Building a New Narrative about Kids

In the United States, we share a common desire for children to be healthy and develop well. Despite this desire, we don’t tend to center the needs of children and young people in our collective decision-making. That responsibility is heaped onto individual adults—namely parents and teachers—while public policies and infrastructure to support them is seen as ineffective, inappropriate, or intrusive.

New research conducted by the FrameWorks Institute in partnership with Leading for Kids shows that, by adopting the frame of collective caregiving, we can expand our thinking as a society about the social conditions and structural supports that children and families depend on to thrive. In this conversation, we were joined by the following speakers to hear about the research behind the strategy and where leading advocates in the field are already seeing opportunities to put it into practice:

• Marquita Little Numan, Executive Director, Partnership for America’s Children
• Jeanette Elstein, Program Officer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
• Tara Watson, Director—Center for Economic Security and Opportunity, Brookings Institution
• David Alexander, President, Leading for Kids
• John Gomperts, Executive Fellow, Campaign for Grade-Level Reading
• Jessica Moyer, Senior Principal Strategist, The FrameWorks Institute