What If We Paid Parents Instead of Paying to Replace Them?
Paul Tan · Good Protocols, SPC · April 2026
“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.” (Ursula K. Le Guin) Culture care is care for our culture’s soul: nourishment for the cultural soil, so that it may produce life for the next generation. (after Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care, and Makoto and Haejin Shim Fujimura, Beauty and Justice)
The Bench
I’ve been building furniture for a quarter century. When you work with wood long enough, you stop trying to make the material do what you want. You learn to read it: where the grain runs, where it wants to split, where it will hold a joint and where it won’t. A furnituremaker who fights the grain can produce something that looks fine on the surface. But it won’t hold. It cracks along the lines you refused to read.
I’ve also spent thirty years working with families: youth homelessness, foster care, refugee resettlement, multicultural family development across the Puget Sound. And what I keep seeing is systems that build against the grain of the people they serve. They do it without wanting to, because the system can’t imagine anything else.
A 22-year-old parent shows up at a family shelter with a toddler. Her own brain is still developing, and the research on prefrontal maturation suggests it continues well into the twenties. Her child’s brain is building much of its regulatory architecture from the quality of her presence. Neuroscientists call the 0–5 period the most sensitive in human development, and the parent’s own late teens and twenties remain a sensitive period for executive function and identity. Both of these developmental windows are open at the same time.
And what does the system do with two open windows? It offers a resume workshop, job placement, and a childcare subsidy, so the parent can work forty hours a week and the toddler can be in institutional care during the exact years when that child’s brain most needs the parent’s consistent, unhurried presence.
Le Guin wrote that without the skills of imagination, our lives get made up for us by other people. I think the same thing happens to systems. We couldn’t imagine that the parent’s presence with that child might be the most valuable thing happening in the entire shelter. So we made up a different story for them, the employment story, the self-sufficiency story, and the grain kept cracking.
The Double Window
The developmental science here is not ambiguous. Nim Tottenham’s work at Columbia has shown the caregiver acting as an outside regulator for the child’s developing brain. The child’s attachment system, stress response, and capacity for emotional regulation are built through the quality of the caregiving relationship. A curriculum doesn’t build them. A person who is there builds them.
What the policy conversation keeps missing is the parent’s side of this. A lot of the parents in the family homelessness system are under thirty. Many of them carry disrupted formation histories: foster care, domestic violence, trafficking, family dissolution. Their own prefrontal development was shaped by those disruptions, and that development is still happening. The window hasn’t closed yet.
I call this situation the Double Window: the parent’s brain is still plastic enough to form new relational patterns, and the child’s brain is in its most sensitive period for those patterns to matter. When a young parent enters a relational environment that builds their regulatory capacity, two things happen simultaneously. The parent’s own neural architecture starts reorganizing, and the parent’s changed presence becomes the child’s formation, because the parent is the environment the child is formed in. You don’t need two programs. You need one formation process that moves across both windows at the same time.
A furnituremaker would recognize this. You don’t work the joint and the surface as separate problems. You read the whole piece.
What Fades and What Doesn’t
The Head Start Impact Study is the only large-scale randomized controlled trial of Head Start ever conducted, with nearly 5,000 children randomly assigned. The finding most often cited is that classroom-based gains faded by third grade: children who attended Head Start were academically indistinguishable from children who didn’t.
The standard take is that Head Start doesn’t work. That reading leaves out the control group, about sixty percent of whom attended some other child care or preschool program. The fade-out might be less about Head Start than about the ceiling of classroom-based early childhood intervention in general. And the gains that lasted longest, for the children who entered at three, showed up in the parents: more reading together and more involved parenting, reported into the early grades. That part held longer than the classroom gains did.
