Big Ideas for Kids: A Blueprint for Building Government That Works for Children
From commissions to commissioners, it's time to institutionalize our support for children.
The Urgency of Now
Something is deeply broken in how this nation treats its children.
Even before the pandemic, the signs were there: stubbornly high rates of child poverty, worsening youth mental health, inequitable education, and widening disparities in housing and opportunity.
But the last few years have made the neglect unmistakable. The expiration of temporary pandemic supports has allowed child poverty to double. Schools are struggling with chronic absenteeism, learning loss, and teacher shortages. Kids are facing record-high levels of anxiety and depression. And the share of federal spending on children has fallen for three straight years to just 8.57% of the budget for all children and just 1.59% for babies and toddlers under age 3.
We are shortchanging our children.
Even commonsense efforts to restore the expanded Child Tax Credit or maintain health coverage for children have been sacrificed in budget negotiations or stalled by political apathy in recent years. Inaction has always been a problem for children, but the more disturbing trend is active regression.
Some political actors are advancing a dangerous rebranding of abandonment under the guise of “parental rights.” But this isn’t about empowering parents – it’s about dismantling public responsibility. It’s about eroding school libraries, muzzling teachers, banning books, undermining access to health care and vaccines, and isolating children from support systems designed to keep them safe and whole.
This is what is called “organized abandonment”: the strategic withdrawal of public responsibility from children, often under a veneer of individualism, religious freedom, or budget discipline. It’s what happens when child welfare agencies are defunded, but surveillance of families expands. It’s what happens when school counselors are cut but censorship boards proliferate. It’s what happens when children and families are left more vulnerable and more alone.
Sadly, this is all happening now, in plain sight. But there is another path.
Across the country and around the world, bold and transformational ideas are emerging. These ideas, including many championed by us at First Focus on Children are grounded not just in compassion, but in design. They offer structural reforms: the creation of institutions, structures, offices, processes, and standards that make children unignorable and their fundamental rights non-negotiable.
Two powerful recent essays illuminate these points. In Harvard Law & Policy Review, Jonathan Todres outlines how public institutions can be transformed to prioritize children by building a new framework around “Voice, Representation, Resources, and Remedies.”
Meanwhile, educator Melissa D. Aguirre and physician Dave A. Chokshi offer a compelling reflection on parenting and the importance of political change. They write:
While so many have given up on politics, resigned to the dysfunction and gridlock, that choice is not available to children. There is a direct line from our politics to their tenuous mental health and their life expectancy. And perhaps traversing that path illuminates a way out of the darkness of our disconnection and polarization. What if the organizing principle of a political movement were the needs of our youngest Americans?
These agendas reflect a shared urgency and a growing consensus that without positive permanent structures, children’s futures will remain perpetually precarious and at risk.
We can’t only fight for the next policy win or short-term fix. We need to fight for a government that works for children by design.
The Problem: Children as an Afterthought in Government
There is a yawning gap between how this country talks about children and how it governs.
Politicians invoke children in speeches, in campaign ads, in slogans. But behind the platitudes lies a harsh truth: children are structurally invisible in public policy and the words are often empty rhetoric.
As Todres writes:
Although children constitute more than twenty percent of the U.S. population, federal spending on children’s programs is regularly below ten percent of the budget. Not only are children not a priority, but government agencies are also often not structured to account for and support the rights and healthy development of children.
The numbers tell part of the story. In recent years, federal spending on children has declined in both real and relative terms. In 2022, the federal government began spending more on interest payments on the national debt than on all children’s programs combined. The federal share allocated to children is expected to fall steadily over the next decade, and that gap is expected to widen.
But this isn’t just about money. It’s about architecture and design.
Children are not voters. They don’t hire lobbyists. And their needs rarely map neatly onto existing bureaucratic categories. There is no centralized office for children at the federal level. There is no standard mechanism for evaluating how legislation will impact children, and even basic data about child well-being is fragmented and delayed. And although there is a supposed cabinet-level champion for children at the Department of Education, the Trump Administration is now even trying to abolish it.
We saw this most starkly during the pandemic. When states were deciding what to reopen, some prioritized bars, gyms, and tattoo parlors before they prioritized schools. When Congress negotiated relief packages, programs for children were often treated as optional add-ons. When the expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty in half, it was celebrated but then quickly allowed to expire.
