligible children get into Head Start and Early Head Start programs; thousands of families will remain on the waiting list until their children start kindergarten.

Getting Me Cheap argues that while there is public support for proposals on the local and national levels to expand public preschool options for three- and four-year-olds, there needs to be more conversation and support for developing opportunities and assistance for infant care. Jill, a mother in Boston, explains the low-cost neighborhood child care option, “It was super cheap and convenient.
 She wasn’t teaching them anything. She’s just watching them, feeding them, making sure they don’t die.” It is not as if these parents don’t desire quality learning environments for their children; it’s just too expensive. “Sometimes it wasn’t worth it ‘cause I couldn’t pay my other bills,” Jill says.

According to the CLASP, families below the poverty line who pay privately for child care typically spend an average of 30% of their income on it. The cost strains the budgets of even middle class parents. Of the limited preschool providers that accept vouchers, the Urban Institute uncovered lower teacher wages, higher teacher turnover and high student-to-teacher ratios.

Access to quality child care options compatible with nontraditional work hours is another barrier. Roughly 4 in 10 kids under 18 live in a household with a parent who works nontraditional hours, such as night shifts, evenings, weekends or rotating schedules. An found these households were more likely to be low-income, single-parent-headed and minority.

The authors’ troubling thesis is that the work of these parents often eases the stress of higher-income families. “Affluent families routinely purchase labor in the form of au pairs, domestic services, child care, counseling, tutoring, eldercare and extracurricular programs,” they write. Most low-income mothers described no access to the resources required to make such decisions: “They were chronically time- and income-starved.”

Years of sacrifice in service to other families and still falling behind with your own have lasting and sometimes intergenerational effects. Decades of research show that low-income people suffer disproportionately from heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity and depression.

The difference in average life expectancy between wealthy and low-income people in the United States is now 15 years for men and 10 for women. Black mothers are three to four times more likely to die from complications stemming from pregnancy or childbirth than white mothers.

Such wide health disparities result from deep economic inequality and systemic racism.

“Alongside these sobering numbers are all of the children who lose parents or live with parents who have been profoundly compromised,” authors contend. “Early gendered obligations funneled women into poverty work. Poverty pay kept them from focusing on schooling, friendships, budding talents, extracurriculars, and most of all, just focusing on themselves.”

Freeman and Dodson wield their research expertise while honoring the voices of low-income women—voices often missing from popular public commentary and feminist discourse. They urge readers to “stop and imagine exactly what it is like for millions of mothers and fathers whose labor we rely on all the time.”

Reading that title, many of us have a Wait. What? moment, unable to connect one idea with the other. Expulsion? For little kids? Isn’t that for incorrigible troublemakers who’ve exhausted all their chances with school officials and teachers?

One would think so. Tragically, as author Dr. Katherine M. Zinsser writes, for thousands of American children that point comes well before their fifth birthday, when they are labeled as “challenging,” “defiant” or “difficult,” and are ejected from early childhood education before they even reach kindergarten. Children 2, 3 and 4 years old — especially boys and Black children — are being kicked out of their schools at “staggering rates,” she writes — more than three times that of K–12 school children.

Drawing on research and interviews with teachers, program administrators, parents and policymakers, Zinsser’s “No Longer Welcome” provides a thoughtful, nuanced appreciation of the complex factors contributing to the expulsion epidemic. Foremost, she makes it clear the children are not to blame. Even though preschoolers can behave in intensely emotional, combative and even destructive ways, they are acting out in developmentally appropriate ways for small children without the language to express themselves or the capacity to self-regulate their emotions.

Nor does she blame the teachers who are often maxed out on their own stress levels from jobs that would be demanding even if everyone were well-paid, well-trained and had their own emotions well-regulated. Far too frequently, none of this is the case.

Excluding a child from school can have significant negative impacts on the child’s academic achievement. Children removed from school for just a few days can have trouble catching up. Studies show that children who are pushed out of the classroom for disciplinary reasons don’t do as well on test scores or other measures of academic learning; exclusionary discipline fuels widening achievement gaps during this critical period of development.

The excluded child loses their connection with classmates and misses the social-learning opportunities they can’t get at home. They feel alienated from school, which — no surprise — makes them more likely to drop out altogether. One of the worst effects of expulsion is that children begin to be labeled as “bad kids,” and to think of themselves as such. Imagine the future unfolding for a child of 3 who is thrown into the “bad boy” track and begins to think of himself as a “threat to themselves and others.”

Researchers have traced significant lifelong negative outcomes to school exclusion, notably delinquency and incarceration, Zinsser writes. A 2015 study showed that children who were repeatedly suspended were eight times more likely to be incarcerated than those who never were. Ultimately, society pays, as older kids who’ve been expelled or suspended are more likely to drop out, putting them at risk of financial insecurity and the need to depend on public assistance. Studies also have shown an association between expulsion and later problems with substance abuse. All of which may seem far removed from that little 3-year-old, but Zinsser’s point is that early experiences of exclusion can launch a cascade of negative interactions with schools.

For every child who is expelled, a family pays the price. Parents suffer emotionally when their children are expelled, and they can begin to see themselves as failures as parents. They suffer financially as well, reporting employment issues such as having to leave work suddenly to retrieve their child, lost hours and wages, and even having to quit their jobs when they can’t find alternative child care. Families who are receiving child care subsidies lose eligibility when they lose their jobs, which makes finding alternative child care sometimes impossible — or impossible to afford. Nearly a quarter of the expelled children in Zinsser’s research team’s surveys didn’t find alternative child care and were kept at home instead.

Bias at Work

Biases, both explicit and implicit, play a powerful role in expulsions, Zinsser writes. A teacher states that girls are “easier” or “more fun” than boys, or that boys are innately more “hyper” and “aggressive,” and it isn’t hard to guess which kid is going to meet harsher discipline as they gallop to the art table or run in the cafeteria.

Implicit biases are the insidious factor in many expulsions. Though all humans have unconscious biases, in the U.S., our collective biases fall along racial, cultural and gender lines. Implicit biases are at play all the time in the American education system but, Zinsser writes, three in particular contribute to disparities in early childhood expulsion: “being a boy, being Black and being big.” The more these “three Bs” describe a child, the greater the likelihood adults will be biased against that child. Black boys are perceived as being “dangerous or aggressive” (At 4 years old? Unfortunately, yes), which eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as teachers anticipate misbehavior among kids who’ve been stereotyped as disruptive or dangerous.

“In light of all this evidence,” Zinsser writes, “it is clear that American preschools are choked with the same ‘smog of racism’ that Dr. Beverly Tatum in high schools nearly 20 years ago.”

The Kids Aren’t to Blame; the Issues Are Real

And yet, what’s a teacher to do? What’s a school to do? Some of the case studies Zinsser presents offer truly frightening portraits of out-of-control children who, though preschoolers, have inflicted serious damage on school personnel or classmates. A 3-year-old’s tantrum turns into something else when they’re strong enough to throw a chair, shove another child to the ground, or kick a teacher hard enough to require stitches.

Zinsser approaches the topic of expulsion through an ecological lens, pointing out that the process occurs on multiple levels at once, with children, teachers, parents and administrators all experiencing the process differently.

We expect a lot of providers, she writes. They work in a system that routinely discounts their value, and they report more stress and worse physical health than their non-teaching peers. Preschool teachers are among the most economically insecure workers in the U.S., with a median annual wage that generally hovers just above the federal poverty line. The demands on these educators are colossal. Many even say they can’t easily take breaks or step out of the classroom for a minute — even if they need to step away from a disruptive student and take a few deep breaths to regulate their own emotions.

