“We have a lot of work to do as Americans to rebuild the bonds of solidarity and connection that we not only have with one another but also with future generations.”
-Joe Waters, CEO, Capita
Interview with Joe Waters
Joe Waters, co-founder and CEO of Capita, an independent think tank, aspires to a future in which families can flourish in just, peaceful, prosperous communities on a healthy, safe, and clean planet. Starting Early spoke with Joe about his thoughts on how Americans can shift from conflict to a shared commitment to improve families’ lives. Following is a condensed version of the interview.
Joe Waters, co-founder and CEO of Capita, an independent think tank, aspires to a future in which families can flourish in just, peaceful, prosperous communities on a healthy, safe, and clean planet. Starting Early spoke with Joe about his thoughts on how Americans can shift from conflict to a shared commitment to improve families’ lives.
Do you think belief in the need to meet families’ essential needs transcends ideological and political divides?
President Kennedy said there are two notions we all hold together—we’re all mortal, and we all cherish our children’s futures. I believe we all share a commitment to the flourishing of our families and our children. However, we don’t necessarily share the sense of interdependence and solidarity that should accompany that. People’s belief in cherishing their children’s future doesn’t necessarily translate into concern for their neighbors’ children’s future.
We have a lot of work to do as Americans to rebuild the bonds of solidarity and connection that we not only have with one another but also with future generations. We don’t just witness this kind of solidarity “across the aisle” in formal settings or programmatic settings, but it’s in how we all live our lives as people and exist in our families in all their beauty and diversity. It may not always show up in formal policy, but we need to remember that politics is not the most important thing and that we transcend divides every day in our lives.
What were some findings that surprised you in your research on stay-at-home parents?
One-fifth of stay-at-home parents are men. Stay-at-home parents are fairly evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. And many stay-at-home parents have a lot lower income than many of us would’ve assumed. When we talk about stay-at-home parents, I think the first things that pop into people’s minds are the conservative religious family that has a traditional view of gender roles or the well-to-do family that can easily afford for mom to stay at home. But our senior fellows Ivana Greco and Elliot Haspel found in their research that’s not who most stay-at-home parents are. And they’re excluded from such things as the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit or getting Social Security credits for their labor. There’s a lot that we can do to change that.
When you see differences of opinion on how to support families, what are some things on which policymakers disagree?
One divide we haven’t examined closely enough is class. In a 2021 survey, the conservative think tank American Compass found that working-class Americans have different preferences for the care arrangements they want for their children than college-educated Americans. Many college-educated Americans believe everybody wants good-quality subsidized external child care so they can go to work, have a fulfilling career, and make as much money as they can. However, working-class Americans said in the survey they want more cash support and the flexibility that provides parents to care for their children at home, have a friend or relative do so, or simply work less to spend more time with their families.
For example, for years, many have advocated for more money for child care subsidies. But if you’re working three jobs and those jobs are crappy, you don’t want more subsidy to be able to put your kid in child care, so you can spend more time at those jobs. Families have said loud and clear, “We want better-paying jobs or cash support so we have more time to spend with our kids, take care of our kids ourselves, or support a friend, grandparent, or other relative.” This type of policy is a key focus of the Family Policy Lab we are launching this year.
One notable takeaway from this presidential election is that the needs and aspirations of working-class Americans of all races for their families likely align more closely with those of working-class White Americans than the rhetoric around inclusion over the previous five to ten years has led us to believe. Class, as defined by educational attainment, is probably more determinative of need and aspiration than we’ve assumed in recent years.
What enabled you to work across the aisle in collaborating with such an ideologically diverse group to shape the Convergence initiative’s framework on family policy?
Let me start with a philosophical point: I don’t think of myself first and foremost in terms of political orientation. And I don’t think most Americans do. I think about myself as a parent, a husband, a Carolinian, and a Catholic, before I think about myself politically.
It’s essential to lead with what matters most and, for most people, politics doesn’t matter most. In 21st-century America, we’ve put too much weight on political identity. Instead, we should lead with our other identities and the things we deeply cherish as human beings.
