Aimee Winder Newton believes the best way to tackle problems is to fix them on the front end rather than deal with more serious consequences on the back end. She is using that approach as the director of Utah’s new Office of Families and a senior advisor to Gov. Spencer Cox.
“I care deeply about good public policy, and I’m especially interested at looking at proactive policies that we can implement in order to prevent issues later on,” said Winder Newton, who is a Salt Lake County Council member. “That’s what appealed to me about this.”
The ultimate goal is for Utah to become the most family-friendly state in the nation, Winder Newton said. She said the effort is aimed at helping all families – including grandparents raising their grandchildren, foster families, single-parent homes and LGBTQ couples raising their kids – not just traditional two-parent families.
“We’ve got all different kinds of families that come in different shapes and sizes,” Winder Newton said.
She added, “We recognize that there is value in groups of family members who are living together and who support each other and love each other. We do believe that families are great things no matter how those families look.”
Cox had announced in his 2022 State of the State address in January that he would create the office.
“The purpose of this office is not to inject more government into families – it is the exact opposite – it is to make sure that government policies are not harming families and that we are coordinating government services to help parents and children succeed,” the governor said in his address.
His appointment of Winder Newton as a senior advisor and Office of Families director was effective Sept. 1. She will continue to serve in her part-time position on the Salt Lake County Council representing District 3.
“Aimee is an effective leader with an impressive track record of visionary thinking, influence, execution and public service,” Cox said in a news release. “I’m grateful she’s willing to take on this new responsibility to support and strengthen all families of Utah.”
Addressing social media use, child care and more
Winder Newton has served on the Salt Lake County Council since 2014 and was the first woman to serve as council chair. She created and chairs the Salt Lake County Intergenerational Poverty Task Force and lists additional mental health resources, criminal justice reform and budget accountability as areas of focus.
In addition, Winder Newton has served as a school district community council member, communications and marketing director for Taylorsville, an executive for a biotech company and a member on several boards, including Prevent Child Abuse Utah.
The Office of Families’ priorities include addressing the negative effects of social media on teens’ mental health; working with businesses to enhance family-friendly work policies; creating a single place where data and resources on trauma-informed care can be accessed; ensuring federal child care grants to low income families aren’t leaving out stay-at-home parents; ensuring every student graduates from high school and engages in the workforce; and investing in more home visiting programs to support vulnerable families with children 0-3.
Winder Newton said the office is working with the Utah Legislature to help fix problems stemming from social media use and has provided lawmakers with data showing how it can harm youth, especially young women.
“Some of the things that the governor has talked about is holding social media companies accountable for the technology they developed,” she said. “We know that we need laws that enable parents to be more involved in setting boundaries for their children on social media. We want parents to have the ability for parents to decide if their child is ready for social media.”
Another aim of the office is to build and maintain a website with resources and information on best practices that health departments, pediatricians, teachers and other professionals can use to help who have experienced trauma. The site also would connect those who want services with a provider.
“We’re looking at providing training and education to those seeking to understand the impact of adversity in childhood and how it impacts people as adults,” Winder Newton said.
In addition, the Office of Families is considering how to better utilize its current home visiting programs where a professional assesses the physical and mental health of mother and child and provides information about child development and connections to community resources. A baby’s brain is 80% developed by the age of 3 and the professional looks for ways the child can have the most developmental advantages, Winder Newton said.
The office also is connecting with the business community to talk about policy and give employers information about making it easier for parents to work, such as having parental leave policies and flexible work schedules, she said.
‘Huge gaps in services and supports’
The Office of Families is not alone in its efforts. Nonprofits and individuals are providing support.
Moe Hickey, executive director of Voices for Utah Children, said his nonprofit advocacy group gathers data on the well-being of children broken down by county. The information is used to raise awareness about the needs of children, influence policy and unite the community to help solve the problems facing families, he said.
“The two biggest issues universally are child care and mental health,” Hickey said.
Historically, parents had a lot of support from their family units, including from grandparents who were living in the community, he said. But now extended family might not live in the same county anymore, he said.
“What we’re starting to see is a need for services that are not being provided. The cost of child care has risen exorbitantly,” Hickey said. “Going into COVID, we were ranked 51st in the country as far as affordability and accessibility and we’re not going to come out any higher.”
He noted the cost of child care in Salt Lake City for two children under age 5 is $20,000 a year but even at that price, there still are waiting lists for the service. Part of the problem is the state doesn’t have a child care infrastructure, he said.
Parents who can’t find child care and women in particular are bearing the burden of that because they are more likely to leave the workforce to stay home with their kids, according to Hickey. Utah touts its low unemployment numbers but those figures do not include people who are not applying or looking for a job, he said.
“I think if we really want the economy to keep moving in the direction it’s been moving for a number of years, women are going to be a major part of that economic growth but not if they’re not in the workplace,” Hickey said.
