What's on the ballot for parents & caregivers this election?

Election day is one week away.

All elections are important - but this one is especially critical. From childcare to paid family leave and reproductive rights, there’s a lot on the ballot this year that directly impacts parents and caregivers.

And so, ahead of election day, we put together a special election week episode, compiling the most relevant snippets from our earlier interviews with politicians, public policy experts and advocates.

This includes commentary from:

‍Congresswoman Katherine Clark: Representative Clark has served as Democratic Whip since 2023 and the U.S. representative for Massachusetts's 5th congressional district since 2013.

‍Reshma Saujani: Reshma is the founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First, a non-profit fighting for structural change with affordable childcare, paid family leave and equal pay for moms.

Erin Erenberg & Raena Boston: Erin and Raena are the co-founders of Chamber of Mothers, a non-profit organization driving a collective movement to advance maternal rights in America.

Orli Cotel: Orli is a senior advisor at Moms First and previously PaidLeave for the U.S., where she helped win paid leave for more than 8.5 million people at companies like Walmart and Starbucks.

Sarah Hardy: Sarah is the co-founder and chief people and experience officer at Bobbie, a female-founded, mom-led formula company well known for their advocacy work for parents and families.

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Allison: Our first clip is from our conversation with Congresswoman Catherine Clark, who has served as Democratic whip since 2023. She has been the US representative for Massachusetts's fifth congressional district since 2013. We spoke to representative Clark about how affordable and accessible childcare is not just something that is nice for parents, it's actually a really important economic issue. In this clip, she shares what success looks like with childcare.

Allison: And what's stopping us from achieving more affordable and accessible childcare? Have you seen major changes since you were in those earlier days when your children were really young? What has changed and what has not?

Rep. Katherine Clark: Yeah, I mean, I really, you know, the frustration of this work is that it is very slow and I think there are a few reasons for that. And one of them is that childcare is predominantly provided by women and women of color. And women's work has always been a replacement for a government-funded social safety net.

So we undervalue women's work of all types. We underpay or don't pay equally for women's work. And then we rely on the work of women to care for our own children as they are unable to afford working full-time and more than full-time to care for their own families on the wages they're paid. So it's a very layered cultural reason why we're here.

And it is really gonna take a paradigm shift that we started to see in the pandemic and we need to continue because the pandemic really drew back the curtain on the fact that we can no longer say, oh, this is just a private decision between parents and providers. There is a public good here.

And I know often as a leading Democrat, I get many chances to work with the National Chamber of Commerce, but they want to work with me on child care because they understand this is a workforce issue. And if we want the economy to recover, if we want to continue to have opportunities for women and retain women in the workforce, we need to address this issue.

They're all so layered together, paid leave, equal pay, child care. We're behind other developed countries with just an example of toddler care. Other countries invest on average $15,000 of public funds into a toddler's care. In the United States, we invest $500.

And that difference makes a huge difference in how kids show up ready for school and how parents are able to participate in the workforce.

Allison: I think about that a lot because I have one child who's in first grade public school and the amount that we celebrated when finally we had access to public free education, which of course is not free. We pay taxes for that. But you know what I mean, we are no longer paid for that private daycare or a nanny or whatnot.

And I know that in Massachusetts, and this is at the state level, they recently announced universal pre-K starting at the age of four. And so there are a lot of states, it seems to me, and again, I know way less about this than you do, but it seems like there are certain state initiatives. How does that impact your work?

Rep Katherine Clark: Yeah, I mean, certainly it is helpful. It is the right step. I just don't see how states can truly help with this conundrum we have in childcare that we pay very low wages to early educators and we have very high costs of tuition for families.

And able to bridge that, to pull up wages, without further exacerbating the costs of childcare, it's gonna need federal help. And that is what all these other countries have discovered. And we are just slow to the game, but we have to take the focus that the pandemic put on childcare and continue to build on that.

And we're gonna have to do it with private business, businesses of all sizes have been some of our best partners in helping us redefine childcare and recognize it as this economic infrastructure. So I think it's all helpful, but at the end of the day, we need to make this push. And it is childcare and it is also care for adults. Because I know that that was certainly part of my story of still having school-aged children and two parents who were very incapacitated and did not need full-time care. That fell primarily on me.