So the investment rooted in the classroom faded when the classroom ended. The investment rooted in the family relationship lasted longer. We’ve known this for fifteen years, and we haven’t redesigned much of anything around it. We keep pouring more into the classroom, in slots and subsidies and programs, and calling it progress. Fujimura’s distinction helps here: culture war seizes ground, and culture care tends soil. The people who built the classroom system wanted children ready for school and parents free to work, and those are real goods. The question the evidence raises is where the investment roots, and it roots in the family.
The Proposal
The Formation Wage pays parents a declining wage to be present with their child during the first five years. It is highest during the period when the child’s brain is most sensitive and the parent’s presence carries the most developmental weight, and it steps down through the pre-K year and into the early grades, until the parent is working substantially and the child is operating from a base that the formation years built.
The wage by itself is not the proposal. A parent sitting alone in an apartment with a child and a check is surviving, and surviving is not formation. The wage works because the parent is embedded in something: a formation community that includes a weekly shared meal, unhurried because the pace is the point; consistent people who know the family by name and aren’t writing case notes about them (Named Adults); workshops where children make real things with their hands (the Maker Lab); and the parent’s own developmental work. That work means surfacing inherited patterns, building the capacity to tell a coherent story about difficult relational experiences, and composing a life instead of managing one.
Le Guin called the carrier bag the oldest human technology: not the spear or the weapon but the container that holds what sustains. That shared table is a carrier bag. It holds what the family needs without turning it into a program, a compliance requirement, or a thing that extracts data from you in exchange for help.
What Families Already Carry
This is the part I feel most strongly about. The families in this system, immigrant, refugee, Indigenous families, already carry formation practices centuries older than early childhood curricula. The Habesha coffee ceremony is one: three rounds of brewing, the conversation slowing to match the roast, children held communally while the adults settle. Developmental science has a word for part of what happens there, co-regulation, and the science arrived late. The Vietnamese extended-kin network, the grandmother, the aunt, the neighbor who functions as family, is the consistent relational web that developmental neuroscience has only recently learned to call essential. The Somali tradition of communal child-rearing was practicing what the Harvard Center on the Developing Child now describes as serve-and-return long before the Center described it.
These practices work, and they have worked for generations. The current model separates the parent from the child for forty hours a week and places the child in an institutional setting often designed far from the family’s own culture, delivered in a language the parent may not speak fluently. Far from supplementing these practices, it quietly erodes them. The child acquires English faster than the parent, and the shared language thins out. The grandmother’s authority recedes, and the evening storytelling loses its hold. By third grade the family’s own ways of forming its children have been weakened by the system that was trying to help.
Fujimura writes about kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold, so the mended vessel becomes more beautiful than the original. The repair honors the break instead of hiding it. I think the Formation Wage can serve that kind of repair. It replaces none of these practices with a curriculum. It provides the conditions, which are time, community, and the economic dignity of a wage, for the families themselves to bring the gold back into the cracks that displacement and poverty and well-meaning systems opened.
The Math
Between public subsidies, classroom programs, and tax credits, we already spend a great deal on each child in the first five years. By our working estimates the Formation Wage costs less in new money per family over the same period, partly because it eliminates the childcare subsidy during the early phases, since the parent is present and you don’t need to pay someone else to be, and partly because its primary technology is a person and a community, not a facility.
But the real cost argument is about what happens downstream. The current model produces things that never appear on the childcare budget line: special education placements for kids whose regulatory architecture wasn’t built during the window when it could have been, foster care entries triggered by the parental instability that the current model didn’t address, emergency health costs, re-entry into the homelessness system, and underneath all of it, the generational reproduction of the conditions that brought the family to the shelter door in the first place. Added up across a ten-year horizon, those layers make the current fragmented model the more expensive one.
We can afford to pay parents, because we’re already paying more than this. We’re paying it to institutions instead of families, and the investment fades by third grade.
The Hardest Questions
I want to take these head on, because if the objections aren’t met honestly, the model doesn’t deserve to be built.
You’re paying people not to work. We’re paying people to do the most consequential developmental work in the human lifespan. Washington already does this for twelve weeks through Paid Family & Medical Leave. The VA does it for family caregivers with a monthly stipend pegged to a federal pay grade, about $2,100 to $3,400 a month in the Seattle area in 2026. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit, $3,600 per child under six, lifted 2 million children out of poverty before Congress let it expire. The principle isn’t new. The Formation Wage extends it across the window where the evidence for impact is strongest.
This tells mothers to stay home. The worry underneath this one is real: a generation fought to open paid work to mothers, and a wage for presence could be bent into pressure to leave it. The Formation Wage is gender-neutral and it has to be voluntary. The employment pathway stays available. What the design says to a parent is “your development and your child’s development are happening at the same time, and this community will invest in both,” which is a different sentence from “stay home with your child.” The wage declines because presence is highest-value in the earliest years. A parent who has come through these years can turn back to hold the room for the next cohort, an idea I call the bodhisattva turn, after the Buddhist figure who turns back to help others across, and that turn can lead into professional work. Some parents will go forward into a career the formation years made possible, and some will choose to stay home longer, and the design honors both.
I don’t need to be ‘formed.’ I need money and an apartment. I hear this, and the person saying it isn’t wrong. The Formation Wage leads with the material: a real wage, a housing pathway, and concrete support. The formation part isn’t a condition. It emerges through relationship, through showing up at the table and having people around you who aren’t assessing you or writing a case note about you. If a parent takes the wage and comes to the table but doesn’t engage in the deeper work, that’s her choice. Her presence with the child is already the work.
Programs always end. This is the one that stays with me. It comes from young parents who’ve been held by systems before, foster care, transitional housing, rapid rehousing, and felt the cliff, the moment when the thing that was supposed to hold you just stops. I can’t answer this with a promise. I can only answer it with a design: the formation community folds back on itself. The parent who completed the arc comes back and holds the table for the next family walking in. The thing passes to different hands instead of ending. But until the first parent actually makes that turn and comes back, this objection stands. It has to.
The Watershed
For most of human history, children were raised in community, often amid hardships we would not choose to return to, and still the elder held the child while the parent rested. The neighbor knew the child by name. The coffee ceremony, the communal meal, the intergenerational household: none of this was run as a program or measured for outcomes. The conditions for formation were just present, and the water table was intact.
Modernity drained the watershed. It moved families away from kin, made two incomes the price of housing, and professionalized care and put it behind a paywall. Then it looked at the dry ground and decided the answer was to pipe water in faster, with more childcare slots, more subsidies, and more shelter beds: more infrastructure to deliver, at enormous cost, what used to happen because of how people lived together.
The Formation Wage is not a pipe. It’s an attempt to let the watershed come back. It says that the parent’s presence is the water, and that the community, meaning the shared table, the Named Adults, and the cultural practices that families carry in their bodies even after everything that’s been done to them, is the geology that holds the water in the ground.
Fujimura writes that culture care starts with making something in a broken place, instead of arguing about the brokenness or trying to win the argument. The making feeds the soil so the next thing can grow. That’s what I’m trying to do here. This isn’t a policy brief thrown into a culture war. It’s a table, set in a culture of care, with room for people who see it differently than I do.
You don’t need to build a pipe if the watershed is intact. You just need to stop draining it.
Paul Tan is the founder of Good Protocols, SPC, a social purpose corporation in Seattle focused on human formation and generative AI for social impact. He brings thirty years of nonprofit leadership across youth homelessness, foster care, refugee resettlement, and multicultural family development, and twenty-five years as a finish carpenter and furniture maker. He holds an MDiv in Urban Systems and Ministry.
paul@goodprotocols.org · goodprotocols.org · goodprotocols.ai
Companion documents available: The Formation Wage: A Proposal for the First Five Years · The True Cost of Not Forming Parents · Two Threads, One Cloth · The Double Window: Formation Reimagined for Young Parents Whose Own Formation Was Interrupted