Consider what happened to the Build Back Better Act. The original version contained over 400 references to children. By the time it was stripped down to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), virtually all child-related provisions were gone – replaced by just one mention of children in the entire bill.
This is what organized abandonment looks like in legislative form. It’s not one catastrophic act, but a steady stream of omissions, erasures, missed opportunities, and unwarranted praise heaped upon unhelpful and outright harmful gestures.
Structural Reform as a Moral and Practical Imperative
So what would it look like to design a government that doesn’t forget or neglect children?
The answer isn’t just better policy – it requires structural change and institutions that elevate children’s needs across time and political cycles. It requires offices built with accountability measures that make child well-being a permanent priority rather than a periodic focus.
As Todres argues, we need to move “upstream” to ensure children’s needs are accounted for in the ordinary course of government operations, rather than relying primarily on litigation after harm has occurred. Todres explains:
By building and sustaining agencies and institutions that account for and help ensure the rights of all children, we can reduce the prevalence of children’s rights violations and thus the amount of time and resources we spend trying to apprehend perpetrators and assist victims and survivors after harm has occurred.
Among the promising ideas that we champion at First Focus Campaign for Children are:
A bipartisan National Commission on Children (see here and here), modeled on the 1990s body that helped catalyze landmark investments in children, could hold hearings, conduct a full accounting of federal neglect, and offer a sweeping blueprint for action. That earlier commission helped generate bipartisan support for creating the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
An independent Children’s Commissioner, as proposed by Rep. Morgan McGarvey (D-KY) and empowered by Congress, could monitor agencies, investigate violations, consult directly with children, and advocate for policy reforms free from political interference. Over 80 countries have such offices. The U.S. does not.
These offices can conduct investigations into situations that harm children, recommend changes to laws and policies, monitor existing policies and budgets, educate the public, and provide expert policy advice. As Todres notes:
Ombudspersons can monitor existing policies and programs that affect children and track budgets and government spending on programs for children.
For such an office to be effective, Todres emphasizes it must be “established and protected by legislation,” granted genuine “independence” so “it can freely critique government policies that fall short of helping, or even cause harm to, children,” have “a broad mandate to address all children’s rights,” and have “adequate resources – funding, staffing, and other aspects of institutional capacity” that are “protected by law, rather than subject to the whim of politicized decision-making.”
Child Impact Statements, akin to environmental or fiscal impact statements, would require agencies to assess how laws, regulations, or programs affect children before they’re enacted. As Todres explains, these assessments “require that governments assess the potential impact of any law, policy, or program on children prior to its adoption.” He quotes the EU-UNICEF Child Rights Toolkit:
There is no such thing as a child-neutral policy. Whether intended or not, every policy positively or negatively affects the lives of children.
The concept recognizes that, just as we assess the impact of government policy on the environment and budgets, we should systematically evaluate impacts on children. Todres argues that such assessments should be “built into Government processes at all levels and as early as possible in the development of policy and other general measures in order to ensure good governance for children’s rights.”
A national child poverty reduction target would establish clear, measurable goals for reducing child poverty and create accountability for achieving them. For example, New York, California, and Vermont have made commitments to substantially cut their child poverty rates. Other nations, including the United Kingdom, have demonstrated that setting concrete targets with timelines drives policy action and allows the public to track progress. Setting clear goals, measuring progress, and adjusting policy based on outcomes transforms aspirational statements into concrete action.
Offices for Children within each federal agency could ensure that children’s interests are considered in everything from transportation planning to housing policy. Creating a White House Office on Children and Youth and supporting interagency coordination would help ensure that services to children and families are better coordinated across federal agencies and departments.
These ideas aren’t hypothetical. In 2023, Congress allocated several million dollars to stand up a new Children’s Interagency Coordinating Council at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). But we need to go further and codify the changes so they endure.
Prevention is better than crisis response. Design is better than damage control.
Embedding Children’s Voice and Rights: From Principle to Practice
At the core of these structural reforms is a bold but essential truth: children are not potential people – they are people with fundamental rights.
