Family & Children

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared on New America's In The Tank blog.

The average childcare worker in the U.S. earns less than a janitor. Sure, some daycare centers pay well, but the average parent can’t afford those high-end centers that can cost as much as public university tuition.

Piling on to that: The daycare industry is largely unregulated with low standards on quality of care. At an event this week based off of a recent New Republic article, The Hell of American Daycare, panelists showed how that painful reality -- a broken system full of tales of toddler deaths and injuries – can also have dire consequences for our economy.

The Asset Building Program is hosting an event Monday to feature Jonathan Cohn’s recent article for The New Republic "The Hell of American Day Care." A great panel will help us piece together the complicated picture of day care systems (or lack thereof) in America and offer ideas that address the issue from multiple angles. RSVP to come Monday at 12:15pm or tune in online to watch live.

Reniqua Allen and Hannah Emple explain how and why America's racial wealth gap became a gulf. Tara Maller reveals what makes sanctions a success - or failure - and what she expects from the ones targeting North Korea and Iran. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

From the Gaza war and the upgrading of Palestine at the U.N. to Israel’s announcement that it will likely build new settlements, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is spiraling out of control. We as coauthors disagree on the Palestinian U.N. bid, as on other important aspects of Middle Eastern politics. But on this we profoundly agree: negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority must resume, and fast.

In September 2012, the trailer for the film The Innocence of Muslims shot to infamy after spending the summer as a mercifully obscure video in one of YouTube’s more putrid backwaters.

Anne-Marie Slaughter made a splash this summer with an article in the Atlantic called "Why Women Still Can't Have it All," chronicling her decision to leave a prestigious State Department job to spend more time with her teenage sons. This week, Slaughter published a short follow-up article on the foreign-policy impact of workplace policies that lead women to "opt out" -- and the factors that make many successful women unwilling to discuss these issues openly.

As children pine for toys they see in store circulars and on TV, parents want to please. But they also wonder: will this toy keep my child occupied or get tossed in the back of the closet after 10 minutes? One piece of information that might help has less to do with the toy itself and more to do with what’s happening around it.

Editor's note: This post is the last in a series of three exploring the issue of asset building and single motherhood. Haley Eagon, a current senior at Williams College in Massachusetts, interned with the Asset Building Program this summer and authored these posts. Read part one on data and definitions of single motherhood and part two on policy design in the series.  

In response to growing rates of single motherhood, many have advocated for a return to the “traditional family.” This traditional family is often envisioned as the ideal self-sufficient unit, with a mother and father who share the burdens of earning income and raising children.

Editor's note: This post is the second in a series of three exploring the issue of asset building and single motherhood. Haley Eagon, a current senior at Williams College in Massachusetts, interned with the Asset Building Program this summer and authored these posts. Read part one here. 

Single mothers face unique obstacles in their quest to raise families and live fulfilling lives themselves. According to a as stated in this New York Times piece by Jason DeParle (see an interview with him in our office here), single mothers lack both a second income, and “a second set of parenting hands.” While these challenges are significant for many single mothers, additional systematic disadvantagesin the form of financial instability, lack of access to affordable and quality child care, and obstacles to utilizing public benefits also play a role. When considering the confluence of these factors, we can begin to see single motherhood not as inherently dysfunctional, but instead, a life made more challenging by obvious limitations on capacity and current social policy. Even targeted anti-poverty programs such as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) can actually confound efforts on the part of low-income parents to get out of poverty.

Editor's note: This post is the first in a series of three exploring the issue of asset building and single motherhood. Haley Eagon, a current senior at Williams College in Massachusetts, interned with the Asset Building Program this summer and authored these posts.

Single motherhood has been a subject of interest from the media, policymakers, researchers, and the public in general. Experts disagree on the importance of family structure in determining outcomes for children, but the percentage of births to unmarried mothers has been on the rise. According to Census Bureau figures, in 1990, 26.6% of births were to unmarried mothers; in 2008, over 40% of births were to unmarried mothers. Worrisomely, children with a single mother are substantially more likely to live in poverty than children living in married couple families (47.6% of kids in single mother households were poor in 2011 compared with 10.9% of kids with married parents.) According to analysis by the National Women’s Law Center, more than half of all poor children in 2011 lived in single mother households.