That is the story of women across this country who are caught in trying to meet their family members' long-term care needs as they age, having to deal with the high costs of childcare. And we should get out of the fact that, just like you said, Allison, that we celebrate and wait for that fifth birthday because it means freedom from childcare to issue.

Allison: Yeah, yeah. I wanna ask, what does success look like with childcare and who is stopping us from getting to that point?Rep Katherine Clark: I think success looks that we can change this model, that we can recognize that from infant toddler to preschool care is really part of a public education system and treat it in that same way. This should be, you know, we've gone way past in our research, in our understanding of brain development, this idea that somehow this is glorified babysitting.

We know this is fundamental, and especially for low-income children, the exposure to rich language programs, the social developmental growth. I mean, for all kids, it is a tremendous benefit, and it is absolutely necessary for so many families who have two working families, are single parent households.

We know that, you know, I hear about this issue in the high costs from as many grandparents as I do from the parents themselves because they're watching their children struggle under the cost and not being able to find the child care that they need. So success is going to be defined by this recognition of bringing up the professionalization of child care providers and also helping parents reduce this cost.

And it's going to be, we need a sort of a slate of pro-family policies, including paid leave and pay equity. But childcare is really gonna be a critical piece. So universal pre-K and really policies where families are not do not have to spend more than 7% of their income on childcare costs.

Allison: Our next clip is from our interview with Orli Cotel, a senior advisor at Moms First, who has spent nearly a decade advocating for paid leave. During her time at Paid Leave for the U.S,, she helped win paid leave for more than 8.5 million people at companies like Walmart and Starbucks. We got right into it and asked her how the 2024 election matters for paid family leave.

Allison: Let's talk about the election. So I got so many texts and messages when Kamala, I think it was her first speech and she mentioned paid family leave in that speech. I think people were like, wow, does this mean that this is gonna be one of the main things that she is talking about? How does this election matter for paid family leave?

Orli: Well, first of all, I'll go back to what I said before. Elections matter. Elections matter for the most personal parts of your life. It's not something that's just distant and remote for us. When you look at the workplace rights that you have, when you look at how things are going for you in your career, there are decisions that our lawmakers make that impact our careers and our lives.

And I'll zoom out for one minute and talk, for example, about one of the most important pieces of legislation to pass in recent years about workplace rights, especially for women and birthing people, was a law called the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

And that passed just a couple of years ago. And it was a very, you know, provided very basic protections. Things like saying that a pregnant person should be allowed to have a chair to sit on at work or a bottle of water, right? Or, you know, an hour off to go to a doctor's appointment. Things, protections that a lot of working people in this country still don't have, but are absolutely critical. Seems like a basic no-brainer that everyone would support.

There were 24 U.S. senators who voted against the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, who literally voted against letting a pregnant person have a bottle of water and a chair to sit on it.

That was shameful. If I were a constituent in one of those states, I would want to know about that and I would want to make sure not to vote for them again because there should be consequences for those kinds of actions.

When it comes to this election coming up, I would say that Harris-Walz is the most pro-paid family leave ticket we've ever seen in this country. A lot of people don't know that Kamala Harris and Governor Walz both have been big advocates for paid family leave in their own careers.

When I was at the Paid Leave for the U.S. campaign, Kamala was one of the first candidates who we endorsed because she was such a strong supporter of paid leave. And in particular, she had called at the time for six months of paid family leave. She was going a lot farther than other folks.

And I've also heard about her own experience, being with her mother in hospice in the last days of her mother's life and her own experience as a family caregiver, which I'm sure has really influenced her support for why comprehensive paid family leave going beyond parental leave is so important for everyone.

And Governor Walz helped to, he signed paid leave into law in his home state of Minnesota.

Allison: I'm a Minnesotan, so I'm right in the thick of that. Very happy when that passed.

Orli: So when I say that 14 states have statewide paid leave, Minnesota is one of those and he's been a champion. And in fact, he was on the Ezra Klein podcast recently. And when he was asked what should be the top priority for Democrats if they win this election, he said one of the first things they should do out of the gate is pass national paid family leave.

