What if this country actually cared about families?
Nate Hilger's "The Parent Trap: How To Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis" is a rallying cry for the political power of parents.
This week, I’m talking to Nate Hilger, author of “The Parent Trap: How To Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis.” Nate is a former professor of economics and a data scientist who makes a compelling and passionate case for the ways in which collective action can help children succeed. In his book, he advocates for two things that I find so compelling: first, the need for a bipartisan nationwide organization that could advocate for parents and families the way that AARP does for senior citizens; and second, what he calls Familycare, which is a program that provides some of the same types of support for families that seniors receive through Medicare.
First of all, I loved this book. I got so fired up reading this and I was like, Yes, sign me up. I am ready to be the co-founder of the American Association of Parents! So I wanted to start by asking you if you are seeing any movement around this idea. Are there people taking action to build something like this type of bipartisan organization for parents and caregivers?
There’s another book that recently came out, published on the exact same day, a very complementary book called “Parent Nation” by Dana Suskind and Lydia Denworth. They have a similar perspective around the extraordinary untapped political potential of parents. They are trying to do some grassroots organizing around that. That’s very nascent, but they're remarkable leaders, so I hope they get some traction.
There’s also an organization in California called Children Now, which is also a very strategic, intriguing effort to do this in a different way. It’s led by Ted Lempert, a former politician in California, and he had this insight that the children’s advocacy movement is very fragmented, it’s often a small organization trying to help a local neighborhood or a narrow issue, and he thought, What if these fragmented organizations could be collectively represented by an umbrella group? So it’s more of a Chamber of Commerce model as opposed to an AARP model.
There’s the organization MomsRising, which is very interesting — I think they tend to be perceived as more partisan because they embrace issues where there’s a lot of partisan polarization. They have really impressive achievements and they’ve been around for years. I don’t know that they have that same bread-and-butter, AARP-like approach of things like giving people discounts on formula and diapers, which I think would really have mass appeal. And the fact that it’s called MomsRising is a little unfortunate, because I think dads would love to get involved in this issue. And I think defeminizing the absolute critical importance of parenting, whoever’s doing it, making it just as vaulted and prestigious and essential an occupation as anything else in our economy, is an important part of what needs to happen. Retirement is not about men or women, and neither is parenting. It’s part of making human beings, and that needs to be a bipartisan, bi-gender issue.
Right, if this whole idea of caregiving is really feminized, then of course this country isn't going to invest in it, because that’s not what we do in this country.
Maybe the answer is defeminizing it, but maybe the answer is just elevating feminized things.
I will take that too. All of the above. Because both of these things are important.
When you talk about a construction worker or something, these men are doing something hard and persevering through something tough. That kind of attitude could be mapped into feminized spaces, but it hasn’t happened yet.
You talk about the myths that stand in the way of this work — it’s too expensive, government can’t do anything right, and the zero-sum myth. It made me reflect on the ways in which there’s some zero-sum thinking around access to higher education. Do we need to move away from this very meritocratic view of education where it’s as if some kids don’t deserve to go to college or take the honors course or whatever?
I’ll agree, that’s a prominent mentality, especially among suburban upper-middle-class parents with a lot of opportunity. A lot of these parents implicitly feel that their children are competing directly with other children for the few thousand-odd freshman seats at Stanford, Harvard, Brown or Yale, and I think that is a huge, catastrophic mistake. I think it would be great for more cultural artifacts to push back against that myth.
We live in a country where there are sensational, world-class opportunities in every state. The University of California, University of Michigan — every state has an extraordinary flagship public institution and many extraordinary regional ones. The best research on the impact of going to these fancier, more exclusive colleges, compared to one of these good four-year colleges that are not so illustrious, is that it makes almost no difference, especially for the upper-middle-class kids, in terms of meaningful outcomes.
So more parents need to be able to relax and say, If my kid can go to UCLA instead of Stanford and takes that education seriously, they are going to have an excellent career and they are not going to have a weaker set of opportunities. We need to shift how people view the Ivy Leagues as, not like a door to a different place, but more like having a Lexus instead of a good new Camry. It’s not needed — a large part of it is as a prestige good.
So there is a distinction there, between one and the other, but the difference is perhaps less broad than people perceive it to be.
