Kelleen Kaye: All Publications, Events and Press

America’s Changing Social Contract

adminn — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
12/03/2007 - 9:00am

Despite the sustained economic growth of recent years, Americans are increasingly concerned with economic security. Even before economists began reporting signs of recession, skyrocketing health care costs, faltering pensions, and burgeoning inequality frayed the fabric of the American social contract. America's social contract is an evolving, complex web of legal and informal relationships between households, employers, government, and civil society that extends beyond particular federal programs. Now is the time to strike a new bargain between these sectors, rethinking the rights and responsibilities of each. Breathing new life into the American social contract is needed to keep pace with our 21st century economy and build the conditions for sustained growth and healthy families.

On Dec. 3, the New America Foundation convened 200 guests at the Mayflower Hotel to explore the intellectual framework of the next social contract. Andy Stern, President of the SEIU, and Carl Camden, CEO of Kelly Services, began the conversation by outlining the promise and the challenges that this coming social contract will encounter. Speaking from the divergent sectors of labor, business and the growing contingent workforce, both leaders issued bold calls for reform and reflected on the turbulent economic challenges that the America social contract faces. Mr. Stern addressed the rights and responsibilities of workers and employers, particularly the important realms of pensions and health care. Mr. Camden offered the perspective of the millions of American temporary and freelance workers and comment on the promise and innovation of flexible, citizen-based benefits.

In response to these opening remarks was a panel discussion to further hash out the rights and responsibilities of employers. Michael Calabrese, Joe Minarik, Donna Klein, and Thomas Kochan addressed the particular responsibilities such as child care and workplace flexibility, the importance of wages and benefits providing for basic economic security, and their potential burden on the global economic competitiveness of American firms.

Next, Brian Gallagher and Diana Aviv offered their perspective on the role of civil society, in a discussion moderated by Michael Lipsky. They focused on the key issues of shared responsibility, wealth, and philanthropy in the social contract. It is important for the social contract to provide certain goods outside of the purview of government, and panel clarified the role of civil society in performing this task.

During a lunchtime conversation, Michael Lind offered a global view of the social contract and how it evolves over time. Mr. Lind articulated the logic of one of the next social contract’s bedrock principles: that the grand bargain between citizens be citizen-based.

Mark Schmitt led a panel on the role of government, including Jacob Hacker, Karen Kornbluh, William Galston, and Reihan Salam. They discussed the government’s role in providing economic security to citizens, the increasing risk and uncertainty that Americans families face, and how confronting these challenges with the language of the social contract can transform our politics.

Finally, David Gray, along with a panel of Jane Waldfogel, Phil Longman, Kelleen Kaye, and Christine Kim discussed the role of the family in the social contract. Changes in the workforce and demography create challenges for government and business to help families balance work and life. Together, the panelists discussed what the status of the two-parent family is in America, what challenges young adult parents face, and where family formation and choices in child rearing intersect with policy.

The event agenda can be found below. Video of the first half of this all-day event is available at right; the afternoon sessions can be viewed by clicking here. An MP3 audio recording of the complete event can be played below, or downloaded via this link.

The Next Social Contract Initiative aims to reinvent American social policy for the twenty-first century. Through a program of research and public education, the initiative will explore the origins of our modern social contract, articulate the guiding principles for constructing a new contract, and advance a set of promising policy reforms. To learn more about this initiative, please click here.

The Stress of Balancing Work and Family

Communications — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 06:00:00 -0400

A New America Event
09/19/2007 - 12:00pm

Americans know from their own lives the stress of balancing work and family obligations. Extensive rhetoric from the media and academic worlds is difficult to disentangle, sometimes pointing to seemingly different conclusions regarding the state of work and family balance, the time parents are spending with their children, and the impacts such conflicts have on individual and family health.

The New America Foundation’s Next Social Contract Initiative and Workforce and Family Program seek to cut through the rhetoric with an analysis of the research through their paper, “The Stress of Balancing Work and Family: Impacts on Parent and Child Health.” At this event, Kelleen Kaye and David Gray discussed where the research leads us in examining the stress of work and family conflict.

Kelleen Kaye is an analyst and policy expert on family structure and family relationships as they relate to child, youth, and parental well-being. Video of the event is available at right, while an MP3 audio recording can be downloaded below.