I also am sure that his time as a teacher impacted him in this area because teachers are among those who are least likely to have paid leave. I'm really excited to see paid leave be a front and center issue in this election. I think, again, one of the things we really need to do is keep up the pressure and the momentum so that paid leave can move forward after November.

Allison: Up next is a portion of our conversation with Raena Boston and Erin Erenberg, co-founders of Chamber of Mothers, which is a nonprofit advocating for paid leave, affordable child care, and maternal health. We talked with Raena and Erin about their Vote Like a Mother movement, a voter registration and education initiative that empowers parents to learn more about all candidates' positions on the topics most important to parents.

Allison: Let's talk about Vote Like a Mother. Is that a campaign? Would you call it a campaign, a movement, an initiative? I would love for you to share more about that.

Erin: You can call it all those things, Allison. Yeah, so Vote Like a Mother is IP. It's quite a real trademark. We were gifted the IP right when we started, and quite frankly, we were so new that we knew it was amazing IP, and there's a community built around it, but we weren't quite sure what to do with it yet.

Now that we have set up our own 501c3 and we're organized and we have our strategy in place, we look at this election year and we know how important it is. Everybody has seen what happened in Kansas and Ohio when women turned out and stood up for their reproductive freedom, which we see as a big part of maternal health. We actually know it's part of maternal health.

And so we see just such an opportunity for mothers to come out and vote according to interest. So Vote Like a Mother is a campaign that we're doing in concert with a few partners. I Am a Voter is providing the, you can text right now, anybody listening, you can try it out, do it right now, text mother to 26797. And not only will you go through the steps of being registered to vote, you can look up your status, you can find out where your polling place is, you can get information on the upcoming elections, super important you can download your sample ballot.

So keep having this theme of time poverty. Moms have so much on our plates. You don't wanna go into the election feeling unsteady. You don't wanna go in just influenced by external sources. You want to be able to download your sample ballot, take a minute when the kids are down, when you can think straight, when you can go on and Google who are these candidates? What are the issues? What do I care about?

Google candidate name plus childcare, plus maternal health, plus paid family and medical leave, plus whatever the issue is that you care most about, find out where they stand, see what the initiatives are, when your local elections are coming up and really take a minute.

So Vote Like a Mother is all about voting according to your interests as a mother. It is a bipartisan campaign. We're not telling you who to vote for, but we are telling you to look up your status, get really sturdy on what you believe and what candidates and what measures fall in line with what you believe so that you make decisions related to voting that are according to your own interests.

Allison: And related to your motherhood, right? I mean, I think that's an interesting way to think about it. I originally was wondering if you were gonna do more to explain, you know, oh, here are like the five different things that parents care about and here's what each candidate and it's interesting to me that you've structured it.

You're not doing a prescriptive type of resource, it sounds like. It's much more almost just reminding people, vote with that identity and those priorities that are important to you as a parent, but of course as a mother in mind.

Raena: It's also a rallying cry. Yeah, it's a rallying cry in that you can vote like a mother for climate change. You can vote like a mother for parental leave or paid family medical leave, vote like a mother for childcare. It is to me a rallying cry and it's a very empowered way to advocate and also for moms to know that the things that they care about are important. They should be prioritized. They are kitchen table issues, literally. These are gigantic things that impact our economy and you should vote like a mother for those things that matter.

Allison: I was just gonna say to center your identity as a mother in your voting decisions.

Raena: It's very in line with what we're doing with Chamber of Mothers, again, like what are our affinities we have in common? What are our needs we have in common? If we all are centering our voting identity in motherhood, we can make a change together to create a country that better serves mothers. And that's our mission. It's uniting mothers as advocates to create a better America.

Allison: Yeah, and I think the reason it struck me when you first described it is, mothers almost always put ourselves last. And so it's this rallying cry to say, put yourself first, which actually isn't even that much about you. It's about your family and it's about your community and it's about everyone. So I just, I love it. I think it's so smart and it is really inspirational.

Allison: Our next clip is from our conversation with Sarah Hardy, co-founder and chief people and experience officer at Bobbie. Bobbie is a female-founded, mom-led formula company, but they're also very well known for their advocacy work.

