Brigid Schulte works at the intersection of personal transformation and systems change to ensure that all people have the opportunity to life a rich, full and wholehearted life. She’s an award-winning journalist, think tank program director, keynote speaker and author of Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life andthe New York Times bestselling book on time pressure, gender and modern life, Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play when No One has the Time. She was an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post and The Washington Post Magazine and was part of the team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. She serves as the director of the Better Life Lab at New America, using the power of story to reimagine better work, family, gender, and care. She hosts the Better Life Lab podcast on Slate. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, the Guardian, Time, Slate, U.S. News & World Report, New York Magazine, Fast Company, CNN, and many others. She is a frequent television, radio and podcast guest and has been quoted in numerous media outlets. You can find out more about her on website.

Haley Swenson is a research fellow for the Better Life Lab. Swenson was the deputy director of the Better Life Lab from 2020 to 2022. Swenson directed major research projects for the Lab, and led the team’s editorial and impact strategy. Swenson has also directed multiple reporting grants and story series, editing and writing pieces that have landed in the Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, and at Slate. She is an expert on the relationship between gender inequality at work and gender inequality at home, as well as their intersections with racial and economic injustice. With Brigid Schulte, she helped create and manage BLLx, a distillation of research-based experiments on better sharing the work of family and home life. Swenson earned an MA and a PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from The Ohio State University. Her dissertation was titled Reproducing Inequality: Cooking, Cleaning, and Caring in the Austerity Age. Swenson came to New America in 2017 as an ACLS/Mellon Public Fellow and edited the Better Life Lab at Slate. She and her family live in Salt Lake City. You can find out more about her on her website.
Here, I ask them about their new study, A Glimpse of Stability: The Impact of Pandemic Aid on Families in Poverty.

AMW: In your recent study, A Glimpse of Stability, how did the pandemic-era government relief packages, such as rental assistance and expanded Child Tax Credits, directly impact family financial stability during the pandemic?

Brigid: When you think back to 2020 and the early days of the pandemic, with a deadly novel virus spreading quickly and leaving people sick or dead in its wake, it was a terrible time for families. Child cares and schools shut down. Businesses closed or went out of business. At one point, 20 million people were unemployed. And no one knew when it would end. Economists were predicting a “financial apocalypse” that would send millions of families spiraling into poverty and hardship. Instead, Congress and the first Trump administration and later the Biden administration responded with a robust set of public policies and investments — the largest outside of wartime — that really worked to make people’s lives better. Economists found that families’  financial well-being actually improved, even in such a turbulent and unstable time.

In our work, spending more than two years intensively listening to families living in poverty or on low wages across the country, what became clear is that a handful of these policies made a real difference.

• Mortgage forbearance, rental assistance and eviction moratoriums kept families in their homes rather than out on the streets, which is critical for stability, especially for healthy child development.
• Giving families cash without all the usual punitive rules restrictions (you can’t buy diapers with food and nutrition benefits, for instance) made an enormous difference. The expanded Child Tax Credit, for instance, brought the U.S. child poverty rate down to its lowest recorded level. That and stimulus payments empowered families to make their own choices about what they needed. Research shows families spent most of the cash on food, housing, basic necessities and paying off debt.
• Expanding access to food and health care was a life saver for many families.
• Expanding unemployment also made a huge difference keeping families afloat as they sought work.

What we found lacking, however, was real investment in child care. Families across the socio-economic spectrum really struggled to work and pay bills without stable child care. And though Congress did infuse some funding to keep the child care system afloat, it wasn’t enough. The system was underfunded and dysfunctional to start with. One single parent, a nurse, wasn’t able to work and care for her four children at the same time, and wound up being evicted several times, despite the moratorium, and spiraled into poverty.

Haley: I just want to add one thing here. The pandemic was a catastrophe for many families. One case study I wrote was of Chantel Valdez’s family in Blanding, Utah. She and her two children lost their main support network, two elders, Grandma Mary and Uncle George, who loved them and cared for them. They both passed away from COVID in 2020. There were some pandemic losses that can never be undone and never be made up for. But at least while they grieved and recovered over the next year, Chantel continued to receive income because she qualified for unemployment after the schools she worked for closed. They had good, wholesome food, because of SNAP. They had safe and stable housing, because of emergency rental assistance. They were able to access mental health services because they had access to Medicaid for the first time.