Early childhood teachers may enter the workforce because they are empathetic to the needs of children who face adversity but may not have the tools, experience or support to be effective in the face of a 4-year-old in bloody-murder-tantrum mode.

“To me,” Zinsser writes, “the exclusion of a child is indicative of a teacher at the end of their rope — a teacher so emotionally or physically exhausted that they must triage how to expend their limited remaining energy.”

Promising Paths, but Few and Far Between

Throughout her excellent book, Zinsser describes programs and approaches that can intervene and interrupt problematic behavior. Workplace climate and culture are decisive, with “high effort” programs engaging in the complex process of working with a family to address a child’s disruptive behavior. But for teachers and administrators trying to cope with chaos in the classroom with inadequate staffing and anorexic budgets, it may seem that just getting rid of “that kid” is the only solution.

It doesn’t have to be this way, nor should it. “No Longer Welcome” thoughtfully details how parents, teachers, preschool administrators, researchers and policymakers all have a role to play in ensuring that no child is excluded, and all can remain in high-quality early care and education settings. Zinsser outlines roles that every member of the field, from classroom aide to legislator, must play in sustaining this change.

More than 20 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds display “challenging” behaviors. If 20 percent of children in a school had peanut allergies, Zinsser writes, and a school persisted in serving peanut butter in the cafeteria, parents, pediatricians and politicians would be outraged and demand structural reform. Peanut allergies affect only 1.4 percent of U.S. children, yet entire infrastructures have shifted to rightfully accommodate their needs. Nobody blames the children for being allergic, but we do blame children who need help managing their emotions.

The time has come, Zinsser writes, to flip the script and consider that the deficiency lies with the adults in the picture. The kids deserve support and huge scoops of compassion.

1. We don’t buy anything that’s advertised on Saturday morning TV, a rule I’d override for birthdays and Christmas. Otherwise, nope.
2. If you pester or nag me in the store, we go to the car. If you persist, we go home. Game over. It took twice for each child to get the message.
3. We don’t buy cereals with sugar as one of the first two ingredients. This sentenced my children to a life of Cheerios, Shredded Wheat and Wheat Chex — as they would tell anyone who’d listen.

And that was that.

But that was Before. Before an entire multi-billion-dollar industry developed for the explicit purpose of getting kids to pester and nag their parents to buy absolutely everything. Before an entire children’s media ecosystem grew up as a venue for advertising and marketing to kids more than for educating or entertaining them. Before digital technologies made it possible to swamp children in advertising more sophisticated, invasive, manipulative and devious than any of us could possibly have imagined. Before every parent trying to do the right thing became David trying to say no to a Goliath so pervasive and entrenched in every moment of their child’s life that it is rendered practically invisible.

In her excellent book, “Who’s Raising the Kids: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children,” Dr. Susan Linn brings this insidious behemoth to the foreground and underscores it with bright red lines. She maps the current landscape of children’s marketing and advertising through deep research and the eyes of an insider who’s been involved for decades in children’s media. A ventriloquist and entertainer, Linn worked with Fred Rogers, first as a guest with her Audrey Duck puppet on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” and later with his production company creating video programs. Linn, a psychologist and expert on creative play and the impact of commercial marketing on children, was founding director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (now called Fairplay). She is a research associate at Boston Children’s Hospital and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is also a mother and grandmother and writes that her activism is as deeply rooted in that personal perspective as in her professional experience.

Since Linn began working in the late 1990s to stop corporations from targeting children, the situation has gone from bad to unbelievable — a progression launched in the 1980s with the deregulation of children’s television. It became legal then for companies to create programming whose sole purpose was selling children toys—and they took to it with gusto. Consider, for instance, the 1994 marketing conference in London called “Pester Power: How to Reach Kids,” or the 1998 marketing research study on “The Nag Factor,” written not to help parents cope with children’s nagging or reduce it responsibly, but to provide corporations more tools to support kids in becoming successful naggers.

Advertising Immersion

With the advent of smartphones and tablets, most children are in front of a screen whenever and wherever they go, despite growing evidence that excessive screen time is harmful to children’s — especially young children’s — health and development. They are inundated by ads in every game they play, every store they enter, every video they view. In-app purchases urge kids to buy cool new gear for their avatars and to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, fomenting envy and shame for kids who can’t keep up, and turning every game session into a battle of wills with parents who may not be able to afford the constant financial demands or who simply resent the incessant pressure to pay up.

As Linn describes in her chapter, “Branded Learning,” school is no respite from this constant barrage. In their classrooms, “free” tablets are an opportunity for companies to instill lifetime brand loyalty, and clever teaching materials promote Disney properties or fossil fuel companies’ hype along with their lessons on nature. The list is endless; this chapter will blow your mind with the many and varied ways corporations insert themselves into the hearts and minds of our kids in educational settings.

Advertising sells values and attitudes right along with the products it hawks to children, and those values are often antithetical to healthy family relationships or even the old-fashioned idea of good citizenship, Linn writes. Children are constantly sold on the belief that competition is king and the things will make us happy, when research suggests that the opposite is true: More materialistic children are unhappier than their less acquisitive peers.

In the chapter, “Bias for Sale,” Linn shows how prejudice, bias, stereotyping, and social stigma are baked into many games, virtual worlds, social networks and even in the search engines we rely on throughout the day. A study in the journal ACM Queue from the Association of Computing Machinery showed that ads implying that someone had been arrested were more likely to appear in searches for “Black-sounding names,” such as “Latanya Sweeney.” While a search for “Kristin Lindquist” turned up neutral ads.

People believe Google searches turn up fair and unbiased information — statistically, younger users believe this more — when the fact is that racism is embedded in the algorithms and inflicts harm on children as well as adults. Imagine the effect on a child who googles her name and finds it associated with criminality. A watchdog group reported in 2020 that the tool Google uses to help companies decide what search terms they should link their ads to was linking the phrases “Black girls,” “Asian girls,” and “Latina girls” to pornographic search terms. It isn’t a stretch to imagine how hatefully these biases play out on children.

No Legal Obligation

In the current U.S. regulatory landscape, the tech companies that create and own these algorithms have no legal obligation to share how or why their search results are selected. These algorithms are written by humans whose biases influence their creations, Linn writes. These employees don’t work for institutions whose mission is to serve the public interest, but for tech companies whose primary goal is to maximize profits. “Just as Facebook isn’t a public square, Google isn’t a public library,” she writes.

Linn is not anti-technology — she just wants it to assume its proper place in our lives and the lives of our children. Her goal isn’t to make parents feel guilty about failing to cope perfectly with the tsunami of carefully targeted temptations every child encounters every day, but instead to help anyone who cares about children understand the “toxic, digitized, commercialized culture” so many children wake up to in every day.

This culture’s impact extends beyond individual well-being to the well-being of our larger society. The solution doesn’t rest in individual parents, she writes, but in working together to push back against the monetization of American childhood. Her “Resistance Parenting” chapter offers excellent suggestions for how to introduce tech to young children and how to manage their use of technology into their teen years. Most importantly, she emphasizes that this isn’t a battle that can be fought on an individual level but something we must embrace as a society. Powerful forces are invested in manipulating children for profit, but they are not all powerful. Parent groups, communities and fed-up friends have formed advocacy groups, undertaken educational campaigns and even, in the case of Minnesota’s Digital Well-Being Bill, gotten a state legislature to provide $1 million to promote resources, education and a leadership program to support young people’s balanced use of devices.

The situation isn’t hopeless, and no one is helpless, though it will take concerted effort to create the social change needed to put technology in its proper place.