Sarah testified in front of Congress about the childcare crisis and its negative implications on working parents in the United States. She also uses her platform to push for paid parental leave in this country, like through Bobby's Parents Push Harder initiative that launched this year.

We asked Sarah to tell us more about this campaign, its purpose, and how businesses can get involved with the coalition supporting this movement, which Parentaly is proud to be a part of.

Allison: We are running out of time, but I have two questions I wanna make sure I get in. Parents push harder, tell me about that.

Sarah: Oh my gosh, okay, so we love a good campaign. This is actually a pretty incredible story. So Naomi [Osaka], her team reached out to us organically. We were thrilled and shocked. It was one of those moments where, and she appreciated what Bobbie stood for and who we were in addition to our products.

And we ended up kicking off this relationship and it became clear to us that Naomi's return to work back to the court would be incredible to document. And normalizing that when a parent has a baby going back to work is the same whether you're one of the world's most famous tennis pros or if you're going back to a regular office job and you know what not.

So we thought it was a great opportunity to really share her journey back to work and to take a stand, to drive more eyeballs, to drive attention towards getting federal pay leave passed as part of this opportunity.

So at the top of 2024, we launched a campaign called Parents Push Harder. And it did just that. It talked about her journey to becoming a mom and going back to the court and what that looked like and the tradeoff decisions that you have to make.

And what we did was in launching the campaign, we also decided, hey, you know what? How are we going to activate all the eyeballs that we have on this particular moment? And so we chose the Family Act to drive people to. The Family Act would guarantee a minimum of $580 per family, welcoming that child to be able to use for whatever it might be in that first period of time.

And so we said, you know what? We're actually gonna do some grants and offer $580 and have people write in to talk about how they would use the $580. Originally, we thought we would do 50 total grants for this.

You're not gonna believe this, Allison. We got 11,000 applications. 11 thousand.

Allison: I totally believe that.

Sarah: I just remember that moment being like, this cause is worth it. 11,000 applications to make a case for $580 matter to that family. I honestly feel emotional just thinking about it because it just talks about the power that some of this legislation really could have in American families.

We did what we do? We looked at each other and said, oh my gosh, this is totally unexpected. We didn't think we would get this amount of inbound interest. And so today we've actually onboarded 38 other partners that have helped us fund 200 of these grants up from the original 50.

So if you're a business leader out there and you wanna get on board, please do. We have started a coalition and we're binding together these businesses that have come together in this moment for the long haul to continue to figure out what are the ways that we can collaborate and to make our voices heard from the private sector, that it is really, really important to the health of our business and the wellness of our employees to get something like federal paid leave.

Allison: And this last clip is from our exclusive interview with Reshma Saujani, CEO and founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First. Her nonprofit tirelessly advocates for working families, especially as it relates to paid leave and affordable childcare. In fact, their efforts helped get questions about childcare into this year's presidential and vice presidential debates.

We interviewed Reshma back in December of 2023 after Moms First launched PaidLeave.ai, a tool that helps caregivers maximize paid leave benefits at the state level. We talked about why they launched the tool, how it works, and the ways it'll allow more workers to access paid leave in New York.

Since this episode aired, paidleave.ai expanded to additional states in DC, so be sure to check it out if you haven't already.

Allison: Okay, I've got a lot to cover in a short amount of time. And so I'm gonna dive in right away. Hot off the presses, we got the press release, paidleave.ai is, according to the press release, an AI powered solution that guides expecting parents and caregivers through the paid leave eligibility and application process. First in the state of New York eventually, hopefully other states as well.

Through the tool, users get checklists and other guidance to keep them on track to obtain the maximum benefits and time off they need to care for their families. We're going to talk more about what this is, how people can use it.

But before we get into that, I wanted to start with why did you build this? What is the problem you're trying to solve here?

Reshma: At Moms First, we're on a mission to win paid leave and affordable child care everywhere, in as many states, as many workplaces as possible. And we know that in order to do this, we have to innovate and we have to look at this problem in a different way. And we need to engage as many people as we possibly can.

