Our Families and Children

PUTTING CHILDREN AND FAMILIES FIRST

As the parents of two grown daughters and grandparents to four children, my wife Libby and I believe that we must ensure the next generation grows up healthy, educated, and prepared for success. Parents have the primary right and responsibility for raising their children, but parents cannot do it alone. Government plays a key role in providing a strong public education system, ensuring children’s basic needs are met, keeping children safe, and supporting families in investing in their children’s future.

I worked to enact the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 that increased the child tax credit, made historic investments in child care, expanded health care services for children with special health care needs, and provided critical investments in public education and community schools.

These have helped sustain essential health and direct care services for children and provided support to parents through the child tax credit that cut child poverty in half. These provisions were overwhelmingly popular with Texans and literally reduced the pandemic stress for parents and their children.

We must make these provisions permanent – including paid family leave, the expanded child tax credit, investments in child care and preschool, increased support for community schools and students with special needs, and preventive and developmental health care for children.

VALUING CAREGIVING

Seniors and those with disabilities need home-and-community based services as well as hospital and nursing home care, and this is one of the most in demand occupations in society. Parents of young children require affordable and quality child care while they work. Whether children or adults, people with physical, cognitive, or mental health needs require caregiving that supports them.

These helpers are direct care workers in health, education, and social services – and they rely in significant measure on government funding to do their work. Most families simply cannot afford to pay the full cost for such care, in addition to what they do in their day-to-day lives to provide care and support.

Unfortunately, we have short-changed caregiving.

We need to make these good-paying jobs and ensure robust worker protections. In Texas, caregivers represent one in seven workers in the state and the demand for them will only grow. They are part of the economy and growing the middle class.

Helpers and caregivers don’t have powerful lobbyists, but they represent the heart of our economy—ensuring our most vulnerable neighbors with serious medical needs are well taken care of, helping raise our children, and enabling Americans to remain in the workforce. I am working to make sure their voices are heard in Congress and we value and invest in them.

SUPPORTING PARENTS

There is no job more important to society than parenting, but it cannot be done alone. Our community and our government must work with parents to ensure every child’s success.

This includes the federal government expanding the child tax credit and nutrition programs for children to combat malnutrition, and strengthening Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to ensure children get the health care they need.

We must also make quality, affordable child care available for every family and ensure special education services that fit children’s needs, starting at birth, through full funding of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). We must guarantee access to well-financed public schools in all communities, regardless of zip code.

Supporting families also means recognizing there is no single definition of family, and we must respect the rights of LGBTQ parents, single parents, interfaith and interracial parents, and all other families. Supporting families also requires supporting access to family planning services and fundamental decisions on child-bearing.