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    ‘Couples Therapy,’ but for Politics

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    Growing political polarization is a problem that keeps me up at night. Not because I think it’s bad to have strong opinions, but because of what social scientists call affective polarization: polarization beyond political disagreement, when “ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party.” At its worst, affective polarization can lead to hate and dehumanization.When my colleague Thomas Edsall wrote about affective polarization earlier this year, he quoted Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth, who said that part of what’s behind today’s intense partisan divide is that “Politicians, instead of focusing on the large list of issues where there is broad agreement in the American public, endlessly re-litigate social divides like gay rights and abortion to mobilize a base they fear will stay home if they focus on the mundane details of pragmatic governance.”I see this play out when I hear activists suggest that you can’t talk to them about climate change if you don’t agree with their stance on the Israel-Hamas war, or when I see politicians tying approval of military appointments to abortion access. The attitude seems to be: You have to agree with me about everything or you’re my enemy and we can’t work together on anything. It leads to a whole lot of nothing.Because I cover family policy, the lack of movement on areas of “pragmatic governance” where there is “broad agreement” drives me bonkers. A prime example is federal paid leave, which is popular among voters across the spectrum, yet remains in legislative purgatory, and has for decades. Though there’s a bipartisan working group in Congress on the issue, we’re still a long way from any change, leaving us out of step with most wealthy nations and creating a lot of stress and economic hardship for people just trying to make ends meet while also caring for children or sick family members.But there’s a group of people of all ideological backgrounds — social conservatives, progressive activists, budget wonks and lots of people in between — that’s been convening over the past year, and that gives me a bit of hope for family policy’s future. It also offers a road map for people who disagree vehemently on issues to have productive conversations and find points of connection. If nothing else, the group’s participants agree that too many American families are struggling, that families should be more of a political priority and that something needs to be done to help them.The convocation has the somewhat jargony name Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families, and its members let me sit in on one of their guided discussions with the understanding that I would follow the Chatham House Rule — I can report on what was said during the session but not reveal “the identity nor the affiliation” of any speaker.The group consists of around 30 people and it has met monthly since April. It is directed by Abby McCloskey, who runs a research and consulting firm and was a policy adviser for Jeb Bush’s and Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaigns and Howard Schultz’s exploratory 2020 presidential run. The collaborative is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. With permission, after the meeting I reached out to some of the individuals involved to see if they’d be comfortable talking in general terms about their experiences in the group.During the initial meetings, the members came up with set of family policy principles they could mostly agree on. The discussion I observed involved them delivering feedback on a draft of a report outlining those principles. At first, I feared this was going to be an absolutely mind-numbing way to spend three hours of my life and that I would have to gently pinch myself to stay awake while listening to a discussion of the budgetary implications of the earned-income tax credit.Instead, the conversation was spicy while still being respectful, and full of fundamental disagreements that did not seem completely papered over simply for the sake of congeniality. McCloskey described it to me more than once as feeling like “couples therapy,” and it did.For example, a few people objected to wording in the report about center-based child care that they felt put a thumb on the scale against stay-at-home parents. Others disagreed with that objection, and there was an impassioned back-and-forth about it. Ultimately, the moderator stepped in, restated everyone’s point of view in a neutral way and advised that everyone needn’t agree on every detail to move forward.I give a lot of credit to that moderator, the aptly named David Fairman, who is a senior mediator at the Consensus Building Institute, for the structure and tone of the discussion. When we spoke on the phone afterward, he explained that C.B.I. is one of “roughly a dozen” similar organizations that help conduct mediation on public issues. His job is to help find common ground among people with different backgrounds and belief systems.There are three main things Fairman does to facilitate these discussions. The first is to build relationships among participants, so that “they discover that there’s more to them than the battle of tweets that they’ve had or the countering publications or testimony and the identities that they carry with their businesses, with their advocacy groups or whoever.” That kind of humanizing is done partly through guided conversations in breakout groups, and some of it is done more organically through events like in-person cocktail hours.The second is by getting people