Workforce and Family Program: Latest Articles

Continuing the Investment

adminn — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 13:58:00 -0500

Deep Creek Elementary School is an education success story. In 2001, Deep Creek, where more than three-quarters of students come from low-income families and 80 percent are black or Hispanic, was one of the worst elementary schools in Baltimore County, Maryland. Its third-graders were reading at a first-grade level. But the new principal, Anissa Brown Dennis, expanded collaboration and professional development for teachers, implemented an aligned reading and math curriculum from pre-K through third grade, and offered summer learning and after-school programs for struggling students. Today, nearly three-quarters of Deep Creek students read on grade level, teacher and student morale… more

Serving Our Young Adults

Articles — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:44:00 -0400

Many churches are developing programs to serve young adults. Many are investing in young adult coordinators in order to help grow their church.

However, there is another reason for churches to focus on young adults -- the critical needs of the early young adult population in our nation.

The violence at Virginia Tech last April perpetrated by a disturbed young adult is a tragedy beyond belief. It calls attention to the challenges faced by an often overlooked age group.

While American society has appropriately focused on the needs of teenagers in recent years, we should not lose sight of the needs of… more

Teach Your Children About Interfaith

Articles — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:45:00 -0400

One of the great fears that parents and church leaders have about their youth engaging in interfaith dialog is that they will lose their connection to their own religion and will end up rejecting and leaving their faith, maybe even converting to another religion as a result. My experience as a Christian pastor has been just the opposite -- I have watched young people become stronger in their own faith through exposure to other traditions.

Personal relationships matter a great deal in influencing how individuals come to faith, switch faiths or grow in faith. Most of us are part of the… more

Help Kids via Junk Food Tax

Articles — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:41:00 -0400

In a few days, Congress will return to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP. The program will pay for expanded coverage for children through an increase in cigarette taxes. The logic is to raise revenue while discouraging a behavior harmful to child health. Instead of a cigarette tax, however, Congress should address the health problem that research indicates is the greatest crisis facing America’s young people by taxing junk food instead.

The new epidemic facing American children is obesity. The Foundation for Child Development’s 2007 Child Well-Being Index has found that the overall health of America’s children… more

The Case for Pre-K

Articles — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 11:10:00 -0400

In 1961, 13 three- and four-year-olds from poor black families began attending a preschool class at Perry Elementary School in Ypsilanti, Michigan. They were there as much to learn as to teach. A team of researchers followed not only their time at the preschool, but their trajectory over the next four decades, and the findings were startling:

Compared to a control group of similar children who didn’t attend preschool, this class from Perry Elementary School would be less likely to skip class, be placed in special education, or wind up in jail. They’d be more likely to graduate high school… more

A Gift of Flexibility For Our Moms

Articles — Thu, 10 May 2007 13:56:00 -0400

This Sunday is Mother’s Day and many of us will be out this week buying gifts for our moms. That is the right thing for us to do. As a nation, one way for our country to say "thank you" to our moms is by giving them more flexibility to balance their work and family commitments through creative public policies that increase workplace flexibility.

The changing roles of mothers have been one of the most pronounced social trends seen in the last century. Today, more than 60 percent of families have two working parents. Moms are working harder than ever both… more

Is America Serious About Mental Health?

Articles — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:10:00 -0400

The Virginia Tech massacre raises questions that may never be answered. Even in the insolubility of this week's events, however, one thing is clear: Cho Seung-Hui was a very sick young man.

No one deserves an explanation to the questions this tragedy raises more than the victims and their families. One question we all should be asking: Is America serious about the mental health of its young people?

America's young people face a mental health crisis. According to the Foundation for Child Development's 2007 Child Well-Being Index, the emotional and spiritual well being… more

Congress Needs an Interfaith Caucus

Articles — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 02:27:00 -0500

The National Prayer Breakfast, an annual gathering of inspiring speeches and solemn moments of silence, recently drew President Bush and hundreds of lawmakers when it was held in Washington. This year, the event was unusual in that it was attended by much of what is the most religiously diverse Congress in American history.