The Stress of Balancing Work and Family

Workforce and Family — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 06:12:00 -0400

Executive Summary

American families confront major challenges in balancing work and family life. Workers report that they would prefer fewer hours, while new technological capabilities require parents to bring more job responsibilities home with them. Mothers and fathers encounter strain in work and home environments alike. Polling and surveillance data confirm that the balance between work and family care needs attention. Some of the most quantifiable and severe costs of this burden on families are adverse health outcomes. This paper catalogues a number of factors linked to job stress and work/family conflict: metabolic syndrome, hypertension, heart disease, poor dietary habits,… more

The Hour Quotes Kelleen Kaye on Unmarried-Parent Trends

Communications — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 08:55:00 -0500

New America in the News:

In Connecticut, where the cost of living is high, single mother-headed households are about seventeen times more likely than two-parent households to live in poverty, and more than half of the state’s singleparent families do, according to the state Department of Social Services...

The proportion of single mother households, which vastly outnumber those headed by single fathers, to married couple households has significantly increased over the past 25 years nationwide.

Sociologists say the rise in unmarried parenthood is due in part to increasing views among young people that parenthood and marriage are separate undertakings, and that a child can be a path to self-actualization and purpose...

[Teenage pregnancy rates have declined, but] age may not have the impact on unmarried pregnancies that [many assume], according to Kelleen Kaye, a family structure analyst and policy expert who is researching behaviors and attitudes toward parenthood for the New America Foundation.

It is encouraging that a nationwide push to decrease teenage pregnancy has worked, but the unmarried women who are increasingly waiting until their early twenties to have babies are as ill-equipped for motherhood as teenagers and have less public policy support, Kaye said.

More than half of the women in their early twenties who gave birth in 2004 were unmarried.

“A lot of this problem has just been pushed back to a slightly older age group,” Kaye said. “They just kind of fall off society’s radar screen but they’re still just as lost.”

Single parenthood is especially prevalent in low-income neighborhoods and is racially-correlated, as well. Nearly 70 percent of births to black women are outside of marriage.

But some middle- to upper income mothers have chosen single parenthood and argue that they are perfectly capable of raising children without men.

Even so, society should discourage the unmarried parent trend, Kaye said.

“Even in those (higher income) families, the children are suffering some consequences,” she said. “Of course we should never be vilifying single moms ... but that doesn’t necessarily mean we want to promote all pathways into parenthood. There are just intrinsic aspects of having two parents that helps kids thrive. If you have a child who was born into a married parent family, on average, there tends to be more significant parent involvement.”

Nationally, children of single mothers are five times more likely to live in poverty than their peers who have two parents. And the risks of single parenthood stretch far beyond economics. Single-parent households are among the main factors schools and leaders use to define which kids are “at-risk” for undesirable outcomes...

Single parenthood is a vicious cycle that partially stems from “generational unraveling” that gives youths no role models for couple parenting and leaves them to fall back on unrealistic expectations, Kaye said.

“You can start to think about entire communities being transformed with ... marriage virtually disappearing as an institution,” she said...

The Hour's website is restricted to subscribers only. For the full text of this article, written by Hour reporter Noelle Frampton, please see the attached PDFs below.

Dreams of Motherhood

Articles — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 07:26:00 -0500

There are few human endeavors that are as fundamentally personal, yet come with such far-reaching societal implications, as becoming a parent. As cultural barriers break down and technology advances, the circumstances surrounding the conception and raising of children become increasingly diverse, extending beyond the traditional nuclear family structure. This brings both new opportunities and obligations, and changes the demographic fabric of some communities for generations. As intercourse, conception, marriage and parenting become increasingly disconnected, public policy faces the challenge of understanding how the rights of adults, the well-being of children and the interests of society intersect.

While much of the… more

How Research on Family Structure and Children's Development Can Inform Healthy Marriage Practitioners in the Field

Workforce and Family — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:00:00 -0500

Is children’s development, and children’s cognitive development in particular, affected by the marital status of their parents? On the face of it, this seems to be a simple question to which there is an intuitively simple answer: yes. Yet the answer to this question is anything but simple. The complexity of this question, the policy context that has helped shape a growing body of related research, and the implications of findings for policy and practice are discussed below. The following discussion is based on my remarks during the plenary session of Connecting Marriage Research to Practice, a conference sponsored by… more

New Urgency for Early-20s Single Moms

adminn — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 16:41:21 -0400

America made teen pregnancy prevention a national priority, and progress on this front is remarkable. However, increasingly, women are avoiding pregnancy as teens, only to become single mothers in their early 20s. Often their entry into parenthood is just as ill-prepared and perilous to child well-being, yet the policy response is far less adequate.

In 1995, President Clinton pronounced teen pregnancy an epidemic, and, following his call for action, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy was formed. Congress made teen pregnancy prevention a focus of welfare reform in 1996, and President Bush furthered this commitment with policies emphasizing sexual… more