 My name is Liza Mundy. I'm a program director here at New America, which as you know is a non-partisan, non-profit think tank and civic enterprise. I direct the Bread Winning and Caregiving Program, which is our sort of fancy word for work and family. And the purpose of my program is to help shape policy and help us move toward a world where both men and women can fulfill their Bread Winning and Caregiving responsibilities more easily than many people find it possible to do now. We have a very exciting, very distinguished panel here today to talk about social policy families, how better to help families, and to talk about the President's budget and some of the visions and markers laid down in that budget and moving forward. It's going to be a high-minded and distinguished event, but I thought if you don't mind, if it doesn't seem too facetious, that I would start with sort of a low culture reference and talk briefly about something that I like to think of as the Jetsons fallacy. I'm dating myself with this reference, but there was a popular cartoon in the 1960s that you may remember called The Jetsons, and I think I watched it fairly religiously because I remember it pretty vividly. And it was a cartoon that envisioned a family of the future, a family that was 100 years hence, so it was like 2062 or something like that. This family was of course living in space because we'll all be living in space in 2060-something. They of course had flying cars because we're going to have those any minute, and they were living in elevated buildings. They had robot housekeepers, you know, all the accoutrement that technology is going to give us any day now, so everything had changed. You may not remember this, there was a two-hour work week, so George Jetson did go to the office, but he only had to work an hour a day, two days a week. Technology was also going to set us free and give us a lot of free time, and I know that that is how you all experience technology in your lives. The one thing that was not going to change though was the family. You may remember that The Jetsons are a nuclear family. George Jetson is the family breadwinner. Jane Jetson, there was always a sequence in which he tried to give her some money in the morning to go shopping and she would take his entire wallet because that's what women do. And so even though everything had changed, the composition of the family had not changed and apparently would never change. We know now that that sort of nuclear family of the 1950s and 60s was in fact a historical blip. Historians like Stephanie Coons have shown effectively that in fact that was not the way that the human family was always made up. And we know now that it was sort of an artifact of that era just to sort of quote some statistics. According to pure research in 1960, 37% of households included a married couple raising their own kids like The Jetsons. Today only 16% of households fit that description. In 1980, 61% of kids younger than 18 were living with heterosexual parents in their first marriage now less than half are. So families are changing. Families will continue to change. In many cases that's a good and wonderful thing as people have found their way into relationships that meet their needs and desires. The Jetsons also I don't think any talk of same sex marriage would have really resonated in the 60s and we've had that very very positive development. So many of the changes I think have enabled people to have more choice and freedom in their lives. But I think some of the changes in the family, 40% now families are headed by a female breadwinner, which is also a great thing in many instances. But in other instances, it's an artifact of the fact that high high paying industrial jobs of the 1950s and 60s that were available to men are no longer so available. So many of the economic stresses that have materialized in the past couple of decades have shaped and affected the family. In some cases in ways that have been not so positive. But our social policies I think are still rooted in the ideas of the 1960s that that you're going to have a nuclear family with a male breadwinner and a stay at home or part time working wife. And I think one of the challenges today and it's a big challenge is to acknowledge the changes that have taken place in the family and to update and coordinate the social policies that serve families and affect families. And it's easy to identify social policies like welfare or you know the child care development block grant that directly and specifically are designed to affect families. But there are many other policies having to do with education or even small business that affect families and family formation as well. And one of the things that we've been endeavoring to do at New America is to bring together many of our programs to really talk about this. How do you think about a whole range of social policy with families in mind and family well being and family formation. We're fortunate to have funding from the Annie Casey Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation to engage in a really rigorous conversation about how we can update and coordinate our social policies to recognize changes in families to support families in all their diverse forms and to holistically address the family so that needs of parents and children are met simultaneously if possible or at least so that social families serving children think about the needs of other generations as well. There's a lot of talk these days about a two generation approach to families or in some cases a three generation approach at any rate a multi generational approach and we'd like to be part of that conversation as well.