THE PARENTING PUZZLE — Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth is one of the finalists for Joe Biden’s vice presidential selection for a lot of reasons: She’s a disabled war veteran, a woman, an Asian-American and Democrats like her record on foreign policy and defense issues.
But she’s also got a unique perspective on the coronavirus crisis: She’s one of the few mothers of young children in the Senate, and is facing the child care and virtual schooling crisis first hand. Duckworth has not been afraid to put her maternal credentials on display — she cast a vote on the Senate floor in 2018 while holding her newborn daughter. (About 41 million U.S. workers between the ages of 18 and 64 were caring for at least one child under the age of 18 in 2018, according to the Brookings Institution.) Duckworth has also sponsored legislation to expand access to child care.
Nightly interviewed Duckworth today to discuss the child care crisis spurred by the pandemic, and we tried to slip in a question about whether she’s moving up or down on Biden’s VP selection list. This conversation has been edited. (Spoiler alert below.)
How are you juggling caring for your young kids with being a Senator?
Listen, I just found out that Chicago public schools is going to back to 100 percent online when we go back to school. Fairfax here in Virginia is the same. Some of the school districts have published what the potential schedule is going to look like and it’s going to be 9 to 3 online education. How does anybody manage that with their children and hold down a job? You can’t even telecommute from home because you are being the teachers assistant. I definitely want our kids to go back to school, but we can’t do it unless we spend the money and send funding out to our school districts so they can afford to make schools safe so our kids can go back to school.
If you could pass a bill in the Senate today to address the child care crisis in the country, what would it contain?
We should be able to let families afford to have child care so they don’t have to quit their jobs. A caring economy is one that would include universal paid family leave, so you can take the time off to take care of your loved ones or to take care of yourself. We should have universal pre-K because we know whether or not a child is enrolled in pre-K or Head Start affects their ability to read by the 4th grade and their performance at the end of 4th grade is predictive of whether or not they are going to graduate high school and go on to college.
Some of your colleagues are grandparents — how receptive have they been to some of these ideas?
This is something that we can work on. I don’t understand why they would not be supportive of a tax credit for the middle class. You don’t have to pay for all of it. If you can provide a credit for up to, say, 50 percent of a family’s child care cost, that means you can actually keep the economy vibrant because those parents would still be working. Free and early education is really critical. When I travel around Illinois, when I say universal pre-K, people understand and are supportive of it no matter where I am, whether I am in the bluest of the blue counties or the reddest of the red counties. There has to be an understanding of the value of taking care of children in our society.
No comments:
Post a Comment