Further Reading from Elliot Haspel
Elliot Haspel writes about the American child care landscape, focusing especially on the birth-to-five years and on the intersection of climate change and family life. He is a regular contributor to a variety of print and digital publications. He also appears as a guest on television, radio, and podcasts.
Further Reading from Elliot Haspel
Elliot Haspel writes about the American child care landscape, focusing especially on the birth-to-five years and on the intersection of climate change and family life. He is a regular contributor to a variety of print and digital publications. He also appears as a guest on television, radio, and podcasts.
Further Reading
Elliot Haspel writes about the American child care landscape, focusing especially on the birth-to-five years and on the intersection of climate change and family life. He is a regular contributor to a variety of print and digital publications. He also appears as a guest on television, radio, and podcasts.
Is early childhood education getting easier to access in Vermont?
When school’s out, parents often scramble to find affordable options for childcare. Elliot Haspel, contributor to The Atlantic and the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It (Black Rose Writing, 2019), talks about how we got here and what it would take to fix the situation.
Perspective: Unmarried adults without children are not ‘kinless’
There is no question that America, and the world, is going through a tectonic shift in family formation. Marriage rates and birth rates are plummeting nearly everywhere. This has inevitably led to a discourse around what’s happening, why it is happening and what might be done. The vocabulary for this conversation, however, leaves much to be desired — and may actively be hampering an effective societal response.
The Largest Private Child Care Provider in the U.S. Went Public. How Will This Shape the Future of American Child Care?
There was a major shift in the child care landscape in October, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing unless you happen to be a regular consumer of Wall Street news. On Oct. 9, KinderCare, the largest private provider of child care in the country — serving nearly 200,000 children mainly below the age of six — executed an initial public offering(IPO) and is now publicly traded on the stock market.
Biden’s push for child care failed. What lessons are there for Kamala Harris?
Elliot Haspel, the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, says part of the challenge of figuring out strategy is that child care advocacy does not have a single leader or single organization. “In some ways [this] means more voices can be heard, more small-d democratic, but it also can create challenges,” he told Vox, contrasting this with the 1990s, when the Children Defense Fund, and specifically its leaders Marian Wright Edelman and Helen Blank, “were basically the child care points of contact.”
JD Vance isn’t wrong about the value of family caregivers
In the child-care sector, grandparents are grouped into what are known as family, friends or neighbor caregivers, or FFNs. There are about 5 million FFN caregivers in the United States who provide regular, recurring child care — not just the occasional babysitting. They play a critical role in family well-being and children’s early learning and development. Research commissioned by the philanthropic collaborative Home Grown has shown that FFNs are disproportionately preferred by rural families, families of color and families whose parents work nontraditional schedules such as night shifts.
The Problem of Summer Child Care
When school’s out, parents often scramble to find affordable options for childcare. Elliot Haspel, contributor to The Atlantic and the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It (Black Rose Writing, 2019), talks about how we got here and what it would take to fix the situation.
How to Solve the Summer Child Care Nightmare
It’s a well-established fact that in the United States, finding summer child care can be hell. In a nation with lengthy breaks from school—and no guaranteed paid time off from work for adults—parents are left largely on their own to cobble together camps and other, frequently expensive, arrangements. New data confirm just how tough this can be. A recent Gallup poll found that nearly half of parents with school-age children “wished their children could have participated in summer programs, or participated more than they did.” By far the top reason for this unfulfilled wish was cost, followed by program schedules not aligning with job schedules.
Praise for Crawling Behind
“In combining the love of a father with the expertise of a scholar, the book is at once deeply reported and universally accessible—a must-read for policymakers and parents alike.”
Julie Kashen
A polarized family policy is the last thing America needs
In recent weeks, much of the internet discourse has been dominated by arguments over the value of parents versus non-parents. This is largely thanks to Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s now-infamous comments about “childless cat ladies” and whether parents should get additional votes to proxy for their children. As incendiary and ill-advised as Vance’s cat lady remarks may have been (he has since asserted they were sarcastic), all American families — on both sides of the political aisle — need family policy to avoid the negative polarization trend that has made so many other issues difficult to resolve.
On Family Policy, Neither Party Has a Vision of the Good Life
Democrats have far better childcare and education ideas than Republicans, but their tendency to frame such policies as mere “good business” misses what really matters about the policies: the freedom to make life meaningful for both parents and kids.