When It Comes to Kids, Are We Communicating What We Think We Are?

It is hard to imagine more satisfying work than advocating for kids. I have been privileged to be able to spend my professional life doing this. Indeed, there are thousands of amazing organizations across the country and tens of thousands of child advocates who work tirelessly to ensure that all our kids can thrive. As important and effective as our advocacy has been, it is hard to ignore the fact that our collective efforts have not had the full impact we all hope for. As advocates, we feel that we are delivering messages that will generate broad public support for the issues we care about, but if we are honest with ourselves, these messages have not been fully effective in creating the broad public support for the programs we all know would improve the lives of kids.

What if the ways we talk about kids are moving the public to see the need for collective responsibility for all kids or the importance of considering what kids need in all of our decisions? What if our messages are unintentionally turning public opinion way from the causes we care about?

Today in partnership with the FrameWorks Institute, we are releasing How Are Advocates Talking about Children’s Issues? An Analysis of Field Communications, which begins to look at these challenging questions. This is the second report from our larger project, Building a New Narrative about Our Kids, that has been generously funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Children’s Hospital Association. The project’s first report, Why Aren’t Kids a Policy Priority? was released in June 2021 and described the cultural mindsets that keep children from being a policy priority.

How Are Advocates Talking about Children’s Issues? An Analysis of Field Communications takes a close look at the narratives and frames currently being used by a wide variety of child advocacy organizations and explores how these frames might affect public thinking. It is especially important for us as advocates to be open to the possibility that many of the frames we use and that deeply resonate with us may have an unintended effect on the general public we are trying to influence.

The final phase of our project will design and test new narratives and framing strategies in order to identify more productive ways of talking about the issues that are so important to us.

It is my hope that by changing the way we talk about kids, we will be more effective in building a culture that considers kids in all of the decisions we make.

Download a copy of the report: How Are Advocates Talking About Children’s Issues? An Analysis of Field Communications.