In 2019, the Better Life Lab team at the nonpartisan think tank, New America, fielded a nationally representative survey on men and caregiving in the United States. We paired the survey with online focus groups consisting of men who are fathers, men who are professional caregivers, and men who care for aging or disabled adults. Our questions covered a wide range of topics, from views on and use of paid family leave to the views and experiences of men who are professional caregivers.
One theme emerged through all the data: Respondents across demographics overwhelmingly supported ideas of equal caregiving and considered men fully capable and valuable caregivers yet also admitted this was far from their lived experiences.
When the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic in March 2020 and schools, workplaces, and child-care centers were closed indefinitely, we were still analyzing and releasing our data. When we had designed our survey nearly two years prior, we could not have imagined such a jolt to everyday life and the caregiving arrangements most people rely on to make it through their days. Yet, our multidisciplinary team of researchers, journalists, and policy experts was positioned to analyze and tell the stories of the changing landscape due to an ambitious vision for our Men and Caregiving project. We were prepared not only to share findings from our study to ground the conversation that emerged about who was responsible for providing care, but also to tell the stories of the men and women navigating this volatile moment.
In the first year of the pandemic, we published several reports on our findings, including Engaged Dads and the Opportunities and Barriers to Equal Caregiving, Providing Care Changes Men, and Professional Caregiving Men Find Meaning and Pride in Their Work, but Face Stigma. We also published several stories about the pandemic care crisis in diverse media outlets, from The Guardian to Harvard Business Review and Slate. We crafted a series of stories and essays on the experience of Black men giving care, and our research was cited in news articles from outlets such as Fortune and the Washington Post.
The Men and Caregiving project was emblematic of the Better Life Lab’s rethinking of what it means to be a “policy program” and what role a think tank can play in driving change, not only in policymaking, but also in workplaces and U.S. culture.
The Better Life Lab at New America envisions a future in which individuals, families, and communities thrive with the support of equitable, high-quality universal care infrastructure; accessible, good work that nurtures purpose, learning, growth, health, and well-being; and enlightened cultural norms that respect autonomy and different ways of living, promote fairness and equity, and enable time for care and connection across the arc of life.
We’re a long way from that vision.
Harmful Narratives Affecting All
Too many people and families in America are struggling. Many workplace leaders adhere to “ideal worker” norms that reward long hours of presence and those with no caregiving responsibilities or lives outside of work. Many leaders view hourly workers as easily replaceable widgets and offer low pay and unpredictable schedules. Among the fastest-growing professions, care work is invisible and pays poverty wages. Layoffs, an emphasis on short-term profits, and other factors have increased insecurity, stress and hollowed out the middle class. As a result, hard work is no longer the engine of financial stability or economic mobility it once was in America. In 2025, nearly 40 percent of all Americans can’t pay for a surprise expense.
Rigid, traditional gender narratives that men should be primary breadwinners and women primary caregivers have led to men dominating the leadership ranks in politics and virtually every sector of the economy and outearning women, regardless of education or experience, in virtually every profession. Women, even when they outearn their partners, still spend twice the amount of time on the unpaid labor of care and home. The impossible time pressure, particularly on solo parents, strains relationships, families, and health and well-being.
These gendered narratives have played a central role not only in shaping American work culture but also in America’s alarming lack of family-supportive public policy. Alone among peer economies, the United States has no federal guarantee of paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, or paid annual leave, and it spends the least on care infrastructure. Child care can cost as much as rent, and it is scarce and difficult to find. Caring for disabled or aging loved ones often requires people, often women, but increasingly men as well, to cut back or drop out of work, straining family economic stability.
While these outdated gender narratives have stymied women’s freedom and economic independence, they’ve also prevented men from engaging fully in caregiving, family, and home life that, though the responsibilities can be heavy, is a source of human happiness, connection, and joy, which our Men and Care project found the vast majority of people yearn for.
Harmful narratives that people in poverty just don’t work hard enough or don’t deserve support have led to ineffective and inadequate safety net policies and investments for families. They also ignore the reality that the majority of those receiving life-saving health, nutrition and other public aid are already working full time.
At the Better Life Lab, we believe the stories we tell shape the world we live in. Our role is to tell the stories that expand imaginations and the boundaries of the possible and paint a vision of an attainable, equitable North Star of an America where public policies, workplace practices, and cultural attitudes enable all people and families to combine good work and time for care.
Why a Better Life Lab?
The nonpartisan think tank New America has had a program dedicated to making work and life better and more equitable for families since its founding in 2000. Anne-Marie Slaughter breathed new life and urgency into the mission when she took on the role of president and CEO in 2013. The former high-ranking U.S. State Department leader ignited a national conversation about work-life issues and the role of women with her Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” and subsequent book, Unfinished Business (Penguin Random House 2016).