to “listen openly” during discussions, which means calming down their “rebuttal minds, the hamster wheel that is almost always turning as we listen to someone with whom we disagree, coming up with the counterarguments,” Fairman explained. Instead, he urges people to ask “clarifying questions, not rhetorical questions, not debating questions.” And he gave this example: “What do you mean by saying that ‘you really feel strongly that the child tax credit should remain universal’? Is it that the most important thing about it is that it’s for everyone? Or is it that you are worried that the political support for it will not be there if it is not universal, or is it something else? I just want to know.”The third, and I would argue the most difficult component, is trying to get beyond people’s stated positions to their underlying interests, values and principles, to create space “to explore new ways of thinking about the options,” Fairman said. He referred to a disagreement over how generous a child care tax credit or other allowance could be. The group was at an impasse. While they couldn’t agree on the appropriate size of the credit, a new idea emerged: that more flexibility for parents to choose how to spend the credit “over the life cycle of their child would be a win, even if it doesn’t address the question of the absolute amount of funding.”I also interviewed several members of the group about their experiences. My takeaway was that overall, people were happy to be in conversation with one another, to meet basically agreeable people with totally different ways of framing the problems at hand and to think hard about their own biases. “I think the level of candor was surprising,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center. “I think everybody committed to coming in with a willingness to critique their own side where necessary and to say frankly where their red lines were.”But the process was certainly not a cure-all. Many said that they wished they had even more time to work through the document they were creating. Some felt that some fundamental concerns — particularly with regard to race and immigration — weren’t aired thoroughly enough before moving on to the particulars of policymaking. More than one person expressed frustration that systemic racism was not more explicitly addressed and that barriers to accessing currently available benefits weren’t fully interrogated.While all the participants thought they would have a document at the end of the process that they would be willing to put their names to, some wondered if it would wind up being so watered down that it wouldn’t have “truly moved the needle,” as Lina Guzman, the chief strategy officer at Child Trends, put it, to get more people fired up about these issues.Even if they come up with something that isn’t earth-shattering, every person I spoke to felt that the process was worthwhile because of the relationships they built. “I think that having created the space to do this is valuable in and of itself, even if what we come out with falls short of what some people might have hoped,” said Katharine Stevens, the founder and chief executive of the Center on Child and Family Policy.We don’t know what unexpected alliances and priorities might arise in national politics in the coming years. But because these professionals have spent a lot of hours together talking about their deepest values, giving and getting clarity about their beliefs, they may find unexpected sources of support for specific ideas that aren’t yet mainstream.I came out of observing the discussion mostly wishing that we could all have mediators like Fairman at our holiday tables. We can’t simply wish away the profound disagreements many of us have. But I’ll certainly be trying to ask more clarifying questions of people I don’t agree with. Quieting my rebuttal mind, as a professional opinion haver, will be a rough one, but I’m going to do my best, and I’m going to try to maintain as much good faith as I can muster. We’ll need it in 2024. More

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      Biden Weighs State of the Union Focus on His Unfinished Agenda

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      As the president prepares for his national address, his aides debate an emphasis on his still-unrealized plans for child care, prekindergarten and more.WASHINGTON — President Biden’s top economic aides have battled for weeks over a key decision for his State of the Union address on Tuesday: how much to talk about child care, prekindergarten, paid leave and other new spending proposals that the president failed to secure in the flurry of economic legislation he signed in his first two years in office.Some advisers have pushed for Mr. Biden to spend relatively little time on those efforts, even though he is set to again propose them in detail in the budget blueprint he will release in March. They want the president to continue championing the spending he did sign into law, like investments in infrastructure like roads and water pipes, and advanced manufacturing industries like semiconductors, while positioning him as a bipartisan bridge-builder on critical issues for the middle class.Other aides want Mr. Biden to spend significant time in the speech on an issue set that could form the core of his likely re-election pitch to key swing voters, particularly women. Polls by liberal groups suggest such a focus, on helping working families afford care for their children and aging parents, could prove a winning campaign message.The debate is one of many taking place inside the administration as Mr. Biden tries to determine which issues to focus on in a speech that