President Biden is rightly targeting immediate crises, but a longer-term priority must be the well-being and future of our children. His Administration’s child policy thus far has focused on tax credits. While these would help children in poverty and alleviate the nation’s childcare crisis, we need a more holistic, interdisciplinary approach to guide policy to improve the state of the nation’s children. A good way to start would be to revive the White House conferences on children convened every decade between 1909 and 1971.
Shortly after the gavel came down at Washington’s Willard Hotel on January 26, 1909, closing the first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, President Theodore Roosevelt called for legislation setting “a high standard of child protection by the national government.” Congress affirmed the government’s responsibility to “investigate and report upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children.”
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