Slaughter brought Brigid Schulte to New America in 2015 to be a fellow and program director. Schulte, a noted Washington Post journalist and author, had become frustrated by the way mainstream media ignored or gave short shrift to work and family issues. They were often siloed as “mommy issues,” “women’s issues,” or even “poverty issues.” She sought to, as she called it, “galactify” the way we think about work, family, gender, and care, just as she had done in her New York Times bestselling book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play when No One has the Time (FSG/Sarah Crichton Books 2014), and her more recent Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life (Holt 2024). So, the Better Life Lab uses character-driven stories, backed by data, to show how creating workplace practices, public policies, and cultural attitudes that value care and advance equity across race, class, and gender are keys to quality of life, thriving individuals, families, and communities, a flourishing economy, healthy democracy, and robust civil and human rights.
Schulte also wanted the “small but mighty” lab to serve as a convener and connector, working with and helping to strengthen the connective tissue of the care and gender equity movement, thereby multiplying its impact. That larger vision led the team to rebrand as The Better Life Lab, tying its work to both moving toward a good life for all and embracing the notion that we don’t have all the answers and, as a lab, are open to experimenting and testing new ideas and methods.
Our goal from the start has been to put ourselves out of business and live in a world of work-family justice, as the sociologist Caitlyn Collins so brilliantly described it.
Focusing on Narrative Change
When Schulte took on the director role, one of her first calls was to her friend and mentor, Joan Williams. Schulte asked Williams, a pioneer in broadening the way we think about work-life issues, to serve as an advisor to the lab. One of Schulte’s next calls for advice was to Stanford University sociologist Shelley Correll, director of the university’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab and President-Elect of ASA.
“Tell stories,” Correll told her, ”and keep telling them.” We need not just a “drip here and there,” Schulte recalls her saying, but a firehose of good information, data, stories, and policy solutions to challenge outdated myths, to keep the reality of people’s lives and struggles and the need for solutions top of mind for the public, and to inspire action and create the appetite to demand change. We need new narratives.
Narratives are powerful. The stories we believe shape our policies, our institutions, our thinking, our ways of living, and our sense of what’s possible. Psychologist Barry Schwartz maintains that narratives—which he refers to as “idea technology”—may be “the most profoundly important technology” available. Narrative has the power to shape us as human beings and the world we go out to create.
When it comes to work, family, gender and care, too many Americans have accepted individualized, misogynistic, racist, and classist social norms as “just the way it is here.” The Better Life Lab works at the intersection of research, policy, journalism, and popular culture. We are what scholar Cass Sunstein calls “norm entrepreneurs”—people who “oppose existing norms and try to change them” by highlighting the deficiencies and harms of current norms and demonstrating that many people feel similarly.
Our storytelling and research are deeply rooted in understanding the complexity of the problems that cause so much hardship for families. One of our first major projects, the New America Care Report and Index, in partnership with Care.com, used data and stories, including video stories, to unravel the complexities of the broken U.S. child-care system. We used Care.com’s proprietary cost data and developed state ratings using (admittedly imperfect) quality and accessibility data. We found that no one state did all three things—cost, quality, and accessibility—well. Massachusetts, for instance, rated high on the quality of early care and education, but was among the most expensive in the country. Although no one understood why child care in Massachusetts—and across the country— was so expensive, we could clearly show this was, in part, due to labor. Depending on state law, one teacher can care for as many as 30 children in a kindergarten classroom. But one teacher can only care for a handful of toddlers or infants; again, depending on state laws. And since parents bear the burden of child-care costs, as opposed to public funding for K-12 education, the country is, in effect, subsidizing early care and education on the backs of the teachers and caregivers who earn poverty wages. One provider from New Mexico we profiled used her money to pay her teachers better. There were also some surprises, such as the conservative state of Georgia expanding child care, as they saw it as both an important economic engine and key to healthy child development and family stability. The findings opened eyes about how the patchwork child-care system doesn’t work, and sparked conversations about finding solutions across the country.
Over the years, we have expanded our focus to include not just understanding or describing challenges but searching for solutions. We’ve been influenced by research on “solutions journalism” that shows that describing only the enormity of problems can lead audiences to feel depressed and powerless. A focus on a solution, a “bright spot,” however small, can create feelings of hope and agency, and a belief that there is a possibility for change.
