Kelleen Kaye

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… more

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… more

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… more

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… more

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… more

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… more

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… more

Fellow

Kelleen Kaye is an analyst and policy expert on family structure and family relationships as they relate to child, youth, and parental well-being. She has been a senior policy analyst at the Department of Health and Human Services, where she worked on efforts targeting single parenthood, teen pregnancy, healthy-marriage promotion,… more