Hello, I'm Nasir and Jewel societal academic Dean at the College of st. Catherine. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to the second edition of this year's saying Catherine Forum on women in leadership. The Forum was created to promote the public discussion of issues and ideas of significance to women. It features presentations by nationally prominent women who will address some of the most compelling issues of the 1990s? Today in continuing our breaking barriers team. We are very pleased to welcome our second speaker. Sylvia and Hewlett doctor hewlett's books include such controversial bestsellers as when the bough breaks the cost of neglecting our children which one a Robert F Kennedy Memorial Book price as well as to other national awards. And also the other book a lesser life the myth of women's Liberation in America. In addition to her writing. Dr. Hewlett has spoken throughout the nation and the impact of us social policies that make having it all and doing it all a difficulty for most women and children. Dr. Hewlett gained insight into the plight of working mothers through her own experiences while teaching economics at Barnard College in New York. She also taught at Columbia University's School of International affairs. Last fall she formed the national parenting Association a nonprofit organization dedicated to speaking for the nation's children and voting for their interests. She is a graduate of Cambridge University and has completed her doctoral degree through Harvard and London universities and noted Economist. Dr. Hewlett has served as executive director of the economic policy Council and vice president for economic studies at the United Nations Association. She's also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. It is with great pleasure that I introduce to you Economist and advocate for women and children Sylvia and Hewlett. I'm standing on a book. So I suddenly disappear. You know, why? It is a very great pleasure to be here today in my favorite state. At a college with which I share so many values. Thank you for inviting me and thank you. Thank you for spending a chunk of your day here helping us push some of these issues further. Let me bite Begin by sharing with you some of my own Journey. to these difficult painful issues I was born on the wrong side of the tracks. In the Welsh mining valleys a place where in my childhood the unemployment rate was at the 35% level. I was one of six daughters. My father was a elementary school teacher and spent part of my childhood out of work. We didn't have a whole lot on the material front my home lag things like a refrigerator. I found a television, but we were very rich in Parental love and attention and all six of us girls made it with difficulty into University and ultimately into successful adult lives. And I guess I feel I hope our incredible debt of gratitude to my parents who accomplish Miracles I think in very difficult circumstances. I came to the u.s. In the late 60s and in all kinds of ways. I felt I'd found the right place at the right time. The barriers to professional fulfillment for women were visibly falling all around me and I just knew that as long as I worked hard surely I could have it all a career a Family Children. I could pursue both love and work and yet when that first baby was born in 1977. I really just fell flat on my face despite all of my good planning because you see I tried to do it the right way. I had delayed childbearing. I found myself an incredibly supportive husband. I found myself a great job as assistant professor of Economics at Barnard college and I clearly our myself to the teeth with Advanced degrees. Annette I fail to become one of those super women part of the problem was that my place of work this woman's college had no parenting or maternity leave and as a result. I was expected to be back at work ten days after cesarean. And obviously I did at least four things badly. I was I think a very lousy professional a very inadequate wife and mother and I also flunked breastfeeding as I leak milk all over the job. But I just thought well, you know, I probably wasn't up to Snuff. I just had to kind of stiffen that backbone and learn to get along with three hours a night sleep and surely I too could become one of those teflon-coated super women that the media was so full of. a couple of years later I became pregnant again. And this time it was a very difficult pregnancy from the beginning. I seem to be swelling up having episodes of cramping and bleeding and generally not coping very well at all. I sought medical advice and a very calm male obstetrician patted me on the head and told me I was being hysterical. Of course, I could just do everything as I normally did and to just go back to work. So I did. I quite soon afterwards discovered. It was a twin pregnancy. It became a much more difficult pregnancy and I still remember at four o'clock on one Thursday afternoon in my office. It had been a particularly grueling day. My tenure process had just started and I had just given a particularly tough lecture to the assembled faculty and my Waters broke and I looked down and realized that my boots were filling with amniotic fluid and that my babies would soon be born and it was too soon and that they would die. That wasn't quite the end of the story. I did get rushed to hospital. There was two days when we felt that the twins might have stabilized but on the third day one of them died and given the threat of maternal infection. I then had an induced labor and the other baby was born to live for just two hours. My place of work true to form decided that I needed just three days off to deal with what they call this medical incident and I was back at work the next week in order to hang on to my job in order to try and get tenure a struggle that I had by that point put 12 years of amazing effort into but a year later when I finally was able to have a second child a child that was born premature and fragile. I