Our work dares to imagine and help design a better world. By telling stories grounded in people’s lived experiences and showing how policy decisions shape their lives, we help families and people struggling with work-life conflict see that they are not alone. They face structural, not individual, barriers to opportunity. Our work shifts the work and care paradigm from a “benefit,” “privilege,” “perk,” or “accommodation” to a “right.”
We’ve partnered with various media organizations to broadcast these new narratives, including a dedicated “channel” on Slate, and produce a popular Better Life Lab podcast. But as the media landscape continues to fragment, we’ve adopted a “delta model,” inspired by the far-reaching networks of river deltas to reach audiences wherever we can. Now, we seek to place a variety of stories in a wide variety of outlets to reach diverse audiences, including the New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, Harvard Business Review, CNN, Vox, Time, the Atlantic, Fast Company, and Forbes. And while we’re thrilled to reach large national audiences, we’re just as thrilled when our work or that of our reporting grantees or fellows appears in small, local newspapers or radio stations in rural Idaho, Dayton, OH, or Appalachia. Schulte and team members also speak widely, appear on podcasts and at events, and are cited as thought leaders or serve as behind-the-scenes sources for numerous media pieces. The Lab also hosts events and brings people together in both public and private convenings to find common ground, share ideas and strategies, and build relationships that can lead to action.
The Better Life Lab has also sought to creatively broaden our storytelling, understanding that people get their information from diverse sources and digest it in a variety of ways. As a result, we’ve supported documentary filmmakers and film festivals, audio journalists, photographers, and graphic artists. We even produced an interactive game that puts players in the shoes of a study participant, with the goal of giving players a better understanding of how poverty narrows one’s ability to make choices.
Building on Shelley Correll’s firehose metaphor, the lab has been widening the aperture of that firehose by developing and supporting more storytellers through reporting grants and fellowships. The lab also provides writing workshops and hosts reporter convenings. Our staff offer editorial support and mentorship to journalists, academics, advocates, aspiring storytellers—anyone, really, with a story to tell—in an effort to ensure a wide variety of perspectives influence public discourse and shape policy and investments.
We operate in a rapidly changing time of media fragmentation, disinformation, and contraction, as so many U.S. media outlets, particularly on the local level, disappear. Half of all U.S. counties have no or little access to local journalism. In this shifting landscape, the Better Life Lab has built a reputation as a trusted source for producing and supporting independent research and journalism that combines evidence and data; compelling stories; and larger business, policy, and cultural solutions.
Making an Impact
We track our impact in three ways: (1) the overall reach of our work to the U.S. public, (2) the influence we have on discourse in key communities, and (3) the effect we have on individual action and social structures, such as shifting workplace norms, public policy, media coverage, and social attitudes. We track our influence through AI and online tools, testimonials, citations, and feedback. We see the following results from our efforts:
We are disrupting harmful poverty narratives that disproportionately harm women and families.
For A Glimpse of Stability, an in-depth qualitative research and storytelling project, the lab centered the voices of women in poverty and highlighted what families need to thrive.
We are shifting the national conversation to focus on care innovations.
Our work has been instrumental in calling national attention to the care crisis across the life cycle and continues to lead the way in highlighting care solutions and innovations. We helped make care a campaign issue and provided a playbook of care movement wins. Our research and storytelling have helped make the case for state and national paid family and medical leave policies.
We are broadening the gender equity and care conversation.
The lab’s Men and Care project broke new ground on men’s attitudes and actions around care and caregiving and continues to drive the national conversation for more inclusive policies.
We are leading the movement to redesign work to make room for care.
Through influential books, a popular four-season podcast on Slate, practical toolkits, stories, and workshops, the lab has been at the forefront of showing how the future of work can be redesigned to be fairer.
We are developing and supporting a diverse cadre of care storytellers.
We lead innovative initiatives to bring more diverse voices into the national conversation and periodically offer grants to support more researchers and reporters in telling care stories.
We are shining a spotlight on unpaid care work.
We are telling stories, creating awareness, and providing practical tools, such as BLLx, experiments users can try at home, that help couples and families more fairly share unpaid labor and care.
The Future of Work, Care, and Well-Being
The current divisive, tumultuous, fearful political moment is deeply challenging for all Americans. Old, repressive narratives of white supremacy, patriarchy, class grievance, retribution, and corporate primacy are resurging powerfully. In this chaos, the Better Life Lab’s mission, North Star vision, and commitment to working toward a better and more equitable world of work and care remain steadfast. We recognize that while it’s important to respond to the moment, to set the record straight and speak truth to power, it is also paramount that the lab and others continue to lead. This is a time to continue to keep the firehose blasting, spreading powerful, truthful stories of hope and progress.
For more about the Better Life Lab, please see our 2024 Impact and Reach Report.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.