The acute shortage of 2022 may have passed. But in October, the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey found that 1.4 million people had trouble getting infant formula in the previous month. Another recall of a formula intended for children with allergies started on Dec. 31. The babies affected by these shortages are different babies than the 2022 crop, with mostly different parents. And that means many affected families might have no idea that these shortages are part of a pattern — or that politicians once promised to help prevent a repeat.
This gap reveals a broader mismatch between the metabolism of families and politics, and one that is a real obstacle to policy that helps them. Kids grow fast. Lawmakers, regulators and corporations move slowly. By the time legislators respond to families’ needs, busy parents are on to the next hurdle. The people who make up the baby-parent constituency of 2024 are different from the class of 2022 — and with that kind of turnover, it’s all too easy for momentum and moral urgency to dissipate.
The recent formula shortages are an excellent example. To recap: In 2022, Abbott Nutrition recalled formula produced in a plant that made roughly 20 percent of the formula sold nationwide out of concerns about possible bacterial contamination, and then shut down the factory for months to make sure it could produce safe product.
Families responded by helping each other hunt down formula in local Facebook groups, shipping samples and extra formula to other parents, and even sharing their own frozen breastmilk. As mom to a then-newborn, I knew how insistent hungry babies can be: I nursed my son while on late-night briefings about efforts to alleviate the crisis.
For a time, it seemed like the policy response might match that parental urgency and sense of collective obligation. The Biden administration flew in formula from overseas. The Centers for Disease Control moved to improve tracking of the bacteria, and the Food and Drug Administration proposed restructuring in a way that would allow it to devote more money and attention to food safety. Some formula companies invested in expanded production so regulators wouldn’t be caught between safety and supply. And 292 lawmakers eager to defend struggling parents and hungry babies — or at least to be seen doing so — introduced or co-sponsored bills intended to help.
One result was a new law to alleviate the impact of future shortages. But as the worst of the shortage passed, congressional energy to fix the underlying causes of such shortages waned.
When I polled those 292 members of Congress who had earlier expressed interest in the problem in early 2023, 106 wrote back to say they were still concerned — and to offer creative solutions to the root causes of the shortage. Yet despite bipartisan interest in everything from the tariffs on foreign-made formula to the need for government investment in start-up formula companies, none of these inventive proposals advanced. I started covering this story out of a sense of obligation to my fellow parents, and I’ve stuck with it, even though my baby is now old enough to raid the cookie table at holiday parties. But many other parents once focused on the formula issue have moved on.
That makes sense. As the political scientists Laurel Elder and Steven Greene explain in their 2012 book “The Politics of Parenthood,” having a child is politically formative because of the new experiences and institutions parents encounter. Families become acquainted with the child-care system, then schools. Parents who need help paying rent, buying food or covering the cost of medical care get to know government bureaucracies, perhaps better than they might like. And all this means that although parents are strapped for time — a large body of literature demonstrates that having a child decreases the rate at which parents vote, for instance — they have a special sense of civics, however ephemeral.
Congress, on the other hand, does have that kind of institutional memory. Or at least, it’s supposed to. And it’s dispiriting to see the contrast between lawmakers’ collective sclerosis and the energy parents bring to bear on behalf of their kids.
Congress passed just 34 bills in 2023, some of them kludged-together spending bills. Perhaps, with a median age of 57.9 and 65.3, respectively, members of the House and Senate do feel more excited about modernizing the way states hand out hunting licenses or minting Marine Corps semiquincentennial coins than helping support successive generations of American newborns. But a more likely reality is that it’s just easier to smooch a baby on the campaign trail than it is to overcome partisan and institutional obstacles to figure out how to feed millions of infants.
This isn’t a simple mismatch to fix, but some little things might help. Universal vote-by-mail would make it easier for beleaguered new parents to keep a foothold in the political process. The vast ranks of momfluencers could turn themselves into organizers, reminding their followers not only that some parenting struggles are universal, but that the answers are sometimes policy fixes, not parenting hacks. And the young parents in Congress, such as the men who came together in the Dads Caucus, can bring their own experiences — and their own babies — to the House and Senate floors to remind their colleagues that kids and parents can’t wait.
As lawmakers return to the Hill and the campaign trail this year, they ought to take inspiration from a parenting nostrum that’s no less true for being a cliché: The days are long, but the years are short. And policy is only family-friendly if it arrives in time to help parents and children who need it.
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