New Year’s Resolution: Three Policies U.S. Moms and Families Need in 2023

A family friend recently moved from New York to Finland, where his wife is originally from. They had a baby a few weeks ago, just a couple months before I’m due to give birth to my first. Watching their social media over the last months as they prepared for and welcomed their little one has been touching, but it has also stoked my envy about how different new parenthood would look if I lived in a country that actually supported families and working parents.

From their ample, guaranteed paid parental leave for both mom and dad (now 160 days off for each) to the famous Finnish baby box that came to them packed with a high-quality baby parka for winter, outfits, hygiene products, a parenting guide, and a safe place for baby to sleep, I’ve felt that green-eyed monster rising with the dawn of my third trimester.

Because the U.S. stands alone among its peers in not guaranteeing a single week of paid parental leave for birthing parents or their partners, and because I freelance and don’t get leave through an employer, my wife and I are working longer hours and scrimping and saving so I can take a few unpaid months off when the baby arrives. Without a baby box in the mail, the more affluent and well networked among us rely on our own baby registries, swapping lists of must-have items with other recent moms and hoping someone delivers us that stroller or breast pump we have to have. With virtually no protections for pregnant people or rights for working parents, less affluent mothers in the U.S., disproportionately women of color, not only scrap together their own baby items, but face astonishingly dangerous pregnancy outcomes, and risk losing their jobs and sources of income altogether as a result of becoming parents. 

We’ve got work to do.

Here’s some good news: in Congress’s waning days at the end of 2022, something nearly miraculous happened. They passed a spending bill that actually included help for working moms! The massive bill included two amendments that family-supportive legislators have been backing and attempting to pass for years—the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which guarantees pregnant workers the right to accommodations, like regular breaks, chairs, and the right to carry water bottles with them; and the PUMP Act, which requires employers to give breastfeeding employees ample breaks and access to private spaces to pump during the work day.

Let’s keep the momentum going while we’re on a roll, and go even further for working parents in 2023. When better than the start of a brand new year to resolve to do better? 

Here are three policies we need for working families in 2023, and, just as importantly, the realistic paths Congress could follow to get us there. 

This year marks thirty years since President Bill Clinton signed into law the Family and Medical Leave Act, legislation that gives U.S. workers under some conditions the right to up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave from their job to care for themselves or a loved one. At the time the bill passed, advocates already knew unpaid leave would hardly suffice to get the majority of U.S. families through the hardest chapters of their lives, and immediately set to work to expand the bill to cover more families and offer paid time off. 

Three decades later, my New America colleague Vicki Shabo reports, just 24 percent of private sector employees get paid parental leave through their employers, while a growing handful of states offer their own paid leave programs. But most Americans still can’t take paid leave when they need it. 

Congress could fix all this today by passing the FAMILY Act. Sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), this legislation would create a public program for comprehensive paid family and medical leave for all U.S. workers, regardless of the size of their employer. 

Want to show your support for the FAMILY Act?

The Paid Leave for All Campaign makes it easy. Add your info to the form they provide, and they’ll send a note to your representatives asking them to pass universal paid family leave now!

While our parenting peers in other wealthy nations get their baby boxes, universal healthcare, affordable child care, and ample paid time off, the closest we get in the U.S. is a small, once-a-year tax credit for bearing the immense costs of parenting. This year, that tax credit will be around $2,000 per kid, and the poorest families won’t even qualify for it. 

For a rare few months in the pandemic, Congress showed us how much better a child tax credit could be. The American Rescue Plan increased the rate of the CTC to $3,000 per child over 6 and $3,600 per child 6 and under, and instead of making parents wait for the benefit until tax time, disbursed around $300 per month, allowing parents to use the money to cover basic needs, buy winter coats, fix air conditioners, and take care of other urgent needs to make their kids’ lives better. The results? Child poverty was cut by almost one-third!

But the short-term expanded CTC ended in 2021, almost immediately erasing those gains. And though Congress could have voted to make the expansion permanent this year by including it in the omnibus spending bill, it failed to do so, returning once again to unproven, old school arguments that benefits for parents decrease their willingness to work. It’s not too late to bring it back!

Tell Congress to Expand the Child Tax Credit

Critical advocacy groups like the National Women's Law Center and MomsRising have been calling on Congress to bring back the full CTC since it expired last year, and made a huge push to include it in the end-of-year spending bill. Follow these organizations as they renew their campaigns and strategies in 2023.

While most industries have returned to their pre-pandemic employment levels and supply norms, the child care industry is wrecked. The child care workforce remains down by approximately 80,000 workers from early 2020, even while demand for child care soars and many parents report the lack of affordable, high quality child care is keeping them out of work. 

I spent much of 2022 reporting on and researching the crisis in the child care sector, and some of the practical innovations that could set it on the right course. What they all have in common, however, is that they require public, federal investment, not only to increase the supply of child care programming and services available, but to drastically increase the wages and benefits of child care workers. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren has pointed out for years, there’s no private market solution to a problem as public as care for the youngest members of our society. 

Sen. Warren (D-MA) has put forward the Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act, while Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) has sponsored another ambitious bill, the Child Care for Working Families Act, both of which would cap family child care costs according to their income and provide more money for early education. Either of these bills would fill a huge gap in the U.S.’s economy and its education systems, an urgent need as families face down the uncertainty of 2023.

Want to Back Universal Child Care?

Join the Child Care for Every Family network and receive ongoing updates and invitations to join the movement for federal child care, as well as state and local initiatives to advance the cause, in the meantime. 

Paid leave, additional money for child rearing, and universal child care are at the top of Work Life Everything’s 2023 agenda. They all hinge on our lawmakers’ ability to see that working families provide an immense social and economic good by raising up the next generation of U.S. thinkers and problem solvers, and that no parent can do that without supportive infrastructure. That’s not something we can pack neatly into a baby box; but hey, we have to start somewhere.