Today’s parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they’ll need to thrive in our current socioeconomic reality. Yet, the majority of parents—even the most caring ones—aren’t trained in skill development and lack the resources to get assistance. It’s almost like parents are being set up to fail!
How do we fix this problem? And what happens if we don’t?
Baila Sebrow, producer and host of The Definitive Rap for 5 Towns Central sat down with economist and father Nate Hilger, who holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford and a PhD in economics from Harvard. In 2020 he served as a lead policy consultant on early childhood and non-K12 child development issues. His work on the origins of success in children has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and others.
Nates suggests that the key is to ask less of parents, not more. He argues that America should consider child development a public investment with a potentially monumental payoff and that we need a New Deal-style program on the scale of Medicare to drive this investment. He calls it Familycare and, as he explains, to make it happen, parents must organize to wield more unified political power on behalf of children, who he points out will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country.
Do parents have the necessary political juice? According to Nate, if they follow in the footsteps of people over 65 and focus on their broader shared interests, they can make a program like Familycare as politically sacred as Medicare and Social Security. As for what’s at stake, asking too much of parents results in lost opportunities that limit children’s success and make all of us worse off. His book The Parent Trap is tremendously hopeful. Watch this interview to hear more!
More money for teachers unions
Doesn’t sound like a great idea