carries extra importance this year. It will be Mr. Biden’s first address to the new Republican majority in the House, which has effectively slammed the brakes on his legislative agenda for the next two years. And it could be a preview for the themes Mr. Biden would stress on the 2024 campaign trail should he run for a second term.Administration officials caution that Mr. Biden has not finalized his strategy. A White House official said Friday that the president was preparing to tout his economic record and his full vision for the economy.The Biden PresidencyHere’s where the president stands as the third year of his term begins.State of the Union: President Biden will deliver his second State of the Union speech on Feb. 7, at a time when he faces an aggressive House controlled by Republicans and a special counsel investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information.Chief of Staff: Mr. Biden named Jeffrey D. Zients, his former coronavirus response coordinator, as his next chief of staff. Mr. Zients replaces Ron Klain, who has run the White House since the president took office.Economic Aide Steps Down: Brian Deese, who played a pivotal role in negotiating economic legislation Mr. Biden signed in his first two years in office, is leaving his position as the president’s top economic adviser.Eyeing 2024: Mr. Biden has been assailing House Republicans over their tax and spending plans, including potential changes to Social Security and Medicare, as he ramps up for what is likely to be a run for re-election.Few of Mr. Biden’s advisers expect Congress to act in the next two years on paid leave, an enhanced tax credit for parents, expanded support for caregivers for disabled and older Americans or expanded access to affordable child care. All were centerpieces of the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan Mr. Biden announced in the first months of his administration. Mr. Biden proposes to offset those and other proposals with tax increases on high earners and corporations.Earlier this week, Mr. Biden hinted that he may be preparing to pour more attention on those so-called “care economy” proposals, which he and his economic team say would help alleviate problems that crimp family budgets and block would-be workers from looking for jobs.At a White House event celebrating the 30th anniversary of a law that mandated certain workers be allowed to take unpaid medical leave, Mr. Biden ticked through his administration’s efforts to invest in a variety of care programs in the last two years, while acknowledging failure to pass federally mandated paid leave and other larger programs.Mr. Biden said he remained committed to “passing a national program of paid leave and medical leave.”“And, by the way, American workers deserve paid sick days as well,” he said. “Paid sick days. Look, I’ve called on Congress to act, and I’ll continue fighting.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.For Mr. Biden, continuing to call for new spending initiatives aimed at lower- and middle-income workers would draw a clear contrast with the still-nascent field of Republicans seeking the White House in 2024. It would cheer some outside advocacy groups that have pushed him to renew his focus on programs that would particularly aid women and children.The State of the Union speech “presents the president with a rare opportunity to take a victory lap and, simultaneously, advance his agenda,” the advocacy group First Focus on Children said in a news release this week. “All to the benefit of children.”The efforts could also address what Mr. Biden’s advisers have identified as a lingering source of weakness in the recovery from the pandemic recession: high costs of caregiving, which are blocking Americans from looking for work. The nonprofit group ReadyNation estimates in a new report that child care challenges cost American families $78 billion a year and employers another $23 billion.“Among prime-age people not working in the United States, roughly half of them list care responsibilities as the main reason for not participating in the labor force,” Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters this week. She noted that the jobs rebound has lagged in care industries like nursing homes and day care centers.“These remain economic challenges and addressing them could go a long ways towards supporting our nation’s labor supply,” she said.But focusing on that unfinished economic work could conflict with Mr. Biden’s repeated efforts this year to portray the economy as strong and position him as a president who reached across the aisle to secure big new investments that are lifting growth and job creation. On Friday, the president celebrated news that the economy created 517,000 jobs in January, in a brief speech that did not mention the challenges facing caregivers.Calling for vast new spending programs also risks further antagonizing House conservatives, who have made government spending their first large fight with the president. Republicans have threatened to allow the United States to fall into an economically catastrophic default on government debt by not raising the federal borrowing limit, unless Mr. Biden agrees to sharp cuts in existing spending.“Revenue into the government has never been higher,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, told reporters on Thursday, a day after he met with Mr. Biden at the White House to discuss fiscal issues and the debt limit. “It’s the highest revenue we’ve ever seen in. So it’s not a revenue problem. It’s a spending problem.”Catie Edmondson More

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      What Does the New Congress Mean for Family Policy?

