How do you afford enough time off work to be with a newborn child while your body may still be healing?
What will you do when your aging parents need full-time help?
How do you get off the wait list for childcare?
How do you find and afford support for a disabled loved one?
How do you do many of these all at once?
As respectively the founding director of Paid Leave for All and the executive director of Caring Across Generations, when we talk to voters across the country—and particularly to women voters, who often play an outsize role in deciding elections—these are the questions we hear.
Reproductive rights and freedom are top of mind for millions of us. So are questions of how to give care, how to find care, how to afford care for our families. We know that has been the case in our own lives. Whether that be walking away from a house in the morning in tears listening to your colicky baby screaming for you, going back to work sometimes doubled over in pain, pumping in the back of storage closets delirious without sleep, the total panic of losing childcare. Or wondering who will care for your mother whose dementia is progressing rapidly hundreds of miles away, and whose emergency room visits have become more frequent and frightening as the months go by. Or running out of care options for your grandfather and having to place him in a nursing home in a room full of strangers, where the workers are overwhelmed and underpaid, and he quietly disappears into loneliness and fear. Care has defined so much of who we are.
These—our—experiences are not unique. But they are the struggles that led us both to this fight of our lives—the mission that we share for all work and care to be visible, valued, and protected. And the belief that all people in this country should be able to give and receive care, while feeling they do not have to carry the burden alone and are not discarded.
After all, what is more fundamental than the ability to choose to have a family, and the ability to take care of one if you do? Care needs are some of the biggest sources of financial and emotional stress for American women, and it impacts every single one of us. The price tags are often bigger than the costs of college, transportation, and grocery bills combined—and the choices that some people have to make to afford it devastating. We are proud that the Biden-Harris Administration is taking this crisis seriously and doing something truly historic about it.
The White House has declared April a Month of Action to recognize care work, launching new efforts to make care more affordable, and taking part in events all month—including today when the president joins the Care Can’t Wait Coalition at a monumental rally. He’ll be speaking alongside caregivers, care workers, and parents—one of whom is Tiffany Mrotek, who featured in Glamour’s 28 Days in the Lives of Women Postpartum project. But it’s not the first nor the last action to make history this term. President Biden and Vice President Harris have issued the most comprehensive executive order on care, ever. They’ve announced the strongest budget proposals for paid leave, child, aging, and disability care—ever. They’ve included these policy pillars in their economic agenda and landmark legislative frameworks, and fought for Congress to prioritize them. And they’ve committed, and recommitted, to passing them into law.
As it stands now, care can’t wait—our country is dangerously behind. We are one of the very few countries in the world without any form of federal paid leave. Families lose tens of billions of dollars every year as a result, and one in four women have returned to work within two weeks of giving birth. Childcare costs more than college tuition in most states, and more than half of American families live in communities without childcare infrastructure. Over half a million older adults and people with disabilities languish on waiting lists for Medicaid-funded home and community-based care, with wait times up to a decade. This will boil over as baby boomers age and the sandwich generation, caring for multiple family members at once, grows.
This is the story from a high level. What does it cost us in our daily lives? It costs many of us the ability to make the rent or mortgage. It costs us in groceries, car payments. It costs us the ability to start a new business or take a new job; it costs us in promotions and retirement, and by compounding financial losses over a lifetime. It costs us the ability to heal or to recover. It costs many of us the most important moments of our lives. The growing care crisis is one of the biggest challenges facing our nation, one that has been disproportionately borne by women and women of color, but impacts us all.
But care also offers us the opportunity of generations. For anyone who asks if we can afford paid leave and care, it’s the wrong question—the question is, what returns will it pay?
Federal investments in paid leave, childcare, and aging and disability care would benefit all of us. They would lead to millions of jobs, billions in wages, and trillions in GDP by keeping more women and caregivers in the workforce. They would lead to greater racial and gender equity by reducing pay gaps and improving Black maternal health outcomes. They would lead to financial security for American families, improvements in public health, greater opportunities for entrepreneurship and job promotion and even creativity. They would literally save lives and jobs. They would help us sleep better at night and give us time with the people we love most. They’re also some of the most popular policies in the country, across party lines and walks of life. In a time often marked by division, care is the issue that unites us. We all have people we love that we must care for.
Imagine that you could go to sleep knowing that childcare was accessible and affordable.
Imagine being able to be with a parent or sibling fighting cancer when they need you, or hold their hands in their final moments.
Imagine that your parents could age with dignity in their home, with a care worker paid a living wage.
Imagine that your loved ones could be with you when you need them most.
We think about what our own lives could have been like with these simple supports, too, our families’ lives. The security and comfort they could have had, the moments of joy and beauty.
This isn’t fantasy; this could be our future.
This is the vision of a country we should all be fighting for and working to win—and alongside our allies in Congress and the White House, we plan to do just that.
Dawn Huckelbridge is the founding director of Paid Leave for All Action. Ai-jen Poo is the executive director of Caring Across Generations.