And so the reality is, there are amazingly 13 states that do offer paid leave, even though we live in the only industrialized nation that doesn't offer paid leave. So one out of four women don't have access to paid leave and they lose as much as $10,000 during that time period in wages. And so many moms today are having to pick quite frequently taking care of their children and going to work, which is unconscionable.

And we also know that the states that do offer paid leave, when you go onto their websites and you try to access these benefits, it's complicated. It's cumbersome. And if you are a busy mom, especially if you are a single mom of color working in retail, you know what I mean? Barely having the time, you know, quite frequently to take care of what's happening in your family, much less go on a government website that isn't helpful, you often give up. And you lose those wages, you lose that money that you desperately need to feed your family.

And so we wanted to change this. Now I wear, you know, I have two hats, I'm founder of Girls Who Code and founder of Moms First. It's like my two worlds kind of collided and came together. And as I started looking at generative AI and talking to people like Sam Altman or Satya Nadella, you know, a lot of what we talked about was like the power of generative people to really play a role in public sector problems, like the uptake of paid leave.

And so paidleave.ai was really born out of that mission, of how can we get as many families as possible in New York state access to paid leave? And how can we use generative AI to make it less cumbersome?

Allison: So let's move into the solution. You've built this tool. Right now it's just in New York. I believe eventually you want this to be for all of the states that have paid leave. How does it work? How can people go and actually use this? And how is it different than going to chat GPT, for example?

Reshma: Yeah, well, we launched paidleave.ai with Novi and Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Craig Newmark, for example, and talk about the amount of men that we have in this space, I think that are champions for families. I mean, both Craig, Demetrius, Demetrian, Alias are just incredible people that all dedicated their time, quite frankly, pro bono to help us create this solution.

And our goal is simple: if you're a parent, to go on this website and be able to know, am I eligible for paid leave? How much money am I going to get? And give you an action plan when you know exactly what you need to do next. And so when you go to the paid leave website, for any state, quite frankly, it is not that simple.

When you use generative AI, you use LLM. So we took all of the information from the paid leave state website, from Google, etc. and put it into this tool. And so when you go on it, you can ask any question. I'm a single mom. I have worked at my job for the past two years. Am I eligible for paid leave? Or I'm gonna have a c-section. How does that change this?

So any question that you quite frequently have, and I think it's, remember, right, you know this, Allison, is that a lot of women in particular are not comfortable asking their employer because of fear of retribution. So there's no one you can really ask, like, am I eligible? How do I access it? What forms do I need to fill out? What do I need to know? And so this is a website you can go to safely, you know what I mean? To answer your questions.

Allison: I think there's also an interesting aspect here around what a company provides and also what you are legally allowed to access. That's also interesting to me because I've seen a lot of people who work at companies where maybe they only receive eight weeks of paid leave from their employer and they have no idea that actually you could take 12 weeks and fine, it may not be 100% paid because the state program doesn't pay 100% for those additional time weeks that they take.

But when I saw that you would build this, I thought that this was incredible because even for people who work at companies that get a lot of paid leave, they still struggle with this. Because a lot of companies leverage that state pay to allow them to offer paid leave.

Reshma: Absolutely, I mean, we make it so damn complicated, right? Because you have to have disability benefits, you get something from your state, you get something from your employer, and here's the great thing about this tool is you can ask all of those questions. My company offers me six weeks. I am gonna have a C-section. So you know exactly how many weeks you have total and where it's coming from, which I think is really, really important.

I felt like, I'm a lawyer, I thought, and I work in this space, I thought I knew everything. And then as we were kind of digging in, and building this tool, I learned so much more in my own ability to understand what the benefits are. So I can explain it to a friend or a neighbor.

So again, we make it so confusing. What I love about what we're doing is yes, it's about paid leave, but it's also about the fact that, you know, the government sucks sometimes at customer service. And especially for people who need it the most, because this was paid leave today and Medicare tomorrow or student loans or...again, there's so many benefits that families are entitled to, quite frankly, but we make it so hard for them to access them.

Allison: We hope you found this recap helpful as you navigate your decision this election year. If you want to listen to any of these full interviews, you can find links to each episode in our show notes.

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