“Who’s Raising the Kids?” is the perfect place to start — a research-based primer in what’s at stake, who the players are and how we got to this place. It’s truly a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of America’s kids.

Frederica Perera is an ideal guide of the crisis we’ve made. Founder of the Center for Children’s Environmental Health at Columbia University, she is a pioneer in molecular epidemiology and research on environmental causes of cancer and developmental disorders. Her new book Children’s Health and The Peril of Climate Change describes the full scope of the intergenerational injustice and harm of climate change and air pollution to young and developing bodies.

With authority and urgency, Perera articulates the sheer magnitude of the environmental impacts of fossil fuel and the health burden inflicted on children around the world. She makes technical terms and processes digestible, and balances expert takes with significant scientific research.

According to UNICEF, almost every child is exposed to at least one climate and environmental hazard, shock or stress. Half the world’s children live in countries at extremely high risk of water scarcity, flooding, cyclones, pollution, heatwaves and other effects of climate change.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 40% of the burden of environmentally related disease and more than 88% of the current load of climate change is borne by children under five years of age. Today, approximately 2 billion children in the world breathe toxic air at levels exceeding the guidelines set by WHO. “The forces hurling us toward climate disaster,” she writes, “are our built-in economic dependence on fossil fuel and our passivity due to ignorance, denial, or despair.”

As Perera explains, the speed of organ development in fetuses, infants and children makes them especially susceptible to airborne toxins. “The elaborately choreographed processes involved in early development,” she writes, “are exquisitely vulnerable to disruption by toxic exposures of many kinds, including adverse environmental conditions and physical toxicants, nutritional deprivation, and physical and psychological trauma and stress.”

Research during the past two decades has produced convincing evidence that early-life exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in air pollution and petrochemical-based compounds like , BPA and PBDEs, which are in everyday consumer products, adversely affects children’s cognitive and behavioral development starting before birth. Even low exposure to these chemicals can disrupt normal hormonal function. Prenatal exposure to these chemicals has been variously associated with ADHD, autistic traits, reduction in children’s IQ, neurodevelopmental and reproductive abnormalities. PBDEs were majorly phased out in 2013, though exposure persists. Dubbed “forever chemicals,” they resist degradation and bioaccumulate in the fat tissue of living organisms.

Perera quotes Phillippe Grandjean, physician and epidemiologist at Harvard University: “The placenta and the blood-brain barrier were probably quite sufficient during millions of years of evolution to safeguard the fetus, but new harmful chemicals have emerged that can manage to pass through the barriers.”

Perera’s book adds nuance to the socioeconomic disadvantages that magnify the harm from pollution, like psychological stress from material hardship due to poverty, violence and racism.

As Bruce McEwan, the late professor of neuroscience at Rockefeller University, explains:Ìę “Not all stress is bad for you. Good stress comes from rising to a challenge, causing you to feel exhilarated when the body and brain are working properly to help you do so.” Toxic stress comes from insufficient resources to cope with unpredictable, threatening situations or daily hassles. The result is inflammation and suppression of immune function. Poverty is a source of harmful stress: In the United States, nearly 1 in 6 children live in a family with an annual income below the federal poverty line. More than 70% of these children are of color.

Offspring of more highly stressed women show changes in specific brain regions that play an important role in making decisions, regulating social behavior, and processing sensory input and memories. A longitudinal study showed that maternal psychosocial distress and high PAH exposure experienced concurrently by the mother during pregnancy increase the risk for anxiety, depression and other neurobehavioral problems in the children.

Climate-related drought and crop failure affect the young by depriving them of essential nutrients and calories. From conception to three years of age, the brain requires more nutrients than at other stages of development. Physical and psychological trauma due to climate-intensified severe weather events set the stage for long-term mental health problems. Further vulnerability comes from the long remaining lifespans of children. The biological insults that occurred early on may manifest as mental illness, heart disease, lung disease or neurodegenerative conditions in older age such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease.

In a book sure to move parents, scientists, scholars, environmental enthusiasts and students alike, Perera rejects both sugarcoating and climate fatalism as she illustrates the impact on children’s brain development, and physical and mental health. She dedicates chapters to outlining the steps necessary to preserve life on the planet. She shares success stories of diverse activists, initiatives and organizations blazing the path of transformation, arguing, “We know that we have the knowledge and tools at hand to reduce emissions and strengthen children’s resilience, but equally essential are the societal and political changes that enable and accelerate those solutions in an equitable way.” Every person and institution has a part to play, from the arts, to media campaigns that reshape cultural narratives, to caregivers of the next generation.

Grose, a New York Times opinion columnist and former editor of their Parenting section, has written a part-memoir, part-history, part-reportage, part-manifesto that arrives at a moment when parents around the nation are not only contending with a vicious , but a . Her main thesis is as simple as it is powerful: when it comes to the ideals of modern motherhood, “the ideals as they are created now serve almost no one. They may serve industry, but they do not serve us or our families.”

Grose adds that these impossible ideals are also dangerously individualistic: “the contemporary set of expectations 
 don’t engage with the broader community in any way, shape or form. Rarely do babysitters, teachers, grandparents, aunties, uncles or friends appear in heralded images of motherhood that are beamed into our phones. If the pandemic taught us anything, it should have taught us that we need to invest in our local, national and international ties to raise the next generation.”

All of this is extraordinarily relevant for current discussions around the first five years of life. After tracing the evolution of American thought about mothers (from the are-you-kidding-me Colonial idea that a craving for a certain food would cause the baby to emerge with a head of that food, to the are-you-kidding-me idea that mothers’ emotional state caused miscarriages, leading one woman to be sterilized in 1953 simply because she had clinically extreme morning sickness), Grose turns to the pivotal last half-century.

Here, echoing Maxine Eichner’s , Grose shows how Nixon’s pointed veto of the 1971 Comprehensive Child Development Act combined with increased female labor participation led to the rise of the ‘Supermom’ model: “As professional mothers flooded the workplace in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, despite a basic safety net, the ‘supermom’—a star at work and at home—became the unrealistic ideal splashed on the cover of magazines.” Since then, Grose argues, the expectation pile has only grown somehow higher, nowadays including the fact mothers are supposed to be engaging in “self-care” — the responsibility, again, falling on their shoulders.

Grose’s work is continually nodding—implicitly or explicitly—to the disastrous way American motherhood is circumscribed and isolated. The choices mothers are offered around work and care are often no choices at all. Her chapter on work reminded me about the so-called “Mommy Wars” between working and stay-at-home mothers in which sociologist Melissa Milkie and her colleagues concluded, “an emphasis on choice deemphasizes the social aspect of the problem, instead individuating the problem and its solution to mothers themselves, thus leaving the weighty burden of responsibility for mothers to bear alone — and a symbolic wedge between them on other mothers.”

Of all the themes in the book, that one is arguably most telling for early care and education. There is a surprising around child care from parents, despite it being a pain point that goes broad and deep. Reading Grose’s book helped me better understand one aspect of why, perhaps one that would have been more evident were I a mother: the weight of our cultural ideals make every step toward demanding public support excruciating and transgressive. As Grose summarizes one interviewee’s perspective, “Mothers are trained to feel like they should be grateful for whatever they get.”

That’s why the final chapter of the book is a refreshing burst of hope. Grose points out the progress that has been made, and highlights promising parents, politicos and policies — the last of which, including affordable child care and robust paid family leave, are frustratingly distant but not unfathomably out of reach. One walks away from Grose’s book feeling as if we have come through hell and high water when it comes to American motherhood, but that with a concerted effort we may just find our way to solid ground. As Grose puts it, “We need allies in our lives, in our workplaces and in our government who are going to use their power to make the United States a friendlier place for our families.” This book will make you a better early care and education advocate and a better ally, and anyone will be better off for reading it including, if not especially, men.

