“I am because we are; and since we are therefore I am.”
Our Work
Recent decades have shown us that our social fabric is stretched beyond its capacity to support our children and families. More must be done to build a culture of connection and solidarity both in the United States and around the world. There is too much distrust, division, loneliness, and despair. It is already taking a toll on our kids.
We are working to understand the scope of the problem and how it impacts kids and families. We want to generate new solutions for growing a connected culture supportive of the flourishing of individuals, families, and communities.
We conduct surveys on parental loneliness and social connection with state and local stakeholders, and funders.
We work with stakeholders to develop policies, strategies, and practices to foster an inclusive culture that supports families with young children, particularly those furthest from opportunity.
We help organizations to better support the needs of Gen Z parents, a new generation with unique challenges and characteristics.
Questions shaping our work
Guiding our work in this area is our search for an answer to fundamental questions that touch on both the human condition and the particular needs of children and families, and those who seek to meet their needs in fields from child health to child care:
What constitutes the good life in community? How might we ensure access to such a life beginning with the youngest among us?
What is driving plummeting levels of trust? How can we reverse these trends? How are they impacting families with young children and the systems that serve them? What will it take to rebuild trust among low-income communities of color where families are vulnerable and systems least resilient?
What are the social, cultural, and political barriers to realizing connection and solidarity as “protective factors” for our children and families?
How might stakeholders create solutions and build public will for more interconnected and solidaristic approaches to supporting young children and their families, particularly families furthest from opportunity?
How can we balance the growing desire for scaled solutions with declining trust in traditional institutions?
Is disconnection in families, communities, and the ambient culture an impediment to the healthy, parent-child relationships that are the emerging focus in the field of child health? How can efforts to rebuild trust and connection in families, communities, and the culture align with efforts to promote parent-child connection as the basis for lifelong flourishing?
Our collection of insights
America's Loneliness Epidemic Hits Kids Hardest
“Positive relationships are central to our well-being. They make us who we are, make us happier and healthier, and help us live longer.”
In his article for Newsweek, Joe Waters reflects on America's loneliness epidemic, and how the key to addressing it might be found by focusing on safe, stable, nurturing relationships in the earliest years of life.
In his article for National Affairs’ summer issue, Ian Marcus Corbin reflects on the loneliness epidemic in America. To address it, Ian proposes "a revival of a particular and extreme form of solitude—that of the artist, the prophet, the philosopher, the revolutionary." Alongside this, he argues for "a revival of solitude in the form of intimate, flexible world-tending in each of our lives and communities."
Deep Down things in a Time of Panic
In his article for the Hedgehog Review, Ian Marcus Corbin writes about America’s season of crisis and why new, more capacious visions are needed to overcome it.
Building A Moral Renaissance in 2023
In their article for Newsweek, Ian Marcus Corbin and Joe Waters write about our need for a spiritual renaissance born from a deep, shared vision of what is good and beautiful and worth pursuing.
Foundations for Flourishing Futures: A Look Ahead for Children and Families
Produced in partnership with Knowledgeworks, this forecast projects how the social, economic, political, and technological movements of today will reshape family life over the next decade.
How Money Culture Hurts the American Family
This essay by senior fellow Ian Marcus Corbin explores the mechanisms that created and now sustain America’s approach to the nuclear family, the economy, and the care of children and elders.
Gen Z parents: growing in numbers, but limited in political clout
The Good, The Bad & The Lonely: What we need to know about Gen Z
Finding Home: Changing Families, a Changing Planet, and Impacts on Young Children
Young children’s connections to other people and to their hometowns, states, and countries are in flux due to shifting family structures and climate change.
Building a Culture of Solidarity that Works for Mothers and Children
It's vital that we remember to ask how mothers and children are faring in contemporary America. And as we work together to imagine a better country, what do we owe our children, and those who shepherd them into the world?
Technology made the pandemic bearable. It’s also behind our national crack-up.
To be sure, Zoom, smartphones and social media have allowed many to remain healthy, sane, employed and somewhat connected during the covid-19 pandemic. But these nine months of tech dependency have also accelerated a less-welcome process long underway: the atrophy of our friend-making muscles. That has deeper implications than you might think.
America Drawn Inward: Assessing Bowling Alone at 20.
We all need time and solitude to set our inner life in order, to understand what we have done and what we intend to do, to choose between our warring desires, to figure out what truly matters to us, what we truly love.
Stay-at-home Fathers: Liberalizing Social Norms or Economic Desperation?
Timothy Green writes that our goal as a society should be to increase opportunities for people. This entails creating the institutions and norms that will allow fathers to play the role of primary caregiver should they wish to and ensuring a robust economy that has jobs and adequate wages for fathers and mothers who want to work.
Health is Membership: 25 Years Later
In this podcast series, our CEO Joe Waters speaks with his guests about the erosion of attention, growing up at scale, clickbait culture, the value of limits, patients as “inhabitants of stories”, and why “cradle to career” is a bad idea.