Build Back Better Was Never Going to Save Child Care. Here's why.
“When we are faced with a seemingly intractable problem, our bias toward action can cause us to move toward solutions before we have fully faced the problem that we are trying to solve. Yet the moments when we feel compelled to act urgently are often the ones when we should slow down and look beyond the crisis and try to understand the underlying system.”
Idea in Brief
Without addressing the underlying structures and beliefs about child care, no piece of legislation was going to save the child care sector.
If we know that deeper, systemic change is necessary, we can’t simply leave it for another day despite the urgency of providing temporary relief to families.
The Iceberg Model helps us assess our own solutions and interventions to ensure that we are working at the deeper levels of the systems to which we contribute.
by Katie King
Photo credit: CNN
Imagine living in a place where every family had broad access to affordable, high-quality child care of their choosing, staffed by skilled people who earned living wages and were respected by their communities. The ways in which that reality would change the lives of young children and families in the United States are difficult to overstate.
When President Biden included robust support for children in his original Build Back Better agenda, advocates celebrated child care’s central place in his vision for the country and called the plan game changing for the sector. Even as hopes about all the provisions for children and families began to dim, people still touted how the bill would fix the child care system by lowering families’ monthly child care costs.
To be clear, children and families would experience very meaningful, positive effects if the legislation were to pass, even in its scaled-back version. For families struggling to afford child care (and there are many), any move that capped what they pay would have improved their daily lives. But no form of the legislation was going to save the child care sector. Far from changing it, Build Back Better never touched the game itself.
A Systems Look at the Child Care Sector
When we are faced with a seemingly intractable problem, our bias toward action can cause us to move toward solutions before we have fully faced the problem that we are trying to solve. Yet the moments when we feel compelled to act urgently are often the ones when we should slow down and look beyond the crisis and try to understand the underlying system. Taking a systems view can help us do that.
Systems are groups of interdependent components that interact to create a complex entity that is more than the sum of its parts. Examples of natural systems include an organism made of separate but interconnected cells or a forest made up of separate but interconnected flora, fauna, air, and water. We live among social systems as well, including the child care sector. It is made up of children, families, providers, and policymakers, among many other people. It includes physical objects, such as homes and centers. It includes policies and procedures. And it includes feelings, beliefs, and mindsets, such as children’s feelings of safety in the care of people other than their parents and society’s beliefs about whether child care is important and why. Each component is a relevant part of the system on its own, but none of them exists independently. All of the people, objects, relationships, policies, and beliefs interact to create a unique whole. When we can work to understand the whole system and its interdependent parts, we have a better chance of being able to create meaningful change.
But understanding a system is no easy task. The iceberg model is a tool from the field of systems thinking that can help us stop and look at how the system is working beneath the surface. It enables us to articulate not only the events and circumstances that we can see and experience but also the patterns, structures, and beliefs that are contributing to those outcomes. An example of this model related to child care costs is shown below.
Perspective matters when trying to describe a system using the iceberg. Not everyone would agree that these particular structures or beliefs are driving the high cost of quality child care, and any number of other structures or beliefs could play a role. Furthermore, some of these structures and beliefs might be important to retain, even if they increase costs. Nonetheless, this example illustrates that the high costs of quality child care are a symptom of the structures and beliefs that underpin the system and managing them in any sustainable way requires change at those deeper levels.
A Systems Look at Solutions
Despite how it was sold, Build Back Better would have provided short-term relief, but the system would have eventually returned back to where it began because its structures and beliefs would remain unchanged. Whether the short-term relief is worth the costs is a point for debate, but we cannot claim that this approach would have addressed the true causes of the high cost of child care.
That families are spending so much of their incomes on child care is a travesty, with countless negative consequences. However, the percentage of income spent on child care is an event, in the language of the iceberg model, and is part of a pattern. It is a symptom of the structures and beliefs that treat child care as a private good whose primary purpose is to allow parents to work. So if our solution is to state that no family can spend more than 7% of their income on child care without addressing social and cultural norms and values about why child care matters, we are setting ourselves up for future challenges.
“Despite how it was sold, Build Back Better would have provided short-term relief, but the system would have eventually returned back to where it began because its structures and beliefs would remain unchanged.”