just took leave of absence. I said look, I'll figure out when I can come back, but right now I'm on leave of absence without pay when I went back six months later. I found that I had been fired. I tell his story because I think it is a fairly standard American story. Despite Clinton's family leave Bill of last year thirty percent of working American women still don't have any rights to any time off any benefits when a baby is born because they work for companies that have fewer than 50 employees. And so this story still goes on route right around this country. And I guess what it meant to me at that time was a tremendously bitter realization that despite all of the American words about revering women cherishing children, when push comes to shove having a baby is dealt with exactly like an expensive private Hobby. That women need to deal with on their own time and usually comes out of their hides. What did I learn from this experience? I think I learned two very profound things in the first place. It changed the direction of my professional life. I left the world of theoretical macroeconomics and I decided to spend much of my professional energy in trying to reconcile the worlds of work and the worlds of family trying to create the conditions. That would make it more possible that my daughter did not face the kinds of things I had face that her birth. And I also think that it did something quite profound to my personal priorities. For the next 17 years, I struggled with these trade-offs between the welfare of children are my career and I think I've made very different decisions since that time because it was agonizing for me to feel that I had contributed to the loss of those children the medical experts tell me something else. They said I would have lost them whatever I had been doing that day, but I did bear with me. I think a great deal of agonized guilt. That I had failed to protect. What was the most important thing in the world to me at that point in time and whether it's walking out of a boardroom at four o'clock because I really need to pick up my seven-year-old or canceling the second business trip in one month or just turning down a promotion because it means the 65 our week all of these decisions. I've made time and time again since that Bleak winter of 1979 and I think if it did anything that was positive it did I think succeed in making me figure out my priorities. In a very brutal way but in a way that has lasted the rest of my life. Let me leave the personal and go into what's happening in our society. And I wanted to stop this discussion of women and children by reading a poem Economist very rarely read poems, which is one reason. I like to do it. This poem was dictated to me by a 8 year old 80 year old homeless by that. I got to know in the summer of 1988 when I was doing some volunteer work at those awful family shelters in New York City. these off Brian's words When our baby died, we start to sit by the window, we just sit and sit or wrapped up quiet in our shirts and watch the pigeons the pigeon fly. So fast move so fast, you move nice a real pretty flyer. She opened her mouth and taking the wind. We just spread out crumbs me and my brother and we wait sit and wait there under the window sill. She don't even see us until we slam down the window and she break. She look with one eye she don't die right away. We dip her in over and over in the water part. We bars on the hot plate for we want to see how it be to Die slow like our baby died. Ryan's baby sister tomorrow had been found dead in their shelter about six weeks earlier at the time of death. Tomorrow was 10 months old and weighed 7 pounds. The cause is would of death were neglect malnutrition and a viral infection in other words. It was an avoidable death. I need you look at the larger picture tomorrow is not on her own because in 1988 40,000 American babies died before the age of one and half of them died needlessly through neglect or lack of support of one kind or another. In fact a baby born in the shadow of the white house right now has a less good chance of living that first year of life than a baby born in Singapore or Costa Rica. But before we run away with the idea that all of the Dreadful problems around children are some are over there. Neatly tucked away in the ghetto. Let's just remind ourselves that many of the problems our children are very much in the middle classes on our block in our families. I want to read you another poet one that was written to me by a fourteen-year-old called Becky again someone I got to know in the summer of 1988 Becky Stories the following. Her parents split when she was 6 months old. Her dad took off she didn't see him for seven years. Her mom struggled to make it as a single mom in New York City, but parole Becky was left home alone and awful lot. When she was four, her mother had a live-in drugged-up violent boyfriend and for two years in there Becky spent her spare time trying to protect her mother from the violence of this boyfriend. She wrote a poem about it. It was addressed to a mother. I'll just read one stanza. You never stop shaking until I took your hand. I was your Valium. I felt it and I was 7 I was your mother. I knew it you were 31. and I was 7 I tried to find Becky this last fall turns out she dropped out of school and she was 16. She's officially a runaway. No one knows where she is. But when I met her dollars were not the problem back. He attended the most expensive private school in Manhattan. She was a beautiful beautiful fourteen-year-old with the world at her feet, but given the rejection and neglect that had gone on in her childhood. She basically didn't have much of a chance. And I think if you look at some of the statistics that out there around our children one has to realize that not only are some of these problems deep within the comfortable reaches of the middle class. But some of them have very little to do with money. For instance. I'll throw out a couple teen suicide