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      Now that the dust has (nearly) settled on the 2022 midterm elections and Republicans are preparing to take control of the House while Democrats will hold onto the Senate, I wanted to check in with some family policy advocates to see what a split Congress might mean for investments in caregiving.To recap: The initial formulation of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan offered the prospect of “the most transformative investment in children and caregiving in generations,” including large investments in child care, elder care and expanded child tax credits. Permanently funded federal paid family leave was also on the table.None of that happened in the current Congress, with Democrats narrowly holding both houses, despite the fact that child care and leave are extremely popular. According to a new national online survey of over 1,000 voters from the First Five Years Fund: “65 percent of voters say they are disappointed (45 percent) or even angry (20 percent) that Congress failed to act” on child care this year. “Suburban women are even more dismayed — 71 percent describe themselves as angry or disappointed.”Further, 81 percent of respondents say that their member of Congress should work with the Biden administration to expand affordable child care options; 65 percent of Republicans agree. According to a Morning Consult-Politico poll from about a year ago, paid family and medical leave is even more popular; only 5 percent of registered voters said it should not be available.When I asked some of my readers in the sandwich generation about what would make their lives easier, many of them echoed the sentiments of Liza Clay Yu, who has two kids under 4 and is also caring for several older family members: “I think the most helpful thing we could hope for would be affordable, reliable, high-quality child care.”So do we have any hope that these very necessary care infrastructure policies will move forward now?Let’s remember that we still have a brief period before the 118th Congress takes over in January. Sarah Rittling, the executive director of the First Five Years Fund, said “a lot gets done potentially at the last minute,” and while she doesn’t expect any child care plans as generous as those in the original B.B.B. framework, something could be squeezed in before the end of 2022.There’s also the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (P.W.F.A.), which would require employers to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant and postpartum and nursing workers, which already passed the House with bipartisan support. Reasonable accommodations could include a designated space for pumping breast milk, a chair to sit in for a supermarket cashier or temporary relief from certain workplace duties if they are dangerous, said Dina Bakst, the co-founder and co-president of the advocacy group A Better Balance.The bill’s proponents believe it could pass the Senate, it just needs to be put to a vote. “Leader Schumer should bring P.W.F.A. up immediately,” Bakst said. “Working women have been the backbone of our economy, and we need our leaders to stand up and give pregnant and postpartum workers the respect they deserve.” Bakst is not optimistic that P.W.F.A. would pass the House again under its new Republican leadership. “We’re literally at the end,” she said.Bakst is probably right. Christine Matthews, a pollster who’s worked with Republican clients in the past, pointed me to the Congressional Republican Study Committee Family Policy Agenda, and said “that is broadcasting what they are focused on in terms of family and children policies.” She was not surprised to see that the document listed, as its No. 1 agenda item, the statement: “We support the protection of children from far-left ideologies inside and outside the classroom.”There is child care legislation on that agenda, but it mostly concerns deregulating the industry so that it might become less expensive rather than using federal money to raise pay for care workers. That doesn’t appear to fix one of the most critical child care problems we currently have, which stems from a worker shortage owing to low pay in the industry.Similarly, the current Republican Study Committee agenda doesn’t propose a traditional paid family leave plan like those in many of our peer nations. Rather, it offers suggestions about how workers could transfer overtime pay into more paid days off and allowing states to extend Medicaid coverage for postpartum women to last more than 60 days.Even though things don’t look particularly rosy for family policy at the federal level, there are small wins happening at the state level. Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow for paid leave policy and strategy at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said, of paid family leave, “on balance, I’m excited about the possibility of state progress in places like Maine, where there’s a legislative effort and a potential ballot for 2023.” She also mentioned movement toward paid leave happening in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico.Jocelyn Frye, the president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, who calls herself an “eternal optimist” about policy at the federal level, said she believes the conversation has moved forward in recent years. “The path is complicated, but the urgency is real” and “the support for the policies is real.” Going forward, she added, “the conversation will be less about whether there’s a value in paid leave, and increasingly a conversation about what paid leave should look like.”After a few of these conversations, I had a measure of guarded optimism about the prospects for some of these policies. I think the pandemic changed the national calculus around the issue of care. I believe more people of all political stripes are beginning to realize that many Americans need robust governmental support to continue working while raising our families.Shabo co-wrote a report for New America that found rural Americans — who do not tend to vote for Democrats — are in particular need of paid leave, because they tend to live much farther from care options. “Without access to paid sick time and paid leave for serious family and medical needs, workers are often forced to manage taking care of themselves or loved ones without pay while struggling to make ends meet, potentially jeopardizing their health, job or economic security,” the report notes. Matthews said that in focus groups she conducted among Americans from rural areas, “men were just as interested in paid family leave as the women, because they had much more rigid jobs,” and they could get fired for taking time off to care for a sick relative or wife who was having health issues postpartum.These aren’t women’s issues. They aren’t urban issues and they aren’t mom issues. They are everybody issues. The incoming Congress should remember that.Want More?In October, The Times’s Dana Goldstein reported, “Why You Can’t Find Child Care: 100,000 Workers Are Missing.” The question: “Where did they go?” The answer: “To better-paying jobs stocking shelves, cleaning offices or doing anything that pays more than $15 an hour.” In the clichéd parlance of the internet: The math is not mathing.Another congressional battle is shaping up over expanded child tax credits, which lapsed at the end of 2021, reports The Times’s Jason DeParle: “Some Democrats hope to revive payments to small groups of parents as part of a year-end tax deal, and despite Republicans taking control of the House in January, restoring the full program remains a long-term Democratic goal.”Some anti-abortion advocates are now arguing for more generous family policies. “Fighting state-level battles at the ballot box requires a greater willingness to find compromise and credible commitment to supporting women and children, rather than the legal strategy that, by necessity, took center stage from 1973 until this year,” wrote Patrick T. Brown in America magazine. He made a similar argument in a guest essay for Opinion in May.American rail workers may go on strike over the issue of paid sick leave. According to reporting in October by The Times’s Peter S. Goodman:“More than anything, workers expressed outrage over their lack of paid sick leave. Most spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing the risk of being disciplined or fired.”“‘You had guys that just didn’t want to share that they had Covid because they couldn’t afford to take off,’ said a former member of a traveling maintenance gang for a major railroad based in Alabama. ‘I believe it added to the spread on the road.’”Tiny VictoriesParenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories.I designated an old pair of sweatpants as my mealtime pants. Since I frequently have a child sitting in my lap at a meal, I don’t care when those pants get covered in food.— Lisa Leininger, Ann Arbor, Mich.If you want a chance to get your Tiny Victory published, find us on Instagram @NYTparenting and use the hashtag #tinyvictories, email us or enter your Tiny Victory at the bottom of this page. Include your full name and location. Tiny Victories may be edited for clarity and style. Your name, location and comments may be published, but your contact information will not. By submitting to us, you agree that you have read, understand and accept the Reader Submission Terms in relation to all of the content and other information you send to us. More