Convergence Collective Calls for National Commission on Children And Families

Building on the report they released last year, the Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families—a cross-partisan, cross-sector group of leaders dedicated to improving the lives of children and families in America—recently put out an issue brief calling for a national commission on children and families. Spotlight spoke recently with Abby McCloskey, the director of the Collaborative, about the issue brief and next steps. The transcript of the conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Abby, let’s start with how the Convergence Collaborative settled on this call for a national commission on children and families

We had called for it in our main report last year along with a whole bunch of different kind of categories of recommendations. But the report from the 1991 commission was titled “Beyond Rhetoric.” And the first section of our report was really about narrative change and why it actually really matters, and our leading recommendation was on narrative change. So, of course you could blow a bunch of money into a big PR campaign or what have you, but to actually get these issues into the bloodstream of Washington, it seems like, at least to me, there’s no better way than actually having a legislative commission that is looking at this stuff.

In our initial report, we hadn’t put a lot of meat on the bone when it came to this idea, so this was a chance to come back to it and really flesh it out. And I think what we found, Bill, after the Trump election, especially in the tax fight and with what happens with the Child Tax Credit, was that there actually was a lot of agreement in the group though there’s still a lot of disagreement about the specifics. One area where we could get more granular on a proposal and build it out was this national commission. In some ways, it was a safety valve—we’ve done this before, it was successful, things got implemented, we could follow the same structure again and there’s no need to kind of reinvent the wheel.

In the founding text for the last commission, it alludes to the welfare of the nation’s children but there was really not much more explanation about what that meant. And so, in our proposal, we used the “flourishing” framework that our group built together.

What would be the dimensions that you would want to look across? Would it be the whole panoply of issues?

There is what does good look like and then, separately, what would the commission be trying to solve for. But I’d say mostly economic needs but also looking at relational needs about feelings of agency and building resilience. As for specific topics, I think that the main categories from the last commission hold: income, security, health, educational achievement, preparing adolescents for adulthood, strengthening and supporting families, creating programs and policies connected to work and a moral climate for children.

What we did in the issue brief is we said, let’s keep those, but under improving health, an issue like screen-time might be in there or we might add emphasis to looking at the dramatic increase in single-family households.

And have you found either since the release of your initial report or now this paper that you are getting any traction on the Hill?

We had a lot of both media buzz and Hill interest around the initial report because there was something in there for pretty much every Hill office. The issue brief was released in August, when Washington very much slows down. There’s been some soft outreach to Hill offices, but my intent was just to kind of get this idea, which has been around for a long time now, into the minds of staffers as they’re thinking about what should happen coming into midterms and things like that.

And do you find that among those on the right, in your discussions within the collaborative, that the biggest stumbling block is just the commission format and the concern that it’s not perhaps the best vehicle to actually get things done?

Well, I certainly think it’s fair that folks on the right would be more wary of setting up another, if even temporary, government entity. I think for both sides, the commission requires giving up some level of control. And I think that that is a bit uncomfortable, especially for advocates and scholars who’ve worked in this space for a long time. There’s just so much distrust in Washington right now too, but you can also argue that that climate makes this the perfect time to try to bring people who disagree together.

And has there been any reaction from HHS or from the Make America Healthy Again crowd to your recommendations? You could see how this kind of commission could play into some of Secretary Kennedy’s goals, though I’m guessing that a major focus on vaccines might be internally difficult.

We probably should be having more of a conversation about vaccines given the significant distrust around the topic. I think that the point of a commission like this would be to keep it from any one particular person’s pet project. In the case of the Reagan commission, you had 34 folks across political parties, across industries. It makes it harder to have a whole report that comes out about pesticides. I think that’s actually some of the beauty of the design.

It does seem that for the Josh Hawley wing of the Republican party, this very much might be something that they would be interested in.

There’s a lot of energy among the pro-natalist crowd. There’s a lot more energy around giving cash support to families than I remember in the Republican party from the populist crowd. Progressives have been involved in these issues for a long time but haven’t gotten as much across the line as they probably should have given their investment in this space for so long. Again, I just think it’s a question of is there a willingness to say that this issue is so important that while I want my voice at the table, I’m also willing to cede some control about where this comes out.

I also think it tends to be the case with issues impacting kids that it gets spread out across a bunch of different agencies and actors. And these pieces get siloed when they’re really interrelated. And the commission gives space to deal with it as it is in reality, which is the experience that modern parents face raising kids in America face.

There’s already some action on this issue in the states, where a number of states have central offices or ombudspersons who at least offer a central overview of kids issues across state government and can help families try to navigate the bureaucracy.

Absolutely, and there’s nothing about this idea of a national commission that of course couldn’t happen at the state level.

So, going forward, Abby, are you planning to have more formal conversations with people on the Hill as people come back and the fall gets going? What are the next steps for this?

We will continue to have those conversations. The Convergence Collaborative itself, however, will officially wind down this month. It’s been operational for two years. So, it’s the end of the road for the Collaborative and a regular period of meeting and production of materials and thinking. I hope that members take these ideas out into their own various orbits and give it energy of their own. I don’t think this is the last that we’ll hear of this idea.

The reason I like the timing of this so much is that kids issues historically always struggle to be at the front of the agenda. But whether it’s MAHA or Jonathan Haidt’s “Anxious Generation,” or the prenatal movement or concerns about screens or demographics or the economics of raising a family, it seems like it’s getting a lot harder to get ahead and live out the American dream. There’s a lot of pockets of these conversations that are happening that have a lot of energy within them. But this would be a chance to kind of pull them under a tent with all our various energies and actually have a bigger conversation about what’s going on with kids in our country.