In addition, he said Utah has the youngest population in the nation, with about 30% of residents under the age of 18 and the largest segment of that group ages 0 to 6. Preschool helps child development but there is no mandate that it be provided and “we hardly fund it,” Hickey said.
“From prenatal to 5-years-old, we have huge gaps in services and supports, which are the most critical years for a child’s development,” he said. “We really, really need to sharpen our focus on that age group.”
Hickey also said a big concern is the state did not identify mental health as a major problem until recently.
Domestic violence, sexual abuse and poverty cause early childhood trauma that can lead to problems later, he said. However, in some rural counties, mental health services are not available and a child in crisis who is able to get help in another country might receive only a few days of treatment before being sent back home.
Hickey said Utah has taken some good steps, including the establishment of the Huntsman Mental Health Institute (formerly University Neuropsychiatric Institute), a 170-bed psychiatric hospital that was funded by a $150 million commitment from the Huntsman Foundation.
He said some potential short-term fixes, such as legislation that addresses problems with social media use, are good but are only band-aids.
“We need a long-term view of how we’re going to build an infrastructure for mental health,” Hickey said. “That’s going to take money. It’s going to take political will.”
Serving a key role in overcoming challenges
Jana Hyatt, Utah PTA family life commissioner, said the biggest challenge for families – and also the biggest opportunity – “is that need to connect.”
“Connection is the key to overcoming so many of the challenges,” Hyatt said. “For example, addiction is overcome by connection. You face that mental health challenge and you strive to overcome that through that connection.”
The Office of Families can have the biggest impact by helping organize and communicate information about the different resources the state offers and the organizations that are available to help, she said.
“It’s important for us as a community to know what those resources are and that’s where I see the Office of Families playing a really key role,” Hyatt said. “What I would love to see happen is for the resources we have now to be fully tapped. There are resources that not everybody knows about.”
Understanding what those resources are and making sure the families that need them can get them should be the first step, she said, and then it can be determined which areas should get more attention.
Hyatt said mental health has become a bigger concern over the past few years and she believes more resources will be needed in that area.
The office also can have an impact by providing a platform to share messages with the community that are relevant to families today, she said.
“The Office of Families has the opportunity to educate all Utahns about the pros and the cons of social media use and has the opportunity to share that message throughout the entire state,” Hyatt said as an example.
Jenet Erickson, a Brigham Young University associate professor, said having an Office of Families recognizes that core relationships have a significant influence on people, both culturally and economically. The data shows Utah has a high upward mobility because of its strong marriage rate, she said.
“You just see all the implications for child development with having strong core relationship structures, strong marital structures,” said Erickson, who specializes in maternal and child well-being. “From a political perspective, it’s recognizing that that marriage matters.”
And that means looking at which policies penalize marriage, particularly those that affect low-income families, she said.
Most mothers and fathers don’t see day care as their top solution but staying home with their children is not always possible, Erickson said. States are better off targeting child care to those who are most in need but the combined incomes of a married couple can make them ineligible for a subsidy, she said.
The professor also said employers can help parents by having flexible workplaces that allow them to prioritize what they think is most important.
“In the business sector, really encouraging a family- rather than work-oriented culture increases productivity,” Erickson said.
Framing the debate on work-life balance
Nic Dunn, vice president of strategy and communications at Sutherland Institute, said discussions about family-friendly policies usually are focused on work. He said the question being debated tends to be “what can we do to help make it easier for parents to be in the workforce fulltime?”
That doesn’t line up with what most parents want, according to Dunn.
“It’s very important for policymakers and business and community leaders to realize that parents in Utah and across the nation want to reprioritize time with kids, specifically when it comes to parental caregiving with kids,” he said.
However, that desire sometimes gets left out of policy discussions, Dunn said.
“The framing of the definition of family-friendly policy needs to shift so that it is more encompassing of the needs and preferences of Utah families,” he said. “You have parental caregiving be the priority. There are ways for work to support that through things like remote work, flexible schedules, more part-time jobs that pay decently and especially part-time jobs that are part of the career trajectory.”
Dunn said Richard Reeves, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, has captured the correct definition of family-friendly perfectly: “We’ve always been promised family-friendly work, but what we often try and create is work-friendly families.”
A family-friendly policy agenda is one that helps strengthen families and a key part of that is the parent-child relationship, Dunn said. The private sector has lots of opportunities to help families flourish and some changes stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic that support parents’ preferences already are in place, including remote work and flexible schedules, he said.
Dunn – who wrote an opinion piece on work-life balance published Nov. 30 in the Deseret News – said he’s excited about the opportunity for Utah to be a leader in the realm of “true family-friendly policy.” He is also pleased the state recognizes the importance of the family as a fundamental institution of society.
“It’s more effective and it’s cheaper and it’s just better for a lot of these things to be preemptively addressed in a healthy family environment,” Dunn said. “I think there are a lot of positive things converging that are going to make a really big difference for Utah families and also help our employers to be able to fill needed jobs.”