Think about any family going through the worst things that have ever happened to them, harder experiences than they could ever imagine, all at once. For a brief moment during the pandemic, our society and both political parties decided families shouldn’t have to cope with all that on their own. It was a real moment of crisis for so many families. I can’t help but think about how many other crises families encounter every day, and because it’s no longer considered a public health crisis, they are, effectively, on their own.

AMW: In your experience, how did the narratives surrounding poverty shift during the pandemic, and what role did government assistance play in changing those narratives?

Brigid: It’s so interesting how the narrative of “deservingness” shifted during the pandemic. You heard from conservative lawmakers that they’d support family-supportive policies and investments because people were out of work “through no fault of their own.” The implication is that, outside the pandemic, if people live in poverty it must be their own fault?

I think, like how the Great Depression began to shift mindsets about the powerful role public policy and investments can make in making all people’s lives better, we began to see some shifting. That policymakers can choose to invest tax dollars to create an economy that works for all people and where all families can thrive.

But, as the new Trump administration and GOP-led Congress seeks to decimate the civil service and slash family-supportive policies, you see those hardened “deservingness” narratives arise again. On X, the social media platform Elon Musk owns, the billionaire and Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE leader, called people who rely on public aid “parasites.” Other GOP leaders want to put work requirements for anyone receiving public support.

All of that ignores reality: One in three Americans rely on at least one of 10 public support programs. Unlike the false and racist stereotype of “welfare queens,” more than 40 percent of those who receive public benefits, by far the majority, are White. And one Government Accountability study found that the majority of those who receive food or health care public assistance, are already working full-time. Those that aren’t working are children, the elderly or those with disabilities.

So the real story is not that people in poverty aren’t working hard enough. The real story is that business and political leaders have allowed an economy that creates jobs that don’t pay enough to support people’s lives.

We also produced some creative multimedia products designed to dispel these persistent yet false narratives and help people better understand the complexity of living a life in poverty, and all the barriers that can get in the way of just trying to get to the end of the day:

A photo story, Why Cash Matters, chronicles a day in the life of the Johnson family. Like 52 million households, about 41 percent of all households, the Johnson’s make too much to qualify for public support, but not enough to live on. We show how an ongoing $500 a month Guaranteed Basic Income pilot, started with federal American Rescue Plan Act funds, and continued by the city of Alexandria, Virginia, has been a lifeline for them.

We also created a choice-based interactive experience or game, “something else came up.”  Readers/players are confronted with the same set of choices that one of our case study participants, Kiarica Schields, faced one morning trying to get her son off to child care in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. The goal was to give people more insight into her experiences, and explore the widespread impacts of poverty and systemic barriers to family well-being. As we explain in an accompanying blogpost, Why did a think tank make a text-based game, “while the choices appear abundant, your environment and material circumstances create seemingly infinite barriers. Navigating around these barriers is time-consuming and reduces access to opportunities to build a better life.”[1] 

AMW: What lessons do you think policymakers can take away from this moment, particularly regarding how support programs could be structured to help families in the long term, beyond the pandemic?

Brigid: The real lesson here goes to the heart of what has been a widening ideological and political gap over the past several decades: the role of government. Conservatives argue that the federal government should be small, businesses unregulated, and that markets should be allowed to run free. But what the pandemic experience showed is that the federal government can and must play an enormously important role in using tax dollars wisely, making investments, setting policies and reasonable regulatory guardrails to ensure the health, wellbeing and quality of life of all people, families, communities and the economy.

Haley: If you look back to 2020 and the policies that followed the start of the pandemic, they showed us unequivocally that government and public funding can make people’s lives better. The stories research participants so generously shared with us show that to be true, but those policies were time-capped and did not last long enough for some families. We need robust policies serving whole families with long-term funding, that don’t set arbitrary limits on support or require them to jump through bureaucratic hoops. I think the key to achieving that is to start by believing these families matter and that they deserve our collective support.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: What Practitioners can teach Everyone about Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd