The issues facing families with young children in our country are numerous and well-known. It’s our politics that’s been the problem.
We know that the share of the federal budget devoted to children is relatively small and declining as a share of spending. Parents frequently want different arrangements for care and work than they can afford or negotiate, and parents’ jobs may not leave enough time or flexibility to care for young children. The share of people having children is declining, with many citing cost concerns. People with children are citing higher levels of pessimism about the future that awaits their kids. But our divided politics has gotten in the way of addressing these challenges. Or so it seemed.
Last year, the Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families convened regularly, representing the most ideologically diverse group of family policy leaders in recent memory, akin to the Congressionally-created National Commission on Children in 1987. Our group included representatives from the far left to the far right and ideological positions in between. It included representatives from think tanks, physicians, childcare providers, the private sector, and more. Most of us are parents ourselves.
Our work together uncovered that there is much more in common than meets the eye and many reforms that could generate a broad base of political support, even in a polarized political environment. Our 2024 report, In This Together, put forward an action agenda for employers, philanthropy, communities, and state and federal governments.
This month, many of us sent a letter to Congress recommending five areas of cross-partisan action, including:
(1) Create abipartisan commission at the federal level to support children and families.
(2) Enact a stable, predictable child-related cash benefit that primarily benefits low-to-moderate-income families.
(3) Design a holistic strategy of care options for parents of young children that reflect differing parental preferences and meet children’s needs.
(4) Create a baseline of federal protection and support for parents with newborns and newly adopted children.
(5) Improve federal fiscal responsibility and sustainability of benefits.
We are not alone in uncovering a broad consensus for family policy reform. Voters want it, too. In a new American Policy Ventures Post-Election Survey conducted by Echelon Insights, 83% of voters expressed support for a national program that would provide all employees access to paid family leave, and 79% of voters expressed support for providing childcare benefits to families with young children.
It’s over to Congress to listen.
Our partisan politics masks an underlying truth about children and families. We are in this together. How we nurture, care, and invest in America’s children today will shape our society tomorrow.
If you want to learn more, join us next week for the 2025 Policy Agenda for Family Flourishing event in Washington, DC!
Deep divisions make it increasingly difficult for Americans to work together to solve our biggest challenges. Since 2009, Convergence has been bringing together leaders, doers, citizens, and experts across ideological, political, and identity lines. Convergence drives solutions to critical challenges that would otherwise remain “stuck,” and the resulting societal impact improves lives.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.