As Todres writes:
…if rights are inherent to all human beings, they exist from birth. Not accepting that children have rights equates to saying rights are not inherent to all human beings but rather that governments get to decide who has rights and when they accrue to individuals (e.g., when they reach adulthood).
To fulfill this vision, we must ensure four foundational functions are built into governance:
A. Voice
Children understand the world they inhabit. They can speak to what’s working and what’s not in schools, health care, policing, climate, and more. But most systems are not designed to listen.
Voice requires more than an invitation. Todres emphasizes children’s “right to be heard on matters that affect their lives,” noting this means children’s “views must be given ‘due weight’ consistent with their age and maturity.”
But genuine participation requires what Professor Laura Lundy describes as four essential elements: space (children must “be given the opportunity to express a view”), voice (meaning “the expression of children’s views must be facilitated in a medium that they choose”), audience (children’s views “must be listened to”), and influence (children’s views “must be acted upon as appropriate”). Without all four elements, youth participation becomes merely symbolic.
Consider how government could adapt its rulemaking process. Currently, when federal agencies propose new regulations, the public can submit comments. But how often do children know about these opportunities? How accessible are the forms? A truly child-responsive system would ensure young people learn about proposed rules that affect them, provide child-friendly explanations, and create accessible pathways for their input.
Agencies should adapt rulemaking processes to include child-friendly explanations and feedback portals. Advisory councils must be more than checkboxes.
B. Representation
Children cannot vote. They have little economic power. That makes institutional advocacy non-negotiable.
Todres makes the case:
It is critical that governments create specialized offices or appoint individuals tasked with ensuring that children’s rights and wellbeing are a priority.
An independent Children’s Commissioner, youth-focused offices in every federal agency, and interagency coordination are all essential.
These offices should be empowered not only to advocate, but to monitor budgets, track outcomes, and consult with children and families directly. Beyond investigating and recommending reforms, they play “an important public education role, organizing campaigns to inform children, families, and the general public about children’s rights and how to uphold them.” They also “provide expert policy advice, representing children’s interests,” and produce annual reports that create accountability for government performance.
C. Resources
Every right requires resources. Yet, as we have found in our Children’s Budget analysis over the years, we are shortchanging our children.
In fact, the government spends more on net interest payments than on all programs for children. The trend lines are worsening.
We need:
Adoption of a Children’s Budget that is reported annually and publicly
Creation of child poverty reduction targets with clear timelines and accountability measures
Passage of baby bonds, like those proposed by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), which create investment accounts for newborns to help close racial wealth gaps and inequalities
D. Remedies
Rights without remedies are symbolic.
Children must be able to report harm, seek justice, and obtain redress in ways that are timely, trauma-informed, and accessible.
Todres is clear about what’s at stake, “Without access to justice for children, children’s rights would merely be symbolic.” He emphasizes that remedies must be “accessible, affordable, adequate and timely, and rights holders seeking them should not fear victimization.”
This requires three components: “processes for identification of violations, including both individual reporting and more systematic evaluations; pathways and spaces or institutions where individuals can seek a remedy; and enforcement mechanisms for any remedies ordered.”
Remedies can include litigation, but also independent monitors, administrative complaint processes, and regular evaluations of law and policy. As Todres notes, “administrative processes, ombudspersons, and other mechanisms can provide more accessible, less intimidating avenues for relief” than courts alone. The point is not to over-lawyer systems, but to ensure accountability is real.
Regular systematic evaluation of laws and policies can catch problems early, reducing reliance on individual complaints from children who have already suffered harm. Children’s commissioners can investigate concerns proactively. Impact assessments can flag potential violations before policies take effect.
These four functions – voice, representation, resources, and remedies – work best when they work together.
As Todres writes:
Each component can strengthen the others. Ensuring meaningful child participation not only empowers young people, but their insights can also improve the work of children’s commissioners; help ensure resources are directed to where they are most needed; and inform evaluations of laws, policies, and programs that can improve remedies.
Consider the reinforcing dynamic: Youth participation informs representatives about pressing concerns. Representatives advocate for resources to address those concerns. Impact assessments ensure resources are well-targeted. Evaluation mechanisms identify when commitments aren’t being met. And remedies create accountability that drives improved performance.
This is the scaffolding of a child-responsive government. One that doesn’t just claim to care about children, but instead, one that proves it.