The 110th Congress includes one Muslim and two Buddhists. The U.S. Senate is now led by a Mormon. All of these are firsts. The new Congress also includes more Jews than Lutherans, Congregationalists or Episcopalians.

The writer G.K. Chesterton famously remarked that America is "a nation with the soul… more

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

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

Beyond Latchkey Kids

Articles — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Time is money, and these days there doesn't seem to be enough of either to go around. The new reality in today's 24/7 economy is that the demands on workers continue to grow, but compensation, benefits and flexibility fail to keep up. Unfortunately, it is not just workers that pay a high price. In this game of long hours, shrinking benefits and stagnating wages, the biggest losers are workers' children and families.

Let's get to the heart of the issue: Between 1970 and 2001, the percentage of mothers in the workforce rose from 38 to 67 percent. Compared to 30 years… more

White Collar Blues

Articles — Sun, 03 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

News that major U.S. technology companies, among them IBM, plan to export thousands of high-skill jobs overseas indicates that worrisome trends in the U.S. economy will probably strengthen. Optimists contend that such "workforce flexibility" guarantees that something new -- the Internet, biotechnology -- will turn up to create similar high-paying jobs and carry the economy forward. But rather than triggering real economic development, moving white-collar jobs offshore underscores how reliant the U.S. economy has become on inflating high-end wealth and paper assets to compensate for large-scale job losses. If this pattern holds, the next boom may quickly mutate into another… more

The Parent Trap

Articles — Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 -0500

The American family changed dramatically over the last decades of the twentieth century. In the postwar years up to the early 1970s a single breadwinner -- working forty hours a week, often for the same employer, until retirement -- generally earned enough to support children and a spouse. Today fully 70 percent of families with children are headed by two working parents or by an unmarried working parent. The traditional family -- one breadwinner and one homemaker -- has been replaced by the "juggler family," and American parents have twenty-two fewer hours a week to spend with their kids than… more

Supermom Fictions

Articles — Sun, 27 Oct 2002 00:00:00 -0400

It happens nearly every time a new book comes out about motherhood and work -- the flurry of responses that treat reports of a still-unsolved conflict between the two as a revelation, even a shock. Last spring it was "Creating a Life," Sylvia Ann Hewlett's dour statistical inventory of a career gal's chances for procreating. This fall it's Allison Pearson's cannily amusing novel of working-mom manners, "I Don't Know How She Does It." Each book was greeted, as such books almost always are, with professions of deepest surprise, as if it were news that working mothers seldom feel that their… more

The Parent Gap

Articles — Tue, 01 Oct 2002 00:00:00 -0400

On a bright California day last April, Arnold Schwarzenegger was out of character. Instead of shooting up bad guys on a movie set, he was driving to the Los Angeles county clerk's office in a truck loaded with petitions bearing 750,000 signatures in support of a ballot initiative to fund California after-school programs, known as the After School Education and Safety Act. The proposal, spearheaded by Schwarzenegger, would offer a matching grant to every public elementary, middle, and junior high school for after-hours programs that would keep kids safely occupied for those treacherous afternoons when their parents are still at… more

Redirect the Rebate

Articles — Sun, 08 Jul 2001 00:00:00 -0400

What's wrong with this picture? Later this year, U.S. states will cut off support to millions of poor children and their mothers who, if they're lucky, have a job but can't afford child care and, if they're not, may have no income at all.

… more

The Mommy Tax

Articles — Fri, 05 Jan 2001 00:00:00 -0500

In attempting to "unite" the country, Gov. George W. Bush should focus attention on women. Women voters favored Vice President Gore by 11 points in the recent election. For the first time, women will make up more than 10 percent of the Senate -- and could form the basis for a bipartisan coalition supporting policies that favor women, children and families. Most important, women are in need of solutions to the daily dilemma they face: balancing family and work, and the high price they and their families pay despite their efforts.

More than two decades after Betty Friedan's equality revolution and… more