rates and T and suicide is very much a middle-class phenomenon. These rates have tripled in 15 years Eating Disorders obesity amongst 14 year olds. These kinds of Trends are really very steeply going the wrong way and another figure In the wake of divorce 42% of dads never see their children again. And that again is something that impacts families right across the face of this nation that figure by the way is a real figure. It came out of the University of Pennsylvania. They follow children white middle-class children for 10 years after divorce five years out. They asked a question that went along these lines. Have you talked to your dad or have you seen him in the last twelve month period 42% of them hadn't And we're beginning to learn in the research the impact of this kind of rejection on children. For instance. The dropout rate in college is right now for the Children of Divorce is at the sixty percent level. A good twenty percent higher than is true for the the control group. Now what does all of this mean for women? I mean, it's all very well sitting here feeling badly about what is happening to kids in our society. But one of the central things that's fallen out of my work is the remorseless connection between the welfare of women and children and let me tell you a story which helps dramatize this a few years back. My husband and I drove up to New Haven to attend his 25th College reunions as we drove up that day. We really felt we just stay for the first event. These are generally rather boring occasions. I thought and we just wanted to link out with some personal friends. But when we arrived at Yale at Friday afternoon, I discovered they were doing some surveys they were doing a survey of what the class of 1963 was earning 25 years later. They were also trying to figure out what their wives were running now. I'm a sucker for surveys. I decided to stick around and see what they said. Well as you might imagine the Yale class of 1963 was doing rather well in midlife it was as you must remember an all-male class pretty much an all white male class and the average income of these. Eyes in midlife was $185,000 a year. You didn't turn up to your unit reunions clearly if you were a failure, you know. The average earnings of their spouses was quite a different story. The average there was $11,000 a year. Now. I looked at that figure and even with my rather jaundiced view of what women really earn in this economy. I couldn't believe that so I went back to the questionnaires to see what had gone wrong and I did did discover. Of course that they were talking about why it's number one as well as wives number two, because the Yale class of 1963 had divorced at very rapid rates and 70% of this class were now divorced and remarried. The other thing that was to of this survey is that they had caught into their net a lot of women who are in part-time work, but they had not included women who just worked in the home and therefore had no Financial income at all. This was a more or less real figure. So I then went to interview these wives wife number one as well as wife number two to find out what had gone wrong because they weren't extremely Highly Educated group. I mean on average they had six years of college, you know, a complete undergraduate degree plus some Graduate School of one sort or another and this was the story. This was the profile of the Yale wife. She had on average taken nine years out of the labor force to rear two point seven children. She done a lot of Shifting around the country moving when hubby been promoted, you know, giving the dinner parties to make sure that the next promotion was really there and come midlife when they try to get back on that train whether they were 38 or 45 or even 32 in one case it proved to be almost impossible to resurrect any real learning ability. And as one of them tell me she said, you know this business of trying to get back on this train. It's not because of pin money. You've just got to look around this room to realize that being a gale wife is not a very secure profession these days. And so the struggles were for real and the casualties were for real because alimony has pretty much gone the way of the trolley cart and these women really were on their own if their marriage has ended and I guess I tell a story because it shows the extraordinary penalty that American women pay for their children and let me put it in some International context here. Take an American woman. Newly graduated from college. Newly out there in the workforce a 23 she is doing great. She is now earning 90% of the male wage whether she's a liar or a truck driver but take that same woman 15 years down the road working full-time with two children. She's now running 46% of the male wage. No matter what the occupation in other words. There's been this slippery slope of downward Mobility that was triggered by motherhood. Now, if you take that twenty three-year-old and say to her look, why don't you just go through life as a man remain without children. Don't get married. Well that woman stays on track in her late 30s. She's virtually indistinguishable from a man in terms of her place in a career and her income level. Now if you shift gears and go to a country like France, it's different that 23 year old isn't doing nearly as well as her American counterpart. Quite frankly French culture does not give the kinds of opportunities to women that we are so used to now here she is earning about 80% of the male wage whether she's a liar or a truck driver but take her 15 years down the road with her two kids working full-time. And guess what? She's just Fallen to 75% She's paid very little in the way of a penalty for those kids. Why? Well, France might not be too good on women's rights, but it's awfully good to Children those children have gold plated in fancies. There's a crush system. There's an early childhood education system all of which are run on sliding scale. So all families can afford to get excellent