Reshaping the Political Conversation
Building these structures also offers a way to transcend our current political dysfunction and polarization.
Aguirre and Chokshi argue that focusing on children can bridge partisan divides in ways that other issues cannot:
The point is actually to transcend these partisan ruts by reshuffling traditional political identities in ways that forge new coalitions and conversations. Is there a more powerful identity than that of a parent, grandparent or caregiver?
Aguirre and Chokshi add:
In our conversations with more conservative family members, we find our attempts at political persuasion have more purchase when we begin with the lens of our daughters’ futures, and then extrapolate to the effects on other children.
The American public have consistently expressed overwhelming bipartisan support for the structural reforms related to children’s policies by wide margins. Voters have expressed support for a Child Poverty Target by a 70-20% margin, for an independent Children’s Commissioner by a 65-26% margin, and for making the best interests of the child the standard for government action by an 81-13% margin.
Fixing the Bridge, Not Just Saving Kids from the River
There’s a public health parable that Todres referenced in his article about people who keep falling into a river. Rescuers pull them out one by one. Eventually, someone walks upstream. “Where are you going?” the others ask. “To see why people keep falling in.”
That’s what structural reform is about. Not just pulling kids from the water but fixing the faulty bridge.
In response to COVID-19, the federal government acted to protect children from poverty and hunger. As a result, child poverty was more than halved through a variety of mechanisms, including making the Child Tax Credit fully refundable. In 2021, child poverty dropped to a record low of 5.2%.
That investment was worthwhile: both because children deserve better life chances and because societies that fail their children pay enormous costs. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) found that child poverty costs the U.S. up to $1.1 trillion annually as a result of poor health outcomes, lack of educational attainment, and higher crime rates.
But Congress backtracked and let the fully refundable Child Tax Credit and many other important provisions for children expire. More recently, Congress passed, and President Trump recently signed into law, a bill that cuts Medicaid by more than $900 billion and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by nearly $200 billion – measures that will increase child poverty, the uninsured rate for children, and child hunger.
Instead of “organized abandonment” and harm, we should improve policies, make investments, and build the institutions that reflect what we say we believe: that children matter. That their rights are real. And that their voices and interests count.
Related Articles
Aguirre, M. D., & Chokshi, D. A. (2024). America Needs a Children’s Party. Unpublished.
Baillie, T. (2010). A Champion for Children and Young People: The Work and Impact of the Commissioner for Children and Young People in Scotland. Big Ideas: Game-Changers for Children, pp. 83-92.
Bell, K. (2010). From Target to Legislation: Tackling Child Poverty in the United Kingdom - A Model for the United States? Big Ideas: Game-Changers for Children, pp. 5-16.
Bunnett, D. (2010). Changing the Paradigm: A Bill of Rights for Children and Youth. Big Ideas: Game-Changers for Children, pp. 101-109.
Cipriani, D. (2010). What Game Are We Playing? Big Ideas: Game-Changers for Children, pp. 94-100.
Convergence. (2025). It’s Time for a National Commission on Children on Children and Families for the 21st Century. Retrieved from Convergence Center for Policy Resolution: https://convergencepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Issue-Brief.pdf.
Davidson, H. (2010). A U.S. National Ombudsman for Children. Big Ideas: Game-Changers for Children, pp. 74-82.
First Focus Campaign for Children. (2023). Children’s Agenda for the 118th Congress: Kids at a Crossroads. Retrieved from First Focus Campaign for Children: https://campaignforchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2023/05/First-Focus-Childrens-Agenda-for-118th.pdf
Lesley, B., & Houshyar, S. (2010). A National Council for Children: Renewing Our Vision for America’s Future. Big Ideas: Game-Changers for Children, pp. 17-23.
Lundy, L. (2007). ‘Voice’ is Not Enough: Conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. British Educational Research Journal, 33(6), 927–942.
Schmidt, M., & Coffey, J. (2010). Change in Sight: Child Well-Being as a Policy Development Framework. Big Ideas: Game-Changers for Children, pp. 50-59.
Todres, J. (2025). Conceptualizing a Rights-based Framework for Public Institutions to Support Children. Harvard Law and Policy Review, 20(1), 145-175.