The other aspect of discounting the idea of scarcity is that it’s also important to emphasize the idea of “supersum” opportunities. Not only is your child not competing against her peers for some limited, special set of opportunities, your child will directly benefit if her peers get the opportunities they need to thrive.
One of the things that stood out to me was the question about what we measure versus the outcomes we say we want to achieve. For example, test scores as a limited data set that doesn’t necessarily tell us everything we want to know about a child or a school. I was curious to know if you have any thoughts about the kind of data that would be more useful to have about a child while they are in school.
Test scores are such a narrow window onto childhood skill development. There are instruments being developed to measure what economists call noncognitive skills. These are social-emotional skills and behavioral skills. I think these instruments are really powerful, and a lot of them are already in circulation. The issue is getting schools to use these instruments, getting whole states to adopt them and making it easier for schools to tap into them and hopefully making that data infrastructure more available. Because right now, test scores are the only thing that’s largely available. So that seems like a big area of opportunity.
One of my biggest takeaways from your book is the idea that it’s not what happens inside the classroom, it’s the other 90% of that child’s life that has the most impact. I feel like schools right now are being asked to solve for a lot, so I wonder if you think schools would be asked to solve for different things if we were addressing more of the issues that you describe.
The day-to-day life of our K-12 education system would transform under a program like Familycare. One analogy that I have found useful in talking about this is diet. If you told a nutritionist to fix the obesity problem in America, and let them control one snack that each person will consume each day, it would seem hopeless. They could do a great job with that snack, they could make it very healthy and nutritious, but that won’t allow them to satisfy the expectations placed on them.
This is the position that professional K-12 educators are in. They only control 10% of children’s time. They are not able to meet the expectations of closing opportunity gaps. They can’t do it! It’s really frustrating and confusing for everybody that this expectation exists.
Familycare is modeled on Medicare. Medicare makes sure everybody over 65 has access to comprehensive professional support to solve their complex healthcare problems, because that’s the main problem facing people in retirement. Familycare would do the same thing for families. It would make sure that all families have comprehensive access to professional support to solve their child development problems. Not just a fragment of support that we currently provide in our public K-12 education system, but a much richer system of child development support that would make sure parents have access to more local trained professionals.
If we had Familycare, schools would have fewer problems with behavioral and mental health problems, and teachers would have a much more manageable, specialized focus on helping kids build the kinds of academic skills that they are trained to teach. Math teachers could focus on algebra and geometry, because their kids wouldn’t be distracted by so many other issues in the classroom. There wouldn’t be nearly the opportunity gaps we see by race and class in our country. So I think it would really transform the nature of our K-12 education system.
What’s challenging about parenting for you right now?
We have a 2-year-old and we have been trying to find the right child care situation for our kid, and I don’t feel there is enough research done to allow us to make that decision with a great deal of confidence. There are studies that are quite scary that show seemingly good child care systems wind up causing harm to children in ways that I’m sure none of the local parents in those communities anticipated. There are also studies showing that other kinds of child care benefit kids, but I don’t feel like there have been enough large-scale randomized control trials to just make this decision clear and straightforward, and I find that frustrating. We have this unbelievable underinvestment in research to understand these kinds of issues. Compared to other industries, child development is just a bastion of ignorance and stinginess in terms of our national research priorities. And that affects all of us.
When you’re working, where is your child?
We’ve been very fortunate to find a lovely nanny over the last year. She typically takes our child to a local park. Otherwise, our child would be in a crib taking a long nap, because he’s a major sleepyhead, or trying to crawl into my lap and mash all my keys on my computer while I’m trying to do work, or steal my snacks.
Tell me something wonderful about your child, or about the last time he made you smile or laugh.
This morning he just wanted to eat my cereal, so he’s in his chair, and he’s supposed to be eating his own food, and he kept just turning his head and looking over at me and yelling “Daddy’s food.” He insisted on getting down, running over, crawling into my lap. And then he won't just eat a bowl of my cereal, he wants just the raisins. And he wants to put the raisin in his mouth in just the right way. And he’s sitting on my lap and his belly is just protruding, and it’s just overwhelmingly delightful.
You can find Nate at natehilger.com or follow him on Twitter at @nate_g_hilger, and look for his book wherever books are sold.