Why Aren’t Kids a Policy Priority?
Why aren’t American kids doing better? Why, in the world’s wealthiest country, blessed with a culture of innovation, and citizens and politicians who profess their love for kids are our children lagging behind those in other developed countries? Why has it been so difficult for nonprofits across the country to scale up and spread their efforts on behalf of kids? These are some of the questions that led to the creation of Leading for Kids in 2018.
Leading for Kids is committed to creating a culture that prioritizes kids and considers the impact of all of our decisions on their well-being. Thanks to generous funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Children’s Hospital Association, we are partnering with the Frameworks Institute to answer some of these questions. By understanding the mindsets we have about kids, we will develop tools to help shift them to increase the salience of children’s issues and build our collective responsibility to better address them.
Today we released the first of several reports from the project. It focuses on American mindsets about kids and how these mindsets limit the effectiveness of advocacy messaging. These findings expose significant challenges, but also provide a new perspective on how, working together, advocates can create deep and fundamental change.
Over the next several months, we will be releasing several additional reports including an analysis of the way kids’ issues are currently being framed by advocacy organizations, an analysis of the framing of children’s issues in the media, and a historical analysis of how of children’s issues have been framed.
The findings in this first report raise a number of questions that we will look to answer in the final part of the project:
Should advocates enter the conversation by talking about kids in the context of their families and caregivers, or focus on the kids themselves?
How can advocates counter racialized perceptions of deservingness—the idea that some families and kids don’t deserve our collective support?
How can advocates stretch people’s understanding of “kids issues” to include the full range of policies that affect them—and not just those that center on home and school?
How should the relationship between government and kids be characterized to get around the idea that government should stay out of families’ lives?
I am incredibly optimistic that this research will provide all of us who work to make kids’ lives better with tools to make our work more effective in the future. We are very appreciative of the support from our funders and by the many children’s advocates, social scientists, and communications experts who have collaborated to allow it to more fully develop. I hope this will be a major step towards creating an America where all decisions are made with the best interests of kids in mind!
Download a copy of the report: Why Aren’t Kids a Policy Priority? The Cultural Mindsets and Attitudes that Keep Kids Off the Public Agenda.