Every parent on some level wants what’s best for their children. Only a privileged few have the means to pursue that goal — frequently at the expense of less-privileged children, though they may never be aware of the price that’s been extracted. That’s the hard news in this kind-hearted book. The thing left unsaid when privileged parents say they want what’s best for their child, Jaffe writes, is “and not for other children.”

Jaffe doesn’t blame parents of privilege — a category to which she belongs — for the terrible circumstances of other children’s lives, but she does make clear that we all have a responsibility and a role in creating and perpetuating that disparity. Her book is directed primarily at parents of privilege, which she defines as “any family who writes down six or more figures on the ‘total household income’ line of their tax return,” and it is both an unflinching invitation for them to do better and a roadmap for how they can use their privilege to see to it that all children have what’s healthy and what’s best.

In interviews with child care and policy experts, parents, labor activists, attorneys, nannies, educators and others, Jaffe methodically lays out the reality of inequity that saturates every molecule of the U.S. child care and education system, starting before a child even comes into this world. (In Seattle, she writes, families trying to get on waiting lists for day care may see an option for “trying to conceive.”) The conversation she has with her readers isn’t accusatory or scolding, but there’s no softening of the fact that it’s a hard conversation to have — and one we all must engage in if we have any hope of our children living in a just and equitable world.

Jaffe starts her story with the birth of her daughter in September 2017 when she joined a listserv for parents in her Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. The daily meetups for these women and the occasional man were friendly, calm affairs dotted with small talk about babies’ sleep schedules and other minutiae of day-to-day life with an infant.

The listserv was an entirely different kettle of fish, with 30-part threads dissecting the many and varied ways the parents could get it wrong. The abiding theme was “worried” — If you skip the iron-fortified cereal, do you worry about your baby getting enough iron? Every conversation presented a new variation on the theme, things Jaffe had never even considered worrying about. Iron? Do I need to worry about that now? But worry was in strong competition with the listserv’s other theme: getting the best for their child — the best waffles, the best teething necklaces, pediatrician or strollers, the best pre-K. The best life.

The conversation gave her a sense of whiplash, Jaffe writes. She was working as an attorney for a nonprofit law firm that brought lawsuits on behalf of children in foster care; one of her responsibilities was to read fatality reports of children who died in foster care after their state’s government already knew they were in danger. Finishing her workday immersed in questions of abuse and neglect, opening her computer to the litany of worries from the privileged parents of Park Slope felt like a “fable about the children in the city I lived in.”

Acknowledging how hard it is for just about anyone to be a parent in the U.S. — the only high-income country in the world without paid leave for new parents, where child care costs more than the average mortgage payment, schools are chronically underfunded and “our college admission process is reminiscent of “The Hunger Games” — Jaffe is sympathetic to the challenges. But the point of her book is not to comfort the comfortable; It is to paint a clear picture of the country’s two-tiered system between the top 10 to 20 percent of income earners and everybody else. Outcomes for children not born into one of those top brackets are vastly different from the privileged few: Racism is at the root of that inequity. The practical outcome of parents with privilege relentlessly pursuing their own child’s interests — hoarding resources within the public school system, for instance, or maneuvering to keep their children (and their resources) out of majority low-income, majority Black and Latino schools — leaves other children behind.

Beginning with early childhood, Jaffe looks at the child care system’s deep segregation by race and class. Because the U.S. has no child care infrastructure, she writes, most parents have little choice when finding their young child’s care, but parents of privilege have the option of touring various programs and finding the best among choices. Low-income families are relegated to publicly funded programs in a fractured system. Families in the middle struggle to make the “least bad” choice among limited options. No one asks about the wages and benefits of the child care workers and pre-K teachers in any of those choices, and few of us ask about the structural forces that have created this impossible situation.

It would matter if we did, Jaffe writes, and then offers a list of questions to prompt that conversation, a format she follows in each chapter with takeaways detailing individual choices, collective action and further reading for readers wanting to act or to find out more about that chapter’s issues. You can’t read “Wanting What’s Best” without gaining a clearer understanding of the inequity baked into everything concerning children’s lives in the U.S. and without seeing at least some way to take action precisely where you are.

Throughout “Wanting What’s Best” Jaffe reiterates the fact that even though individual choices matter, the solution to fixing our broken system doesn’t lie with any individual. The U.S. has no cultural understanding of child-rearing as a communal activity and doesn’t acknowledge the commonsense reality that everyone in our society benefits when every child has enough to eat, a safe place to sleep, loving adults to care for them and good schools to educate them — the best, in other words.

“But collective action,” she writes, “particularly when it’s undertaken by people with privilege, creates change. Decisions about child care, schools, and how we use our time and money may not feel like political decisions, but they are.”

What would it look like, she asks, if we fought for other people’s children as if our own children’s future depended on it?

“Not being able to go to school was really hard on her,” Kamenetz says of her three-year-old daughter, who would sound the alarm by lying down on the floor to kick and scream. “She was kind of the weathervane for the whole family’s distress, because she really picked up everyone’s emotions and expressed them kind of in the most intense way possible.”

This distress, of course, was not limited to Kamenetz and her family. As a reporter covering education for NPR, she uncovered the many ways parents, teachers, children and caregivers were struggling. The crisis, she realized, was deep but not unprecedented. Her home city of New Orleans had undergone comparable trauma in the wake of Katrina. “That was the biggest example I could think of in recent time where all the schools had shut down in an American city in the 21st century,” she says, adding that the impact had lingered for a decade. “It was more than a storm. It was a social catastrophe across the board.”

Another noteworthy precedent: refugee camps around the world, where children’s schooling is suspended while other life-and-death needs are addressed. In April 2020, when Kamenetz published a story on Morning Edition, host Steve Inskeep was taken aback at the comparison, but she calmly predicted the high school students dropping out, the workforce shocks, the toxic stress, the multiple-year recovery journey. When kids can’t go to school, we can try to connect them through technology, but these efforts invariably fall short.

Many of her dire predictions came true. American women (resulting in a spike in liver disease), (they called it the Quarantine 19, but the consequences go beyond not being able to fit into your jeans) and . Anxiety was widespread, and women shouldered more than their fair share.

They were also in disproportionately high numbers. “The media treated it as inevitable,” she recalls. “They would say, ‘Women were forced from the workforce,’ and I was like, ‘Well, who forced them?’ Why did people pretend like this was some kind of inevitability and not just a re-instantiation of the patriarchy?”

It’s these overlapping emergencies, but also the inspiring and instructive solutions, that distinguish Kamenetz’s The Stolen Year.

She describes the interviews and research that went into the book as “an opportunity to have even more empathy for parents who cared about their kids just as much as I did, but maybe didn’t have all of the resources at their disposal that I did to make sure that their kids were okay.” It made her reflect on the factors that go into her family’s decisions about where to live and where her kids go to school. The Stolen Year chronicles the way the pandemic surfaced class and gender inequities, as well as the regional and ideological divides that beset our nation.

Opinions about school and child care closures, in particular, ran hot. “It was the first time I had a bleep on the radio,” Kamenetz notes, with regard to a in January 2022. Torn between Texas’ determination to keep schools open, the CDC’s recommendations and a boss who expected her at work, the parent was expressing rage only slightly more articulately than Kamenetz’s toddler. A San Francisco kindergarten teacher reported that the kids were doing terrible even though she was working so, so hard.