care. There's also all kinds of health benefits and a promotion system within firms that give brownie points to two women. For instance. If you have a child you have extra. It's extra vacation and some credit towards additional seniority. I mean all of this sounds very strange to us, doesn't it? Because we're used to getting fired or at least demoted when we have our kids but they're the attachment of the society to the vision of the child as a national treasure that needs to be supported by the community at large is a very very real idea and I think here we see children as some kind of private consumption item And we certainly don't feel that generous spirited, you know, societal wide supports are things we can get behind. So what I'm trying to say is that there is a real connection between the life path of women the economic security of women and what we do to our children because quite frankly in this country. We have largely gotten rid of some of the more obvious forms of discrimination. But we have not taken this next huge step which is to put in place the social supports that underpin family life so that women don't go down that slippery slide of downward mobility in their 30s and 40s and hang on to their career prospects. And I guess one thing I'm quite convinced of is that we're doing the nation a great disservice by not allowing women to fulfill their professional potentials after all, you know, fifty three percent of all college graduates. These days are female 50% of our law schools 45% of our medical schools are now women and yet we fail to allow these women to fulfill the abilities that we've so expensively inculcated so I think it floats economic sense and it clearly flies in the face of the welfare of both children and women. Let me move now on to the wise of it all and then to the solutions because clearly I would like to leave here today giving you a sense of what you can do to push this into a more sensible Direction. very briefly I'll give you two reasons for why we dug this hole in America firstly, I think that the whole emphasis of our women's movement has been on equal rights. Rather than on protection and support for family and let me flesh that out a little more clearly the whole drift in the 70s and 80s was that we needed as modern women to get out there and clone the mail competitive model. To become exactly as men. And this was why for instance in the early years many feminist groups were against maternity leave. Because they felt that it might Boomerang and hurt us if we separated as out and gave ourselves benefits, which were not available to men. It also for instance made us much more eager to support abortion rights than prenatal care. And in a way we fought for the right to hat not have a child harder than we fought for the right to have a child. But I think any sensible approach to pro-choice for instance has to have both things on the agenda and if we can March in the streets for the rights to abortion or the rights to the ER a surely we can get out there and March for things like adequate access to prenatal care, which is so very vital to poor women and two children recently. I interviewed Helmut Kohl the chancellor of Germany and I asked him what would his Real views in our abortion? Because after all he is a very committed Catholic head of a nation that has a rather liberal abortion laws. And he said look my favorite abortion stances the following that we in Germany create the best possible conditions under which to have a child the best in the world the most Blue Chip set of supports. If we do that correctly abortion will become a secondary issue. And I thought that that was one of the more sensible things that had been said on the subject for a long time because clearly we now live in a nation where 27% of all pregnant women have no access to prenatal care. And as a result, we have the highest rates not just the baby's dying but of preemies who you know run up extraordinary bills the taxpayers and live on to have damaged lives and I think in all kinds of ways we've been sent wise and dollar foolish and the ways we've looked at babies, but I guess what I'm striving at here is A vision of feminism which includes the cherishing of children because you know in those struggles of the 70s and 80s motherhood did not go out of style. It isn't as though modern women have decided that motherhood is not Central to their existences. If you look at the statistics, you will find that more women are having at least one child and ever before 87% of them and yet children and family life have never been in the center of a vision of a liberated life and we have to get them there if we are to solve The problems of our daughters and give them the ability to truly lead balanced lives. Back in the 1930s. For instance Eleanor Roosevelt was against the ER a because she felt that cloning. The mail competitive model was not where one should be at. If you will an ordinary working woman dealing with family as well as work what you needed if you wanted equal results for women was of course a lot of equal rights, but you also needed a whole bunch of special treatments. Because you needed more than just the male framework. If you were to get yourself the conditions that allowed you and your family to thrive. So I guess what I'm talking to here is the need to widen the agenda so that we can put children center stage acknowledging that for True equality in midlife women desperately need the kinds of family supports that really have been on the back burner for the last 20 30 years. The other thing I just want to mention is the cultural story in in the America, which is so very different from Europe. I very much feel it children are seen by many people as just kind of an accessory a private consumption item this kind of private hobby that you could kind of indulging it on your own time. Well, I guess I needn't remind this group that children are much more than that. Not only are they 100% of our joint futures. The workers and the citizens of Next Century that people that will determine whether this great nation continues to lead the world. But I think that they're also our connection with posterity our connection to morality in the 1980s many folks in this country built a tremendous at bonfire of the vanities. Whereas self-fulfillment was the central goal where one was judged by the yardstick of income or career achievement and I think having journeyed long and far along that road of self-fulfillment. We mostly discovered that there was rather little at the end of that Journey. The self is a very lonely site to find meaning and I think children for many of us are our way of reaching Beyond. Ourselves and touching something that is closer to the face of God. Let's change gears for a moment and talk about what to do about it. Let me start with the private sector because since work is so tied up in this business of treating children. Well, let's start with the business community and what is possible there? And a little story will give you a sense of the good news on this front. Last winter I was invited down to Dallas to be the speaker at the Teamsters Union first conference on women in the workforce. I tell you is one of those invitations that seemed to arrive from Left Field. I mean, I'm not quite sure why they invited me there. They certainly weren't on my list of progressive institutions. But when I got down to Dallas that evening, I realized that America changed here was one of the most conservative most Macho and I think most indicted audiences you could choose to. Taking notes and seemingly listening to me as I told them what they could do for women. The first question I asked was why were they newly interested in women and they fast up it turns out that 300,000 flight attendants. I just voted to join the teamsters. And they realize that unless they got up to speed real quickly in terms of parenting lee-char care that kind of stuff. The team says could become history because you know, they read the writing on the wall. They had crunched the numbers and they knew that white males were becoming an endangered species out there in our Workforce. If you look out to the year 2000 only ten percent of the net new growth in our labor force is going to be white males. Everyone else is either a woman or a member of a minority group so oddly enough the team says because they're interested in their own future have joined the current and they now have some of the best contract language of any Union vis-à-vis the rights of mothers to decent conditions on the job and I can tell this story right across Corporate America. We are too important to ignore Corporate America has quintupled the number of firms that have produced complete packages of support for family life. Clearly. We can't leave it to the private sector. We have to bring government in on the ACT particularly in terms of preventive programs in early childhood to give you a sense of what's out there. There's a whole bunch of programs. Whether it's Wick Head Start prenatal care, which have an extraordinary rate of return every dollar you put in you get three back in terms of the enhanced futures of those kids that you get on track and the other thing which is true out there. It's not just government. It's not just the private sector. It's also you and me. It's very important to realize that what we're talking about here is a programmatic agenda that helps us juggle our personal agendas so that we can put children first which brings me to my new advocacy effort. The national parenting Association and I know you're sitting with a leaflet in front of you is an attempt to do two things is an attempt to bring America's 58 million parents together. With one loud voice so that they can help Valerie valorize this business of parenting. It's become I think I demeaned and undermined a third-rate activity in our society. And this is an effort to get out there and Hammer home that being a parent being a good parent is one of the best things you can do with the life. And it's a societal blessing. We also hope to be helpful on the concrete front. There are a bunch of policies that we're going to push for that will give parents the gift of time as well as new resources for education and health and what I'm going to invite you to do is come on board and help make this a reality in Minnesota this organization started just seven months ago the to lead states are New York and Minnesota and as you will see from the back of this document, we have some wonderful leadership in the state Susan Carlson the first lady the private sector is on board in the shape of Jack geraghty @ Land O'Lakes Jim renier at Honeywell, and we also have some extraordinary parent activists because this will be a parent driven effort. Again, I invite you to come in on the ground floor help us shape an America that truly does put parents in the center in the heart is of power speaking for their children and one final note. I want to say that we are reaching out to men. in our efforts to empower parents many groups that seek to help kids are often populated by dedicated women, but I think It is now a time when we absolutely should reach out and include our partners include males in this effort because one of the most painful problems of our society is not enough contact between men and their children. Did you know that tonight in this city thirty-six percent of kids will go to bed in a home where there is no dad. I think we have to re-engage Dad's in the lives of their children are firm and honor those who are doing such a great job right now and give them ways of being more active in the lives of their child. I'll give you just one last example. I just did a study of paternity leave trying to figure out what was going on there in America and allow about 600 companies now have paid leave for Dad. Only 3% of them ever take it. This came home to be very forcibly just last month. I was doing a little research at the Ford