When you do that, it becomes much easier to work across the aisle. We discover that we’re complicated people. In some areas, we might have a more conservative disposition, and in others, our disposition leans progressive or liberal. We’re also temperamentally different. In the matter of how we order the common good, I tend to be a classic New Deal Democrat, but when it comes to my personal temperament and how our family lives, I’m a pretty conservative, weekly Mass-going Catholic. If you show up with who you are authentically and don’t put too much weight on political identity, you can have conversations with people who have differing points of view, find areas of common interest and commitment, and move forward on that basis.
This is embedded in Capita’s DNA and a central component of our strategy. Our country can feel very divided, but to fundamentally put families and their communities at the heart of our society, we have to return to what matters most to us all and build those bridges. With Convergence, we all agreed that the stability and quality of family life in America are essential to the stability and order of our common life. And we need to do whatever we can to promote policies that help families have a stable, quality family life where they can pursue their individual hopes and aspirations as they see fit.
You’ve talked about the need to have cross-governmental solutions to help families flourish. How would that work?
We need a whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach to the stability and quality of family life. We have an advocacy and policy ecosystem that’s so programmatically focused — you have child care advocates; you have home visiting advocates — such that we have siloed and fragmented issues around families and given permission to elected leaders to replicate those silos within government. So, responsibility for the stability and quality of family life doesn’t extend to everybody in government.
I make an analogy to foreign policy or defense policy. Defense policy isn’t just the Pentagon’s responsibility. There are agencies across government involved in defense policy, and, ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the President and Congress, and everybody knows that. And just as defense policy is important for our external security, family policy is important for our internal stability and security. But we haven’t been thinking about it that way. What we think about instead is, “How will we fund Head Start?” or “How will we protect Head Start from cuts?” I don’t have a problem saying we must prevent Head Start from being cut. We do. But that’s like discussing procuring the engine on an F-16 fighter jet and saying that’s a defense policy. It’s not. So, Head Start, child care, child care subsidies, and home visiting programs, as important as those are, are not an overarching family policy.
At Capita, we’re working to ensure that our new strategy explicitly challenges these silos by promoting bold, integrated solutions that treat family policy as a cornerstone of national stability and flourishing. We also know that we can’t do this alone – and that is where our community of deep relationships across sectors, disciplines, and the aisle is critical to shaping the ecosystem and driving the systemic change that families need.
New York is implementing a law providing pregnant employees in private-sector companies with additional paid leave for prenatal care. And in 2021 New Jersey became the second state to provide universal home visiting for newborns. Do you see such policies as outliers or do you think other states will follow?
They’re not necessarily outliers, but states often need to find their own reasons to adopt similar measures. In North Carolina, we just expanded Medicaid. One reason was that rural hospitals were in danger of closing. Republican rural legislators who previously opposed expanding Medicaid got on board with the expansion to address the rural hospital issue.
Look at what’s happened with extending Medicaid coverage to 12 months postpartum: Every state across the country except Arkansas did it. That’s remarkable progress. We need not only to frame and communicate policies that resonate with people across different perspectives but also to give them the space to develop their own reasons for supporting them. Those reasons might not align perfectly with the original intent of the policy, but if they help achieve the goal, that’s what ultimately matters.
I’ve worked with Republicans for fifteen years, particularly in South Carolina. Republicans believe families need to be supported, but it won’t look the same as how Democrats approach it. But very often, we end up in the same place. We saw that when Nikki Haley, a conservative Christian, Republican governor of South Carolina, was supporting things we’d had trouble getting done because she felt, as a mom, that other moms needed support. She knew how hard it was to be a mother with a newborn at home and she supported newborn home visiting as a result.
What’s your outlook on the future from a policy perspective?
FDR was a proponent of “bold, persistent experimentation,” which was needed during the Great Depression. Today, there’s an opportunity for that, and it’s what I think about daily in Capita’s work. Some of what’s been pushed in this country in terms of policy has been inflexible and narrow-minded in the approach that such proposals as the Child Care for Working Families Act were the only way to go. Never mind how many times it hasn’t come to a vote. I think now’s the opportunity to say, “You know what? It’s not just that we didn’t push hard enough on the advocacy front, but that the policies themselves have been rejected.” Now is an opportunity for us to stand up, lick our wounds a little bit, and say, “Let’s do the sort of experimentation to deliver on good, sound policies that the American people want and that meet the American people where they are, and that will deliver for the American people prosperity, opportunity, and flourishing for the future.'”