Solutions that aim to remedy a symptom of a deeper issue can release pent-up pressure in a system. Such a release can meaningfully shift people’s lived experiences and a system’s patterns, but only temporarily. Working at that event or pattern level alone almost always leads to unintended consequences in other areas of the system or adds new structural issues that will need to be fixed later. For example, licensing and reporting requirements that would allow providers and parents to be eligible for funding or subsidies have the potential to create any number of roadblocks that would keep people who need child care from being able to access it.
No policy change will ever be able to anticipate and account for every possible ripple effect. But if we know that deeper change is necessary, we cannot in good conscience simply leave it for another day. At the belief level, Build Back Better reinforced the notion that only economically productive members of society need and deserve to have skilled and affordable support in raising and educating their children. That pernicious mental model undermines so many social safety net solutions, yet we continue to accept and pursue solutions that further entrench it as a cultural value.
So, how can we assess our own solutions and interventions to ensure that we are working at the deeper levels of the systems to which we contribute? The iceberg model can help us check ourselves and our solutions so that we do not equate a reaction with transformation.
Using the Iceberg to Assess Possible Solutions
The series of questions below, adapted from the work of Systems Innovations and that of systems expert Donella Meadows, provides a screen through which we can examine our ideas and proposals and acknowledge what level of the system those interventions will address.
Are our solutions reacting to events? Are we shifting resources, setting a standard without any additional change, or buffering the effects of what already exists?
Are our solutions anticipating and responding to what is likely to happen based on patterns from the past? Are we working to speed things up, slow them down, or strengthen interventions that seem to be working well?
Are our solutions designing new structures? Are we changing the policies, habits, or rules that govern what we do or the way the elements of the systems relate?
Are our solutions transforming what people believe about the system? Are we setting new visions and goals and changing the values and mindsets that underpin the system?
Shifting resources, buffering effects, speeding things up, or slowing them down all have their place in policy and systems change. We can have legitimate debates about not letting perfect be the enemy of the good and about when and whether changing hearts and minds is the right goal. But what we cannot do is pretend that we have the answers to our problems before digging deeper. We must make choices about what to pursue and what to accept only when we can do so with eyes wide open as to what lies beneath the surface.
Using the Iceberg Model in Your Context
This tool is meant to help leaders and other stakeholders depict a problem within their system and assess the depth of the solutions that they might use to address it. The steps below will help you do that.
Depicting the Problem
Gather as many perspectives on and lived experiences of the system as you can. No one can have a perfect understanding of how a system operates or its foundations, so including diverse perspectives increases understanding.
Select one problem within the system.
Discuss the following questions:
What is seen and known as it relates to the problem? What are today’s lived experiences? Capture them at the Event level.
What has been seen and known over time? What are the trends related to the event? Capture them at the Pattern level.
What structures, policies, norms, or rules contribute to those trends? Capture them at the Structures level.
What beliefs, values, and mindsets justify those structures? Capture them at the Belief level.
Assessing the Depth of Solutions
Select a solution that you or others are proposing to solve the problem from your iceberg.
Use the solution assessment questions above to gauge whether the proposed solution is reacting, anticipating/responding, designing, or transforming. Take all perspectives as information about the system and possible solutions to the problem.
Analyze options for deepening the solution by doing one of these things:
Ask yourself:
Can the solution be adjusted to address the problem at a deeper level?
What could you do that would address the structure or belief level?
Alternatively, select a structure or belief that must be changed to address the problem in a meaningful way. Use the solution assessment questions to inspire ideas about the types of solutions that could shift structures or beliefs.
Committing to Transformation
At a time when many families are in crisis and struggling to make ends meet, we must consider how to offer immediate relief. However, we must also do the long, difficult work of transformation if we hope to create equitable, high-quality, responsive, and sustainable child care systems that are worthy of our children and their futures.
Why not check out our futures toolkit with instructions, examples, and templates for three futures thinking methods that can be used by anyone who wants to create powerful long-term change for children and families.
This blog is part of a series on futures thinking and child care, co-produced with KnowledgeWorks.
Katie King is the Director of Strategic Foresight Engagement at KnowledgeWorks. In her role, Katie manages externally facing strategic foresight projects and partnerships, co-designs and delivers workshops and contributes to KnowledgeWorks’ publications about the future of learning. She is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists and co-author of The Futures Thinking Playbook.