Family-Friendly Policies: Enabling Environments for Early Childhood

• In Event: Poster Session 2
  In Poster Session: Family-Friendly Policies: Enabling Environments for Early Childhood

Proposal

The 2016 Lancet Early Childhood Development series highlighted new scientific evidence on early intervention at a time when Early Childhood Development (ECD) was universally endorsed in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.  The evidence from this series was subsequently used as a part of the road map to scale up ECD services for every child especially the most vulnerable (UNICEF, 2017). This new evidence emphasizes the importance of ensuring nurturing care and providing a stimulating context for every child to grow to their full potential. For working caregivers, their ability to reconcile work and family responsibilities has a profound impact on early childhood development and wellbeing, including nutrition, health, and early learning. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the pre-existing crisis of care and learning, in part due to underlying gender norms around care work, disproportionately affecting women who bear the brunt of childcare (UNICEF, ILO & WIEGO, 2021).

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2019, to address the need for effective policies to support families, academic experts, UN agencies, and other partners came together in a Conference of Thinkers: Exploring the Evidence on Family-Friendly Policies (FFPs) to synthesize the evidence from multiple disciplines and generate recommendations for the core set of workplace policies and transformative shifts needed to address. This initiative defined Family-Friendly Policies as those policies that help to balance and benefit both work and family life that typically provide three types of essential resources needed by parents and caregivers of young children: time, resources, and services (UNICEF, 2019a). Four FFPs were identified as urgent and critical to support holistic early childhood development: (1) Paid parental leave (2) breastfeeding support (3) Affordable, accessible, quality childcare and (4) Child benefits and wage protections (UNICEF, 2019a).
These policies are good for women, good for children, good for business, and good for the economy. Not only do FFPs pay off in healthier, better-educated children, greater gender equality and sustainable growth, they are linked to better workforce productivity and the ability to attract, motivate, and retain employees (UNICEF, 2019b).  

Spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, with its severe socio-economic consequences, an increasing number of governments and businesses are implementing FFPs (UNICEF & UN Global Compact, 2020). However, despite the demonstrable benefits of these policies for children, families, businesses, and economies at large, progress in the business and policy spaces needs to be accelerated (Jayasekaran & Faudot-Miguet, 2020). Globally, the vast majority of working parents and caregivers remain without or with only insufficient access to family-friendly policies, especially in informal work settings that fall outside the remit of labour market institutions (UNICEF, ILO & WIEGO, 2021).  The lack of such policies compromises parents’ ability to securely bond with their babies in the first critical years of life – a time, evidence tells us, when the combination of the right nutrition, a loving environment and stimulating care can strengthen a baby’s developing brain and provide the ingredients for the best start in life (UNICEF & WHO, 2012). 
 
  
The proposed poster aims to:  
Provide an overview of Family-Friendly Policies  
Explore how the key stakeholders in the CIE community can disseminate key messages and advocate for FFPs 
   
Over the past few years, the family-friendly policies agenda has evolved significantly to identify current and emerging drivers, gaps and challenges in the design and implementation of family-friendly interventions. However, despite its successes, the FFPs agenda is yet to be adequately mainstreamed and taken up more systematically across business and public policy spheres, as it remains limited to certain geographies and select global champion companies and countries (Jayasekaran & Faudot-Miguet, 2020). Efforts too frequently remain ad-hoc (both in the public and private spheres), failing to achieve the scale needed to reach every worker and family with adequate support systems (UNICEF, ILO & UN Women, 2020).    
  
To be fit for purpose in a post-COVID world, it is important to critically assess current approaches to FFPs in light of fundamental societal and workplace shifts taking into consideration the unique needs of workers in the informal economy. This poster seeks to build on programmatic work, evidence, guidance and advocacy messaging on this topic, but to also strengthen FFPs to meet the demands of a post-pandemic world. It is important to conceptualize and embed FFPs in wider systemic strategies to support parenting and gender-responsive/transformative social protection and care systems, to combat child poverty, gender inequality, and support inclusive economic growth.   

Author

• Prashansa Chandrakant Chavan, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania