WASHINGTON — Families gathered outside the U.S. Capitol Tuesday to “make a fuss for babies,” who they believe are being left behind by lawmakers who direct only a fraction of U.S. resources to young children.

Parents and kids representing 50 states and the District of Columbia convened for the eighth annual “Strolling Thunder.” Moms and dads pushing strollers decked out in state license plates rallied on the Capitol’s East Lawn to lobby lawmakers to fund child care, establish national paid family leave, and permanently expand the child tax credit.

Matthew Melmed, executive director of ZERO TO THREE, the organization behind the event, rallied parents to tell their representatives that the 11 million babies in the U.S. “make up 3.4% of our population, but 100% of our future.”

“You’re here with the pork producers and the insurance lobby and the pharmaceutical industry. Members of Congress don’t normally see real people, and they rarely see babies and toddlers, particularly babies and toddlers who need to have their diapers changed on their desks. And that’s what I encourage you to do if you need to have that happen,” Melmed told the crowd.

The nonprofit ZERO TO THREE bases its advocacy on health and developmental research findings in infants up to age 3, the years the group describes as “the most important for lifelong mental health and well-being.”

Melmed praised top Democratic appropriators Sen. Patty Murray of Washington and Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut for achieving a $1 billion increase for child care block grants and Head Start in this year’s government funding bills.

DeLauro, who spoke to the crowd, said “families deserve better.”

“The cost of living has increased year after year, and more and more Americans simply do not get paid enough to live on, let alone to raise a family,” the Connecticut lawmaker said, promising to advocate for the reinstatement of a fully refundable child tax credit.

‘Diapers, child care, formula’

Candace Winkler, a former Alaska resident and current ZERO TO THREE leader, sat on the Capitol lawn next to Sabrina Donnellan who traveled to D.C. from Girdwood, Alaska, with her 13-month-old Blakely to advocate for lower child care costs and paid family leave.

Winkler, the organization’s chief development and strategy officer, said the group of families would divide up in the halls of Congress Tuesday to meet with their representatives about six key policy issues, including permanently expanding the child tax credit to pandemic levels.

“We’ve seen that time and time again that families are using those resources for diapers, child care, formula and things their babies and their family needs. And it’s really critical for their success,” WInkler said.

The current child tax credit is $2,000 a year after tax liability, but the amount a parent could receive per child under 17 in a refund check is capped at $1,600 in 2023. The credit phases in at 15% on every dollar after earnings of $2,500.

As the U.S. was digging out from under the COVID-19 economic crisis, Congress approved a one-year expansion of the tax credit to $3,000 per child under age 18, and $3,600 for those under age 6 — including for families who made $0 in income. Lawmakers made the entire amount refundable, and a portion of it was sent to families in monthly installments.

Advocates hailed the research findings that showed the temporary move was a game changer for lifting children from poverty in the U.S.

A current bipartisan proposal, widely supported by U.S. House lawmakers, to temporarily expand the child tax credit until 2025 — though not to pandemic levels — is currently stalled by U.S. Senate Republicans who liken aspects of the bill to a welfare program.

The proposal, as passed by the House, would increase the credit’s refundable portion to $1,800 in 2023, $1,900 in 2024 and $2,000 in 2025. The legislation would also increase the phase-in rate to 15% per child, simultaneously — in other words, 30% for a family with two children, 45% for a family with three, and so on.

Credit card debt for child care

Cruz Bueno, a parent from Rhode Island, shared her story of racking up credit card debt to enroll her 11-month-old Rosie in child care, along with her 2-year-old sister Amalia.

“Putting Rosie into daycare means that we must put a halt to our dream of buying a home,” said Bueno, an economist who lives in Warwick with her husband, Xhuljan Meta.

“One of the stipulations of our mortgage pre-approval was to keep our credit card balances low. Even so, we remain hopeful that one day in the not-so-distant future we will be able to buy a home to raise our girls and pass on wealth to them,” she said.

When asked about the Strolling Thunder event at Tuesday morning’s regularly scheduled House Republican press conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said, “There’s lots of ideas out there. What we stand for, what our party stands for, is support of families. We support infants and children, and there’s an appropriate role to play in that.”

“The devil’s always in the details on legislation, so I’m not sure exactly what they’re proposing, but all of us are looking at those avenues. We want to support families. That’s good public policy,” Johnson said. “In our view, the best way often for the government to do that is to step back and allow the local and state officials to handle their business at that local level.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik, House Republican Conference Chair, said the GOP is “proud to be a pro-family conference.”

“There are many of our members who have proposed innovative solutions — one is rural child care. Home-based child care, that’s an issue I’ve worked with many of my colleagues on the Education and Workforce Committee,” Stefanik, of New York, said. “But the economy, the border, crime, these issues, these crises caused by Joe Biden, they impact every family.”

I was so homesick I had to stop looking at images on social media of my friends in beloved, familiar landscapes of home. At times I felt my life had been reduced to getting stuck in underground car parks in a car that was too big at an exit barrier that would reject my bank card. 

Most of all, I was confused by how very foreign America felt. I’ve consumed huge amounts of American novels, television shows, movies and music, but living here is a very different thing, and in some senses our shared language makes the shock of the foreign even more confusing. This country, I’m learning, is odder and wilder than anything I’d prepared myself for, its food, education, humour, language, climate, landscape and emotional sensibilities all very different to ours, and the fabric of this wildly multicultural society defies definition. 

This also makes it beautiful and exciting: a normal Saturday can involve taking our sons to karate lessons with their Iranian-American teacher, followed by lunch at an Ethiopian café and coffee in a Jewish deli, before driving into rural Pennsylvania to catch the end of an Amish quilt sale and grabbing tacos in a Tex Mex café on the way home. I love the wild sense of possibility here, and the collision of an infinite number of cultures and races, which is unlike anywhere else. 

Looking back, I can see we all, apart from Pete, who was already acclimatised, went through a period of acute culture shock, something that’s subsided slowly, tentatively, as we’ve started to create a sense of home, albeit impermanently, in DC. Autumn brought with it the sugary thrill of an American Halloween, with life-size pirate ships of model skeletons and huge blow-up ghosts decorating houses, and trick or treating – a vast, communal activity, where adults chatted around front-lawn fires while the children darted madly around lugging pillow-cases of candy. 

I love the American impulse to decorate the outside of houses, not just at Halloween, but for any festival, light-up candy canes and life-size sledges on front lawns lingering right into February, when they’re replaced by ditzy pink lights and blow-up hearts, for Valentine’s Day, then swiftly replaced again by bright green shamrocks made from tinsel for St Patrick’s Day. 

In the winter, snow lay thick and bright white for 10 days everywhere, and Dash and Lester earned forty dollars shovelling snow from front yards, like they were in a movie. Early spring has brought the astonishing froth of cherry blossom over the Tidal Basin, and we have favourite walks through Rock Creek Park, which brings a surprising sense of the wild, natural world right into the middle of the city, just blocks from the blacked out SUVs and presidential cavalcades of the White House.  

Everything in America is, of course, bigger, but embracing these seasonal rituals has helped the children feel at home in a city totally at odds with the rural landscape they knew as home. We wanted the children to go to American state schools, and they’ve swapped their village school, where they knew all the 100 pupils, for much bigger schools with an incredibly diverse intake, swapping break for recess, a peg for lockers and PE for basketball, and are learning about periods of American history they knew nothing about. 

The definition of home will always be England, and sometimes I feel gratified by how much the children miss the fields around our house, the green where they played and the village shop where they went for Haribos. I’m pleased that that landscape I love so much is in their souls and is the place they think of when we talk about home, but it’s exciting to watch their horizons literally expanding by the experience of our big American adventure. I still feel homesick, of course, but transplanting our life is also showing me that home can be a feeling as much as a place, and represented by a person more than a feeling, because more than anywhere else, home for me is with Pete.

The Giant on The Skyline by Clover Stroud (Doubleday) is out now