Adventure: Family Adventure Travel

Family Adventure Travel Biography
Campaign for Inclusive Family Policies
The purpose of the Campaign for Inclusive Family Policies is to establish this basic principle in public policymaking: Family policy should be inclusive—the ways in which families meet their income-earning and caregiving responsibilities should not determine their eligibility for support and services.
There is a serious disconnect between U.S. families and family policy. For decades, policymakers have been pushed to focus on “working families” with the result that many family policies help some families while discriminating against millions of others. The often ill-defined term “working families” is used most commonly to describe families with employed parents who utilize child care services while they are at work. But millions of families do not fit that model—instead they use diverse and dynamic strategies to meet their income-earning and caregiving responsibilities. It is time for policymakers to support and respect parents’ decisions. They should begin by adopting the principle of inclusion: the ways in which families meet their income-earning and caregiving responsibilities should not determine their eligibility for support and services.
This is not a campaign against “working families”—it is a campaign for helping the greatest possible number of families, regardless of how they manage their income-earning and caregiving responsibilities. In short, it is a call for inclusion.
Parents make complex decisions about employment and caring for their children. They weigh their children’s needs, their own values and desires, as well as economic and career considerations. Families are diverse, their work/life solutions are diverse, and their choices are dynamic. Many families modify their employment and caregiving practices over the years as the needs of their family members change. Today’s “working family” might in two years be a family with an at-home mother or father, and ten years from now it might fit the “working family” category once more.
Policies made with a narrow focus on “working families” discriminate against a significant percentage of families, including—contrary to popular belief—many lower income families. Commenting on the findings of his recent research on low-income families (earning less than $38,000 for a family of four), Gregory Acs of The Urban Institute says: “The need for child care is very important for families that have no other options. But what you most often see is the dad going out to work and the mom staying at home.” Families who do not fit the “working families” label cross the spectrum of economic status, cultural and political outlooks, religious beliefs, race and ethnicity and include:
Families with one full-time earner and one at-home parent;
Families in which two earners work different shifts so that one or the other is available for caregiving, including those who have full-time jobs and “tag-team” by working different shifts, those with one full-time earner and one part-time earner, and those with two part-time earners;
Families who share caregiving among members of their extended family or trade caregiving with friends in a cooperative arrangement (strategies used by some single parent families as well as by two parent families);
Families in which children are being raised by retired grandparents.

Family Adventure Travel

Adventure

Saturday, 5 January 2013

Family Adventure Travel

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