As the pandemic recedes, and social divides persist into the midterm elections and beyond, it’s understandable that we might want to let go of 2020 and 2021, but now is the time to take a hard look at what happened.

Especially because it isn’t over. Many effects of the pandemic on children continue to unfurl. Some are experiencing social deficits. For some who didn’t get the early interventions they needed, the consequences haven’t even shown up yet. “This is a decade-long project of recovery,” she says.

In The Stolen Year’s introduction, Kamenetz characterizes the book as “a little like restorative justice or therapy.” (The former term, an alternative to retributive justice, and involves elevating the role and voice of victims and community members. Its applications go beyond criminal justice.) As she said, “We need to tell the story of what happened. We can’t look away. If you think you know what you think about this already, you should maybe look at it again.”

She regards the book as a chance for us all to absorb the stories of what happened and where our choices led. “Whether you think that they were absolutely justified or completely wrongheaded, they had the consequences,” she asserts.

Having left NPR earlier this year, Kamenetz is shifting from one crisis to another, with the climate featuring in a number of current and planned projects, including . The initiative of the Aspen institute builds upon the , mobilizing the education sector to take on climate change and enact solutions.

“There’s a huge amount of climate despair and eco anxiety among young people,” she says, “And talking about it is not going to be enough. You have to act, and you have to do things differently and listen to the kids that are upset, because they have good points.”

COVID was a lesson. It’s up to us to study it now and to do our homework, which Kamenetz describes as “thinking about what we learned, and what we now know that we’re able to do.”

The author of The Test and The Art of Screen TimeÌęinterviewed diverse experts, children and families to weave together snapshots of systematic and household dynamics across the nation and how they survived the pressures of an unrelenting public health crisis. Kamenetz covers the influence of COVID on many aspects of life, including school, hunger, mental health, child care and parenting trends.

The book is organized by semesters, summoning the stress regarding the safety and efficacy of school closures, reopenings and hybrid models. Shifts in kindergarten classrooms affected the psychosocial well-being of our youngest students.

Kindergarten is not mandatory in most states. Kamenetz explains compulsory schooling and the concept of kindergarten, other educational systems and their many adaptations. Their loss can set students and society back for years to come. “Experts expect to see the pandemic cast a shadow on mental health across the population for a decade or two to come,” she writes,Ìę “including on children who were in utero while their mothers experienced the stress of lockdown.”

When the pandemic hit, babies missed routine doctor visits, toddlers went without vital learning experiences and missed milestones went unflagged. For speech and motor delays, outcomes tend to be better the sooner they are identified and treated. During 2020, referrals dropped and so did the rate of services provided.

Clinics treating children under five saw increased sleeping problems, nightmares, physical aggression and regression behaviors like bed-wetting. Kamenetz cites a study showing that depressed children as young as four who talk about dying have a clearer understanding than their peers of the violence and permanence of death.

Oliver is one such kid whom Kamenetz follows throughout the book. He stopped eating during his struggle with depression and suicidal ideation. “My middle son needs the schedule to keep him regulated. He also missed his friends. He missed normality. And he was scared,” his mother Beth explains, “My baby. Saying he would just rather die, over and over and over again.”

Kamenetz notes that while children younger than puberty are historically very unlikely to commit suicide, these comments and behaviors are to be taken just as seriously in young children as in adolescents and adults.

Missing school and routine socialization compounded many problems that young children and their families already faced, most notably, hunger and poverty. “Even when hunger lasts a short time, the harms can linger for decades,” Kamenetz explains, “Pregnant women who aren’t well nourished have babies who weigh less and struggle more to survive.” The Dutch “hunger winter,” a wartime season of extreme deprivation caused by the Nazis in Holland in the early 1940s, illustrates that a period of hunger can have an epigenetic impact, meaning it affects the genetic expression of babies in utero. Most strikingly, that generation grew up to have a higher risk of schizophrenia.

Hunger in young children is associated with chronic illness, behavior problems and lower school performance. Chronic malnutrition, a lack of essential nutrients, is believed to interfere with brain development. Food insecurity, the preoccupation with having enough, is associated with high levels of parental stress and, therefore, with children’s mental health and behavior problems.

Enter seven-year-old Habersham, his seven siblings and their mother Heather in St. Louis. When Heather had to go to work, she’d sometimes leave the younger children unsupervised for a few hours, locking the door behind her. Habersham often found his way out. Their home didn’t have enough space or working computers to plug in for school, so instead, he’d don his uniform red polo shirt and khakis and head to a local Family Dollar store, where a cousin worked. Habersham held doors and carried bags for tips. He used the money to buy a hot meal from the corner store.

When Habersham and friends broke into a seemingly vacant building nearby, he was shot in the leg. Heather explains that even with the child welfare investigation from St. Louis’s Department of Social Services, she didn’t get the services she needed to support her family, “When [the shooting] happened, everyone was on my case, like, ‘oh, these kids need help.’ But no one was helping me.” Rebecca Winthrop, senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues, “You can’t hope for children to be resilient in a crisis unless you deeply support their caregivers.”

Kamenetz cites data from Phil Fisher’s of families with children under five at the beginning of the pandemic. Black and Latinx households were much more likely to report material hardships, including problems paying for utilities, housing and food.

Investments in children bring compounding returns, and harm to children has long-term consequences. The investments are overdue. “To put things right we need to put children at the center of our decision making in a way we never have before in this country,” Kamenetz writes.

At its most wrenching, The Stolen Year highlights the words and worlds of children and adolescents around the country who are often overlooked. Historical context demonstrates how families ended up in these predicaments.

Eventually, lockdowns are lifted. Schools and childcare facilities reopen. We learn that Oliver starts teletherapy and begins eating again. Habersham recovers from his injury. Most of the children and families in these instances receive the services they need. Still, the impact of COVID was unequal and the most vulnerable populations experienced the most hardship.

Tender and devastating, concise and sentimental, The Stolen Year draws upon Kamenetz’s identity as a mom and a journalist to reckon with what happened, what went wrong and how to move on.

In “,” Paul effectively makes the case that most of the metaphors we have for cognition are not useful because they allude to Western society’s assumption that thinking only happens inside the brain: the ubiquitous admonition to “use your head.” Our scientific journals, she writes, mostly proceed from the “brain in a vat” premise that considers our mental organ a disembodied, asocial entity, a computer encased inside our skulls doing all the thinking for a body that barely registers in the hierarchy of value.

The reality is much richer, more complex and delicious. And while it might seem overblown to call a book on cognition “revolutionary,” the ideas in “The Extended Mind”Ìęactually could change everything.

We’ve been led to believe, Paul writes, that like the Mighty Oz, the brain is an all-purpose, all-powerful thinking machine — and it is impressive, what with its lightning processing speed and its magnificent mutability. But it turns out, the brain — not just my brain (huge relief!) or your brain — is limited in its ability to pay attention, to remember, to deal with abstract concepts and even to persist at challenging tasks. So much for bearing down.

The smart move, she writes, is not to lean harder on the brain but to reach beyond it. Replace the brain-as-computer and brain-as-muscle metaphor with a more fitting one that compares our brains to, say, magpies. Like the magpie — famous for building its nest out of an astonishing array of materials it finds throughout its environment — our brains weave the bits and bobs of everything they encounter and turn them into cognition. We think with our bodies, our surroundings, our relationships. We think with gestures, with movement and sensation; we think with natural and built spaces, and the spaces we build with our ideas. We think with the other minds with which we interact — our family, coworkers, classmates, teachers, friends.

