Child Care

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include childcare, food security, housing and foreclosures, and financial products.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include our new Assets Report, welfare reform, food security, veterans, housing, tax time, alternatives to mainstream banking, economic security for the working poor, and student loan debt.

This week, host Pamela Chan talks with Schwartz Fellow Brigid Schulte and Global Assets Project Research Associate Nicole Tosh to mark International Women’s Day by discussing girl-centered poverty reduction programs and gender equality at work and at home.

Schulte, a staff writer for The Washington Post, is writing a book on the struggle of working mothers to manage the scarcest of all resources – time – in balancing work, family and their own well-being.

As a child, I knew Santa was keeping an eye on me. Not because of that vague "naughty or nice" nonsense, but because my parents had a direct line to the jolly man from the north. A hotline, in fact. When my siblings and I misbehaved, my mother would pick up the phone and start to dial 1-800-YO-SANTA as she warned us that Santa was about to get an earful. She'd inform him that I was picking on my younger brother, or that he had been caught removing the screen in his bedroom window and attempting to climb onto the roof (again). She was such a tattle-tale.

On November 22^nd, the Asset Building Program hosted a panel of experts to discuss how Americans are faring in the years since the Great Recession according to different measures. (Video from the event is available here.) Speakers from Wider Opportunities for Women, the Half in Ten Campaign, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Pew’s Economic Mobility Project joined moderator, Rachel Black, for a discussion of current data and indicators, who’s falling short according to these measures and by how much, and policy ideas for  making progress.

The official arbiters have spoken: The Great Recession ended in the middle of last year. Unfortunately, this decree seems a bit hollow as new evidence of pervasive hardship continues to appear on a daily basis.

The welfare reforms of 1996 replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) as the primary safety for the poor. But the Great Recession has exposed the failure of TANF as a safety net to catch American families as they experience hardship.

It was an overcast day in Sacramento for yesterday's 2010 California Working Families Policy Summit. A sellout crowd of nearly five hundred attendees from across the state gathered at the convention center downtown to reunite, share common dismay at the state of California's budget and political challenges, and try to forge a vision for the future.

The home visitation program -- a key piece of the Obama Administration's pledge to strengthen programs for children from birth to age 5 -- received another boost yesterday when the Senate's Finance Committee passed its version of the health care bill. The bill includes language that would establish a program for "maternal, infant and early childhood visitation."

The Census Bureau just released America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2007, a report that describes the characteristics of American households and families.