Foundation trying to find out what had happened to paternity leave there. This is a very kind of knee-jerk liberal arts are kind of outfit. They've had paternity leave for 27 years. The only problem is that the Ford Foundation no man has ever taken it at that institution. And as one of them told me when I was doing these interviews, he said, you know taking paternity leave in New York City is a little like having lace on your jockey shorts good working American man, just don't do things like that. And what I suggest is by delegitimizing the demands of family in our workplaces has not just done us a massive disservice as wives and mothers. It's really encroached on the ability of man to connect with their children and to feel both the dries and responsibilities of Parenthood. And I think that we really are in this together and if we can make a start in these two states to finally create the conditions that are our children to thrive. We as adults will benefit not just in material ways, but in ways that enhance and deepen all of our Lives. Thank you. I'd like to remind our Minnesota Public Radio audience. You're listening to the College St. Catherines Forum on women in leadership. Today's speaker is nationally renowned author and Economist. Dr. Sylvia Ann Hewlett. Dr. Hewlett has just completed completed her presentation and will now take questions from the audience. Dr. Hewlett, I'm Joan Alders to the lieutenant governor of Minnesota. Thank you so very much for your very thought-provoking comments. I'm sure each and every one of us in this room are very very concerned about our children. There's another area of impact. However, I think on our children and families and that's the area of crime and violence. Do you have any particular comments that you would like to share with us in that area? Thank you. That is obviously a incredibly urgent topic particularly this week with the governor having declared that is you know, number one concern for this next year. And in fact the issue of violence keeping our children safe returning childhood to Children. These are the first set of goals of my national parenting Association. We've held focus groups with parents right around the country. In Alabama, Oregon New York and the state this is the number one concern of parents. And what we hope to do is come up with a action plan which is rather profound in it getting out the roots of the problem as well as some of the symptoms for instance. It clearly is important to get more police out there to do something about violence on TV to do something about the availability of handguns, but it's also important to look at the roots of violence within the family to give you an example, which really came out of our this last hour. In this city, if 36 percent of our kids are going to bed in households without dad's it's very hard to produce the supervision and the the attention that those kids need if they are to stay off the streets you go talk to you know, a single mom with a fifteen-year-old lets you know, six inches taller than her and try and understand why she can't persuade this kid to go to school. We all know fathers are incredibly important not just in terms of supervising kids and in terms of creating, you know, the income that brings that family up from below the poverty line, but dads are in incredibly important in the emotional and the cognitive health of the kid and I suggest that strengthening ties between dads and their kids might be part of this anti-violence agenda. The other bit of the puzzle is obviously enhancing parental time. There was a great study done recently in California, which showed that if teenagers 13 and 14 year olds were left alone more than 12 hours a week. Then they would start acting out with alcohol or at some other kind of substance. And so I think one can see this intimate connection between parenting and kids going off rails, which ultimately ends up with this kind of maelstrom of violence we have out there and we know it's bad. I mean in the little book I just did for Unicef. I show that the child homicide rate in the u.s. Is now 73 times worse than the next worst country. I'm sorry. We only have time for one more question. This will be the last one. My name is Dave Wildey. I'm a very new father. I'm very curious what steps you took and how long it took you to get back on track after you were fired for your six-month leave of absence. He took me while I was looking for a job. That wasn't full time. And in the end I did end up directing a program with a private sector group called The Economic Policy Council. I was working a four-day week one of them at home, which was kind of what I'd been searching for and I could do my I could carry out my new plan which was good to contribute to some of these issues. I persuaded this group to look at family-friendly policies within the corporate workplace. And ultimately I did put together a framework which work for my kids in a subject area, which I was then quite passionate about but it was, you know, a year of searching with a premature infinite helmet all kinds of medical bills. I mean, we know the story this is not easy because many of us are dependant upon contributing to family income and I certainly was at that time. Let me just I guess it's a final. Footnote mention the fact that Saint Catherine's college and myself would like to make available to you all today membership of the national parenting Association and I would love to involve you all in thrashing out our agenda here in the state of Minnesota. One thing that's right. Now today in front of the legislature is a new proposal to create an at-home childcare credit and that might be a very good step in giving young parents the ability to carve out a little more time for their children and perhaps, you know, create a situation where there were fewer Minnesotan children at home alone into the next few years. That's an example of the kind of initiative that we could get out there and support. Thank you.