The Frameworks Institute is a nonprofit research institute that uses various social science disciplines in the service of economic justice, racial justice and other issues that matter to families with young children. A recent paper from the organization presents a new framing strategy for building support for kids: “Collective Caregiving.” In a recent interview, Andrew Volmert, the institute’s senior vice president of research, and Dr. David Alexander, pediatrician and president of Leading for Kids, an advocacy group that centers the well-being of children, talked about the underlying research and findings that powered the report.
Download “Collective Caregiving: A Frame for Talking about What Kids and Families Need to Thrive”
Q: Why hasn’t the U.S. built systems that support kids?
Alexander: It’s not that we don’t know what to do — and it’s not that we don’t have lots of organizations and people trying to make things better. But we don’t seem to be able to scale anything or change in a big way. If it were easy, somebody would’ve figured it out already.
But other countries have figured it out.
Alexander: In almost every industrialized country in the world, the kids are doing better than they are in the U.S. And if you look at any one of those countries and how they take care of their kids, you see a different system, but the one thing that struck me is that the health and well-being of kids sat differently culturally in the minds of people there than it does here.
In other countries I visited, in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, there was a sense of responsibility as a society to make sure kids did okay. Whereas in the United States, we see it as the family’s responsibility.
Is racism the big difference there?
Volmert: Racist mindsets do contribute to a sense of undeserving-ness. We talk about pathologizing the Black culture mindset, which leads to this assumption that there is some sort of dysfunctional culture or bad values. Which then makes it not a collective responsibility. The thing that’s required to fix that problem is those communities need to improve their own culture. And so that provides a justification for not being concerned about kids outside “our” own sphere of orbit, and particularly for Black and other children and families of color who obviously are dealing with inequities that are a result of structural problems and structural racism.
We’re basically saying, “Hey, there’s nothing we can do about that collectively.”
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And we as a country don’t like government very much.
Alexander: And we especially don’t like government interfering with family life. And it doesn’t matter how liberal or conservative you are. If you’re liberal, you tend to be willing to have government help out families that are in trouble — “not ‘my family,’ but those other families that are in trouble.” And in other parts of the world, they look to government as sort of the bedrock of the way we take care of families. It’s a core function of government, similar to how Americans look at the military.
Volmert: The question comes down to, how do we talk about government in ways that enable people to recognize the critical role that government can and should play in supporting children and families?
What was the research process like?
Volmert: We developed a set of frames explicitly and frontally reframe the role of government vis-à-vis families. We experimented with different frames. For example, “Government is a critical partner for families.” “Government is one of the pillars of children’s well-being alongside families and communities.” “Government is us.” And so on.
How were those frames received?
Volmert: They not only were ineffective; they actually backfired in various places.
So what did work?
Volmert: If you talk explicitly and straightforwardly about the public policies and programs that are needed, things that government can do that are essential to provide collective care for families and children, people are very open to it and open to that conversation. So instead of attempting, “Let’s have a big conversation about government’s role,” you just talk about the specific things that government can and should do.
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People will buy into something called “Collective Caregiving” more than they will government-sponsored caregiving.
Volmert: For sure. Now, we didn’t test “government-sponsored caregiving,” but I can tell you that would not work. “Collective Caregiving” gives people a sense that they are part of it.
They sometimes struggle to think about themselves as part of government. So it’s not that you’re hiding the ball. It’s just that you’re talking about government policies and programs as a set of actions for providing care as a society.
Alexander: People like the programs that government provides. They just don’t like the government because they think of it as “those people that we don’t like doing things that we don’t trust.” The joke was, the more excited I got about a way of talking about government, the worse it did.
It’s the G word.
Volmert: You can say it, but don’t lead with it.
In your survey of field communications, you reviewed white papers and messaging and nonprofit communications of all kinds. What did you find about their messaging?
Alexander: There are some messages that advocates are using that actually work, counter to what we think they’re doing — especially messages around vulnerability. If we want to bring more people into the tent and more people to have a common concern about kids, and really create an upswell of interest in supporting kids and families, we have to try some different things.
Volmert: It’s not that the field isn’t doing some good things. We saw trends that were promising but that need a nudge to be fully effective. There has been a tendency to talk more explicitly about racial equity, and while taking that is important, the way that the field was doing it, it tended to be by dropping in the phrase ‘racial equity.’
I often try to use that word in my writing, but it’s hard when you have to define it, because then it’s three paragraphs later and you’ve lost the thread. What do you recommend?
Volmert: In order to provide collective care, we have to make sure that we are doing it for all kids, not just our own kids. And we are explicitly talking about race partly by highlighting the ways in which historically and currently our society doesn’t provide care evenly across groups, that we don’t extend the same kind of collective care to Black children, other children of color, that we do to white children.
Alexander: That has a really strong positive effect on the way people think, especially Republicans. Instead of using that term equity, saying, “We do not provide care to all kids in the same way” does the same thing, but it gets people over a hump.
It was mind-boggling to me the first time the Frameworks team showed me this stuff. You can get people to think differently by just talking about equity in a different way.
And how about “Citizen Caregiver”? How did that arise in the conversation?
Volmert: Care is the central thing that people think kids need. So is it possible to stretch that idea so that when people think about care, they’re not just thinking about interpersonal caregiving; they’re thinking more broadly about the range of actions that we can take as a society, including public policies?
We played around with that idea and found that it was somewhat productive, and then we asked, “How do I have a role in this collective thing?” It’s not something that’s happening over there or something that someone else is doing. It’s something that people have a personal stake in and a personal responsibility for.
Which other issues might this framing strategy apply to?
Alexander: Gun violence, for one. Don’t start talking about “the epidemic of gun violence.” Start by saying, “One of the most important ways we can care for our children is to make sure that their schools are safe from gun violence.”
Volmert: With environmental issues, if you talk about healthy air and water, people immediately get, “Wait a minute, yes, of course that affects kids’ well-being. And there’s actually nothing that I can do individually or that families can do to solve that problem on their own. There’s nothing I can do as a parent to make sure that my kids are breathing healthy air, because this is something outside of any individual’s control.”
And so it becomes a way to prevent people from defaulting back to this idea that, “Oh, it’s just the family’s job. This must be parents’ responsibility.” Instead they think: “Okay, wait a minute. I wouldn’t usually think of this as a kid’s issue, but it requires collective action in order to make sure that all kids have what they need to do well.”
Early Learning Nation columnist Mark Swartz writes for and about nonprofit organizations. Author of the children's books Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Lost Flamingo, Magpie Bridge and The Giant of the Flood as well as a few novels, he lives in Takoma Park, MD, with his wife and two children.