As Paul explains the new research into these three types of thinking — embodied, situated and distributed cognition — she convincingly and entertainingly makes the case that the research “not only produced new insights into the nature of human cognition; it has generated a corpus of evidence-based methods for extending the mind.”

Then, she goes a step further and lays out the purpose of her book: to operationalize the extended mind. To turn the discussion from something strictly philosophical into something practical and useful. If, when you reach the end of this book, you don’t view yourself and the world at least somewhat differently, well 
 I invite you to give it another read. And maybe dance more.

Contemplating what this new view of cognition might mean for early learning had me going overboard on the marginalia—with multiple exclamation points (Imagine having kids “act out” the solar system! Children play more imaginatively outdoors—cheers for forest schools!!!). First, as Paul mentions several times, children already come into the world with their thinking extended in these “new” ways. They certainly think with movement and with their relationships — and continue to do so until our education system succeeds in getting them to sit down and stop talking. Children spend an average of 50 percent of the school day sitting, Paul writes. That proportion increases as they enter adolescence; adults in the workplace spend more than two-thirds of the average workday seated — all rooted in society’s erroneous belief that to be thinking, we need to be sitting still.

What this attitude overlooks, she writes, is that human’s capacity to regulate our attention and our behavior is a limited resource and we use it up by suppressing our natural urge to move. In multiple experiments, children who were given license to move were “more focused, confident and productive.” One study of young people diagnosed with ADHD found that the more the kids moved, the more effectively they were able to think. Instead of insisting that children stop moving so they can focus, a more effective approach would be to allow them to move around so that they can focus. Throughout the U.S., recess has been reduced or even eliminated to generate more “seat time” devoted to academic learning. Paul argues that parents, educators and administrators should be arguing for more, not fewer, opportunities for children to be active.

One of the most profound and possibly revolutionary concepts Paul covers is that of interoception, an awareness of the inner state of the body. All of us start life with our interoceptive capacities operating via our onboard sensors taking information from the outside world—our retinas, cochleas, taste buds, olfactory bulbs—which send a constant stream of data to the brain from all over our bodies. Our conscious minds can’t process all they encounter, but the insula, the brain’s interoceptive hub, takes the constant data feed and uses it to navigate the world: the body “rings like a bell,” Paul writes, to alert us with a shiver, a sigh, a cringe.

Research has found that that how caregivers communicate with children about these bodily prompts can strengthen or weaken a child’s sensitivity to these internal signals. Other research has found that greater awareness of these sensations can give us agency in actually creating our emotions. Consider, for example, the difference in a child’s life if their caregivers took their sensations seriously and helped them learn to reappraise their physical sensations—my palms are sweaty; my stomach has butterflies—and label “nervous” or “anxious” as “excited” and “eager.”

Some of the most exciting and potentially transformative research cited in “The Extended Mind” is found in the chapters on thinking with relationships. Humans evolved to learn from other humans and to learn from teaching other people. We are social to our core and a large body of evidence points to the striking conclusion that we think best when we think socially. We evolved to reason, to persuade others of our views and to guard against being misled by others. If you ever wondered why your preschooler can argue you into exhaustion, they’re only fulfilling their evolutionary calling. Humans argue together, Paul writes, to arrive jointly at something close to truth. The key element is learning to argue over ideas with mutual respect. Argument, when done in the right way, produces “deeper learning, sounder decisions and more innovative solutions 
.”

Our modern life has gotten too complex, too jammed with information and sensory overload for our brains to manage by themselves. Fortunately, we’re just beginning to realize how far and how well humans can think beyond those limitations. Taking Paul’s information-packed volume as a starting place, it’s thrilling to imagine what futures might be concocted by a whole society of magpie minds thinking together in ways informed by, but no longer bound by, the human brain.

I felt as though I were right back in those days as a single mom when someone had a cold, someone had a science project, I had a deadline and how was I going to get all this mess to work? Always with the question running in the background, “Is this what my life is about?” Then, I read Garbe’s eloquent reflections on mothering as maintenance and maintenance as essential and honorable. It makes the world go round; it keeps life happening.

I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book that made me feel more seen; I wish I had had it years ago when I was up to my neck day in and day out with all that mothering.

The way Seattle author Garbes defines mothering, though, a lot of us are always up to our necks in it. She traces her understanding of mothering beginning with her first book, “,” about the science and culture of pregnancy, to her much broader view now that mothering is a verb and “the action of mothering 
 includes anyone who is engaged in ‘the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life.’” The work of raising children is mothering, she writes, and includes people of all genders, extending to nonparents — preschool teachers, babysitters, good friends who are so close with their caring that they almost become co-parents.

Garbes wrote “Essential Labor” during the pandemic as her daughters’ preschool, along with much of the rest of the world, locked down. As a writer, she didn’t get a regular paycheck or health insurance and her husband did, so by default it became her job to care full-time for their daughters, 2 and 5 at the time. The pandemic underscored for all of us that the essential work of caregiving is the only truly essential work humans do. During the “long, strange season” of the pandemic, people began to see — maybe for the first time — that caregiving is hard work — mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting. It is also highly skilled labor without which nothing in the world works as it should. Yet, what recognition do those involved in this essential labor receive in reality? Beyond hollow atta-girls and sentimental talk about the importance, yea even the sacredness of mothers, how does American society actually recognize the people do the care work, the maintenance and domestic labor that keeps the whole shebang running?

Garbes alternates her well-researched, fact-based reportage on the state of mothering and caregiving in the U.S. with personal reflections of her upbringing as a Filipinx-American with two parents in the health care field, a lens that allows a particularly powerful insight into the work of caregiving in America. The Philippines has for decades served as the farm team for the U.S. health care workforce, providing nurses and other healthcare workers to make up for shortages in the U.S. workforce. As is always the case, the immigrants ended up taking or being assigned the jobs the white workers didn’t want, which for nurses often meant the ICU or critical care jobs that required them to be more intimate with patients’ bodies.

During the pandemic, Garbes writes, she read that Filipinx nurses made up 4% of the nursing workforce in the U.S. and accounted for 34% of Covid-related nursing deaths — a gut punch, she says, because any one of those deaths could have been her mother. When she saw all of her “wild, racing thoughts and frustrations about the state of caregiving in America” showing up all over the media and in every Zoom conversation, she felt in her bones that the time had come to, as she writes, blow open the conversation, invite in new perspectives, and imagine new possibilities. As a growing body of us have realized during the past two and a half years, if we don’t fix this, our society is going to go off the rails. It’s time to double down on the radical power of mothering, she says. (And let all say, “Amen.”)

Lest it seem that “Essential Labor” is a scolding polemic, it is anything but. She writes deliciously about mothering as survival, mothering as valuable, sensual and even erotic labor, taking Audre Lorde’s depiction of the erotic as “the deepest life force 
 which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.” Love is an action verb, acts of attention. Mothering is service and attention to the body, the “geography of mothering” (lovely!), which can’t be conveyed to a child in words. If ever there were a situation that demanded deeds not words, it’s mothering.

She also writes about mothering as interdependence and underscores what so many of us have seen during the pandemic: No one gets out of this alone: Community sustains us, even if it’s limited to our Covid pod or wine shared by Zoom after the kids are asleep. To nurture our children, support our elders and our disabled, and to tend to our sick, we have to take care of each other.

Garbes shies away from nothing — ear wax, stinky toes, the incessant role of mucus, barf and other bodily fluids in caregiving. Bodies do all of that, and attention must be paid. Her frankness extends to details about some of her intimate moments with her husband which may land as TMI for some of us, but her point about the power — and necessity — of pleasure is well-taken.

She’s also not afraid to tell one on herself, relating how a friend on a camping trip showed her how to blow on the campfire to get it going. When she asked how this (white) friend learned how to do that, the friend said that as a kid her family was too poor to stay in hotels, so when they went on vacation, they always camped. In that moment, Garbes had a sudden reckoning with her own privilege, in many ways a typical, middle-class family whose parents could afford to send their children to private school and take vacations that involved staying in hotels with swimming pools.

But she writes of also seeing the way her successful, hardworking parents endured the immigrant indignities of having their competency questioned, being condescended to socially and professionally, being essential yet infantilized, oddly echoing motherhood itself. Garbes demands more for mothers, for caregivers — more acknowledgment, more information, more pleasure and compassion, more recognition that cultivating and nurturing a child’s life force and essence can be more deeply satisfying for both child and caregiver than any other life experience.

“Essential Labor” is both a memoir and a call to action. The caregiving crisis the U.S. finds itself in now will outlast the pandemic and we must figure out ways to care for each other. Individual people patching together individual solutions will never work, and it’s up to all of us to take what the pandemic has taught us about essential caregiving and turn it into political will and action. It isn’t rocket science: Societies throughout the world have sorted this out and created solutions that allow caregivers to be acknowledged and caregiving to be shared. Part of mothering, Garbes writes, is to insist on worthiness. It’s time the U.S. does that now — insist on the worth of caregiving — and in the process, build something more powerful than we’ve ever known, based on love, inclusion, mutuality, and acceptance.

“,” Dr. Josiah Rector’s dense, deeply researched history of Detroit’s water disasters, lays out the origin story of this most recent catastrophe. Beginning with the mid nineteenth century, Rector meticulously layers fact upon fact to detail how politics, policy and societal changes ebbed and flowed in Michigan’s largest city over multiple generations to create a witches’ brew of race, class and gender inequalities that translated into polluted water and scandalous policies. If Rector’s cataloguing of these events has a certain here-we-go-again, rinse-and-repeat quality, it’s because since the late 19^th century through present day, Detroit’s history has seen incessant waves of income inequality, unregulated mass-produced industry, lackadaisical or non-existent financial regulation, environmental degradation and unrelenting racial segregation.

Along with this history of metastatic industrial development, staggering pollution, relentless corruption and breathtakingly bad policy, Rector presents the other side of the coin: the fierce, courageous, dogged commitment of activists pushing back decade after decade, demanding cleaner air, better working conditions and water that wouldn’t poison their children. Rector draws on dozens of oral history interviews and extensive archival research to tell in relatable terms what is likely the most comprehensive history of Detroit’s environmental justice movement to date.

At the heart of the issues raised in “Toxic Debt” is the question of whether access to water should be considered a human right available to all, or a commodity available to whoever can pony up sufficient money to pay a water bill. The irony baked into this question since Detroit’s earliest days is the fact that what Rector calls the “dehydration of Detroit” has occurred in an urban area surrounded by the largest freshwater system in the world.

Throughout the Rust Belt in the 1990s and 2000s, union busting, cuts to welfare programs and neoliberal trade policies that sent thousands of jobs to Mexico took a toll on America’s working class. For Michigan’s Black-majority cities, like Detroit and Flint, the toll was even more profound as decades of racist housing policies, white flight, and industrial and commercial disinvestment hollowed out the cities’ economic core.

Rector doesn’t mince words in laying the water disasters of both Flint and Detroit solidly at the feet of neoliberal policies of austerity, deregulation and privatization throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Wall Street shares a sizable part of the blame as legislation during President Bill Clinton’s tenure removed the firewall between commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms and insurance companies, supercharging Wall Street’s affection for mergers and acquisitions and enabling commercial banks to make increasingly risky investments. Investment banks marketed high-risk “swaps” to cities and Detroit, among many others, took the bait.

In 2013-2014, Detroit declared bankruptcy, resulting in Republican Gov. Rick Snyder suspending democracy via Michigan’s Emergency Manager laws, which gave the state the power to impose economically and environmentally disastrous policies without any accountability to the residents. Snyder put Detroit under an emergency manager and imposed radical austerity measures that shut off or poisoned the water of hundreds of thousands of Americans — largely African American families — living there. (For a look at how these decisions created the public health catastrophe of Flint’s water system, see our review of Dr Hanna Attisha’s “.” Different calamity, same players and policies.)

During this time, Detroit’s poor and working-class African Americans became a lucrative market for subprime loans, which treated home mortgages as a casino. Balloon fees led to out-of-control mortgage payments and as the families struggled to make these mortgage payments, they fell behind on their water bills. Rather than come up with ways to mitigate these payments, as had been done during the Great Depression, the city just cut off the spigot. As the city handled its bankruptcy — the largest in U.S. history — it made a bargain with its creditors and bondholders. Unsecured creditors — pension funds representing thousands of active and retired municipal workers and their families — had to take what the financial wizards called a “haircut,” meaning they paid for the city’s bankruptcy while the banks and insurance companies came out fine.

Two-thirds of the water cutoffs involved children. In a cruel Catch-22, child welfare authorities removed children from their homes because of a state requirement that all homes housing children have working utilities. On June 25, 2014, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights released a statement calling Detroit’s policy for shutting off people who couldn’t pay “an affront to human rights.” Protesters took to the streets demonstrating against the shutoffs and blockaded the dispatch facility to stop the trucks leaving to perform shutoffs.

U.N. officials visiting Detroit at the invitation of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights found examples of the indignities families suffered from the shutoffs, such as the mothers whose daughters had to wash themselves with bottled water during their periods, parents with asthmatic children who couldn’t operate nebulizers without water, families unable to adequately bathe themselves and clean their homes. The U.N. experts said the shutoffs violated international human rights laws including the right to water and sanitation, and the right to non-discrimination.

Even as the infamous unfolded, Gov. Snyder’s policies were contributing directly to increased lead poisoning among Detroit’s children as well. Austerity cuts to the Department of Health and Wellness led to the department ending its lead abatement program, despite evidence of “pervasive exposure” to lead among the children of Detroit — nearly twice the level in Flint. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no safe blood level of lead in children has been identified and even low levels of lead have been shown to negatively affect a child’s intelligence, academic achievement and ability to pay attention.

Austerity measures and outsourcing also led to a toxic water disaster in Detroit’s schools, as hundreds of the district’s unionized maintenance workers were laid off, accelerating the physical decay of its buildings. In 2016, Detroit Public Schools officials discovered toxic levels of lead and copper in 19 out of the district’s 62 tested schools. As Rector writes, “Far from fixing DPS, austerity policies had transformed centers of learning into sources of permanent brain damage for unknown numbers of children.”

It would be satisfying to report that these matters are all safely in the past and Detroit residents have finally gotten a fair shake and fresh water. Sadly, that is not the case. In March 2020, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer responded to activists’ demands for action by issuing an Executive Order requiring that all public water utilities restore water service to any residence where water had been shut off due to non-payment. The policy would only last through the end of the pandemic. Detroit has extended the shutoff moratorium through 2022 but has shown little support for progressive water rate structures.

Rector writes that the water disasters of Detroit and Flint demonstrate the “horrific human costs of sacrificing basic environmental health protections to the short-term financial interests of bond-holders and private contractors.” A major takeaway of “Toxic Debt”Ìęis how misguided the free-market approach to public services is. Privatizing has an incredible allure to investors, but “efficiencies” most often lead to underfunding the resources necessary for the long-term health and viability of an economy and a society. Public systems should be accountable to the public.

Katz, former head of the Discovery School at the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and Hadani, a Brookings Institution Fellow, are encouraging and forgiving coaches, telling readers, “Guiding your child’s development requires an endless amount of patience and kindness, especially toward yourself. But it also requires knowledge about how children develop to understand what shapes their thoughts, behaviors and actions.”

Consider their perspectives on sharing, lying and remembering emotions.

We all agree that sharing makes for a harmonious playground and a more peaceful world, and we fully expect our offspring to let their friends take a turn with the Barbie—but then we hear they’re refusing to let anyone near the doll. Where did we go wrong? “Sharing involves the ability to take another’s perspective,” the authors remind confused, frustrated parents. Their developing minds have caught onto the intoxicating concept of ownership, and now they’re expected to willingly surrender property without a struggle? Putting ourselves in our kids’ tiny shoes will help them get better at this essential skill.

“Did you brush your teeth?”

â€Ôš±đČő.”

â€Áè±đČč±ô±ôČâ?”

â€Ôš±đČő!”

“Really really?”

“Oops, I think I forgot something in the bathroom.”

Of course, lying is a behavior we want to discourage in children, but Katz and Hadani point out that deception actually demonstrates a leap forward in brain development, requiring “an understanding that other people have different beliefs and that those beliefs may not reflect reality.” This discovery sets their little minds on fire, so it’s natural that they’d want to try it out a couple of times.

By around age 5, the authors say, children are capable of re-experiencing emotions from a memory. Not only can they summon feelings of jealousy around actions that took place a few days ago, but they also learn to hide those feelings—whether to manipulate others or to fit in socially. Calling attention to these newly acquired strategies can lead to uncomfortable conversations and even conflict, but Katz and Hadani encourage parents to “explicitly teach your child about the developmental phase they are in, model it and offer suggestions for how to enhance it in a fun and playful way.” As the authors emphasize, timing is everything. It may not be productive to lecture them about brain development at the moment you catch your toddler in a lie or an act of aggression, but fascinating and helpful dialogues can take place later, during bath time.

Through words, pictures and stories, the authors maintain, children and their adults gradually gain fuller and more nuanced views of the world around them and between their ears. Parenting involves intentional and incidental steps to foster the vocabulary to recognize and name emotions, to picture them and render them on the page, and to understand and dream up stories where emotions show up and affects the chain of events.

Nobody said parenting would be easy. It demands patience, a sense of humor and self-awareness. The hardest parts are allowing ourselves to be vulnerable (“Children love to learn that their parents have struggles similar to their own”) and admitting that children and adults alike have the potential to be selfish jerks sometimes.

On the long and ever-expanding shelf of parenting books, deserves a prominent spot alongside Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish’s  and Thomas Lickona’s . Katz and Hadani join these authors in the conviction that becoming empathetic parents and caregivers is the key to bringing up the humans we want running our world in the future. Stories and infographics make it a book for sharing, perhaps with a trusted group of parents going through the same challenges as you.

“There is an alarming disconnect between what we know about what children’s brains need and what we have actually done to develop those brains,” writes Suskind, founder, and co-director at the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health at the University of Chicago. The book empowers caregivers, parents and policymakers to act as “brain architects” early on for the country’s poorest and most vulnerable group: children. “In the first thousand days of a child’s life, over 85% of the brain’s total adult volume is built, which is why what happens during this time is so critical.”

TMW focuses on serve-and-return interactions, (tune in, talk more and take turns) to promote early language skills. “Out of all the cognitive skills we can help young children develop early on, there’s one that stands out as a particularly strong indicator of what’s to come: language.” Parent Nation further urges societal shifts that would better support parents in a role that matters to all of us.

“Our society robs too many families of the opportunity to provide healthy environments,” Suskind argues, highlighting homelessness, poverty, illness and other afflictions that jeopardize healthy brain development. “Unlike malnutrition, which is easily observable in a tiny, frail infant, poverty’s impact on the brain is hidden behind the chubby cheeks and soft skin of an adorable baby, only manifesting many years later.”

Suskind dissects the prevalent and cyclical challenges of parenting in the United States. In 2018, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, Head Start served only half of eligible three- and four-year-olds, and the Early Start program, a later addition for infants and toddlers, reached a startlingly low 8% of eligible babies. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 60% of American adults experience at least one adverse childhood experience (ACE). Childhood adversity burrows into the brain. If left unaddressed, it can disrupt the stability of the brain circuitry and thus the stability of the child’s future. Further, if mothers experience stress while pregnant, that stress can affect which genes are expressed in their children. In essence, ACEs can change genetic programming. The more stressed the parents, the more likely young children are to have mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

Parents require support from employers, communities and policymakers as well as health and child care providers. “The larger realities of a family’s circumstances—their work constraints, economic stresses and mental health as well as the injustices and bad luck they are subject to—all matter as much as the 3Ts for healthy brain development,” Suskind explains.

Vivid vignettes of parents and families illustrate all-too-familiar circumstances of lacking the supports to raise their children into happy, healthy adults capable of reaching their full potential. Suskind maintains, “You need a plan, and you need an appropriate, safe environment, one that provides backup as required.” Many parents lack an informed plan, let alone any reliable backup.

Suskind writes about Randy, a dad and TMW program participant who struggled to find stable work offering a livable wage with benefits, “Parents like Randy want nothing more than to do the work to help their children succeed. But without time and bandwidth and money, it’s as if Randy was trying to ferry his son and daughter through childhood in a leaky rowboat.”

When Suskind and her husband Don (who later drowned while trying to rescue two boys on Lake Michigan) became parents in 1999, they knew nothing about healthy brain development. Even with the explosion of neuroscientific knowledge about building children’s language skills during that era, parenting books rarely linked those ideas directly to foundational brain development. “They buried the lede by not pointing out just how much the conversation between parents and children contributed to wiring up kids’ neural circuits,” Suskind laments. Today, we know so much more. However, the current system fails to connect the dots. “The result is a country full of anxious parents and a frenetic parenting industry rife with misinformation and conflicting advice.”

Suskind posits health care as the missing link in the educational continuum, building a bridge from the first day of life to the first day of formal schooling. “Knowing more,” she writes, “affects how parents behave with their children and changing parent behavior changes children’s outcomes.” Suskind imagines a future where parents receive explicit information about how the brain develops or what tools they can use to encourage and enhance it at every opportunity, from the first prenatal appointment to each pediatric visit. With holistic health care at the hub, this future also includes looking beyond symptoms to the root causes of good health and ill health—including the social, economic and environmental factors that influence child development.

Parenting is not an isolated experience. “It is time to recognize that the fates of parents and children are bound up in the fate of societies, of nations,” Suskind argues. According to research at Stanford University, in countries with family-friendly policies such as universal child care or paid family leave, there are smaller language gaps between rich and poor children than in the United States. In those countries where family-friendly policies boosted parents’ happiness, the policies did not reduce the happiness of non-parents. “The policies of the country we live in,” she asserts, “weave their way into our lives and can have immediate and far-reaching implications.”

Parent Nation provides countless examples of programs and resources that will help any parent on their journey. Along with these examples, the book includes a discussion and action guide so that people can do this work in a community with others seeking change.

Suskind reminds readers of what unites us in this human experience and elucidates the benefits of equipping those rearing children with the resources they need to thrive. She shows us that the most meaningful difference we can make in the life of children is ensuring that their families have safe places to live and that everyone’s physical and psychological needs are met. “Each family shoulders unique challenges, experiences and strengths,” she writes, “but nearly all mothers and fathers know sleepless nights and overpowering love.”