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 to provide care for our culture’s soul, to provide nourishment for the cultural soil so that it may produce life for the next generation.” — Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care
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. Not because anyone wants to. Because the system can’t imagine anything else.
Here’s what I mean. A 22-year-old parent shows up at a family shelter with a toddler. Her own brain is still developing—the neuroscience on prefrontal maturation is clear about this, it continues into the late twenties. Her child’s brain is building its entire regulatory architecture from the quality of her presence. Both of these developmental windows are open at the same time. Neuroscientists call the 0–5 period the most sensitive in human development. And the parent’s 18–30 window is the closing phase of a genuine critical period for executive function and identity.
So here are these two open windows. And what does the system do? A resume workshop. Job placement. 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 at Columbia has established that the caregiver functions as an external regulatory organ for the child’s developing brain. The child’s attachment system, stress response, capacity for emotional regulation—all of it is built through the quality of the caregiving relationship. Not through a curriculum. Through a person who is there.
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.
So you have this situation—I call it the Double Window—where 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 intervention for the child, because the parent is the child’s formation environment. You don’t actually 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. Nearly 5,000 children, randomly assigned. And the finding that everybody cites 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. But that reading misses something important. Over sixty percent of the control group attended other preschool programs. The fade-out might not be about Head Start specifically—it might be about the ceiling of all classroom-based early childhood intervention. And the one dimension where the gains actually persisted was parent engagement. Parents spending more time with their kids. Reading more. Being more involved. That part held.
So the investment rooted in the classroom faded when the classroom ended. The investment rooted in the family relationship didn’t. We’ve known this for fifteen years, and we haven’t redesigned much of anything around it. We just keep pouring more into the classroom—more slots, more subsidies, more programs—and calling it progress. Fujimura would call that a culture war approach. Winning territory. Seizing ground. When the actual question is about soil. The classroom was the campaign. The kitchen table was the ground.
The Proposal
The Formation Wage pays parents a declining wage to be present with their child during the first five years. It starts at 100%—$24,000 to $30,000 a year—during the period when the child’s brain is most sensitive and the parent’s presence carries the most developmental weight. It drops to 75% during the pre-K transition year, 50% during kindergarten and first grade, 25% by second and third grade. By that point the parent is working substantially and the child is operating from a base that the formation years built.
But I want to be clear that the wage by itself is not really the proposal. A parent sitting alone in an apartment with a child and a check is not in formation. They’re in survival. The wage works because the parent is embedded in something—a formation community that includes a weekly shared meal (we call it the Slow Table, 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. Surfacing inherited patterns. Building the capacity to tell a coherent story about difficult relational experiences. Composing a life, not just managing one.
Le Guin called the carrier bag the oldest human technology—not the spear, not the weapon, but the container that holds what sustains. The Slow Table is a carrier bag. It holds what the family needs without turning it into a program, a compliance requirement, a thing that extracts data from you in exchange for help.
What Families Already Carry
The part of this that I feel most strongly about is the cultural piece. The families in this system—immigrant, refugee, Indigenous families—already carry formation practices that predate every early childhood curriculum by centuries. The Habesha coffee ceremony isn’t a cultural supplement. It’s a co-regulation intervention. Three rounds of brewing, the conversation slowing to match the roast, children held communally while the adults’ nervous systems settle. The Vietnamese extended-kin network isn’t a nice cultural asset to affirm. It’s attachment architecture—the grandmother, the aunt, the neighbor who functions as family, providing the consistent relational web that developmental neuroscience now calls essential. The Somali tradition of communal child-rearing is doing exactly what the Harvard Center on the Developing Child describes as serve-and-return interaction.
These practices work. They have always worked. And the current model—which separates the parent from the child for forty hours a week, places the child in an institutional setting designed by people from a different culture, delivered in a language the parent may not speak fluently—doesn’t supplement these practices. It erodes them. Quietly. The child acquires English faster than the parent. The shared language thins out. The grandmother’s authority recedes. The evening storytelling loses its hold. By third grade the ECEAP gains have faded and the family’s own formation technology has 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 doesn’t hide the break. It honors it. That’s what I think the Formation Wage can do for these cultural practices. Not replace them with a curriculum. Provide the conditions—time, community, the economic dignity of a wage—for the gold to flow 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 $130,000 to $170,000 per child over the first five years. The Formation Wage costs $96,000 to $123,000 in new money per family over the same period. It’s cheaper, partly because it eliminates the childcare subsidy during the early phases—the parent is present, so 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—$12,000 to $20,000 a year per child in Washington—for kids whose regulatory architecture wasn’t built during the window when it could have been. Foster care entries—$30,000 to $55,000 a year—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. When you add those layers up across a ten-year horizon, the current fragmented model runs two to three times more expensive than the Formation Wage.
We’re not asking whether we can afford to pay parents. We’re already paying more than this. We’re just 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 at $18 to $20 an hour. 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 Formation Wage is gender-neutral and it has to be voluntary. The employment pathway stays available. And the design isn’t “stay home with your child.” It’s “your development and your child’s development are happening at the same time, and this community will invest in both.” The wage declines because presence is highest-value in the earliest years. And the Bodhisattva Turn—where formed parents become formation practitioners for the next cohort—leads into professional work. The exit isn’t backwards into domesticity. It’s forward into a career that the formation years made possible.
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, concrete support. The formation part isn’t a condition. It emerges through relationship, through showing up at the Slow Table, through 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 intervention.
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 Slow Table for the next family walking in. The thing doesn’t end. It passes to different hands. But I’ll be honest—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. 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—nobody was running a program. Nobody was measuring outcomes. The conditions for formation were just present. The water table was intact.
Modernity drained the watershed. Moved families away from kin. Required two incomes to afford housing. Professionalized care and put it behind a paywall. Then looked at the dry ground and decided the answer was to pipe water in faster. More childcare slots. More subsidies. 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. To say that the parent’s presence is the water, and the community—the Slow Table, the Named Adults, the cultural practices that families carry in their bodies even after everything that’s been done to them—that’s the geology that holds the water in the ground.
Fujimura writes that culture care starts with making something in a broken place. Not arguing about the brokenness. Not winning the argument. Making something that 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 · 206-931-6646 · 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 Who Were Never Formed