It’s Often Hard to Find Affordable Caregiving

  • For millions of families with children, child care is expensive, hard to find, and too inflexible to meet their specific needs.
  • As detailed in this recent IWF Policy Focus, millions of seniors need additional support and assistance so they can age in place, but it’s hard to find qualified and affordable help.
  • For millions of Americans and people living in the United States, housing is expensive and scarce. Rent has gone up by more than 20% since the Biden-Harris administration began in 2021.

Existing Domestic Work Arrangements Fail Workers and Families

  • Domestic work is a unique and challenging sector of the economy, suffering from both over and under regulation. Government regulators struggle to balance the competing need to ensure that workers are treated fairly and the reality that domestic work can blur the lines of what constitutes work. 
  • Policymakers should consider how to create a better regulatory framework to encourage more caregiving relationships to take place legally. 
  • All states and federal agencies should work to ensure that there are opportunities for any worker who is being abused to obtain legal help.

Congress Should Create a New American Caregivers Program

  • An American Caregivers Program would give citizens and residents similar work opportunities to those currently provided to young foreigners through the State Department’s au pair program.
  • It could create a new opportunity for Americans to engage live-in caregivers—outside the existing, often unworkably complex, regulatory framework.
  • And the caregiver program would increase the supply of caregivers, and make it easier for people to get the help they need. 

Click HERE to read the policy focus and learn more about an American Caregiver Program.