Policies to Promote Family Security

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This paper is a response to New Safety Net Paper 3, "Family Security: Supporting Parents' Employment and Children's Development" by Shelley Waters Boots, Jennifer Macomber, and Anna Danziger.

Shelley Waters Boots, Jennifer Macomber, and Anna Danziger propose policies to advance the security of low-income families by supporting parental employment and child development. In particular, they focus on policies related to child care, leave time and working hours, and Head Start.

To motivate their selection of policies, Boots, Macomber, and Danziger highlight four dimensions of child development that may be affected when low-income parents work and policy supports are inadequate. These dimensions are stability, health, nurturing, and activity. For instance, as they explain, the requirements of a low-wage job may interfere with a parent being able to provide stability in child care arrangements or family meal times. Similarly, parents working in low-wage jobs may not be able to take time off to bring their children to doctor’s appointments or to stay home with a sick child. The demands of work may also interfere with time that parents would otherwise have spent nurturing their children or arranging beneficial social activities for them.

Each policy the authors advocate is designed to address at least one of these challenges (although this is not always made explicit). In the first policy area, child care, the authors endorse Mark Greenberg’s proposal for guaranteed child care assistance for families who work at least 20 hours a week and have incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level as well as his and others’ proposal to expand the child and dependent care tax credit, expand quality improvement efforts and (also under the quality heading) maintain children in subsidized child care for a period of time even if parents’ work hours are reduced, and increase funding for after-school programs through an expansion in the 21st Century Community Learning Program.

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The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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