The cost of everything is rising, and wages aren’t keeping up for everyone. “Affordability” has become the word of the moment, and with good reason: Zohran Mamdani rode the concept to his stunning mayoral victory in New York, President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was buoyed by rising costs, and now Democrats everywhere are rushing to embrace the idea. But the intense pressure has think tanks and politicians conflating an affordability agenda with what people need to live a good life. While the need to address affordability is undeniable, a pathway toward a more humane and compelling vision for the country must move beyond the current obsession with the “cost of stuff” and grapple with a deeper question: How do people actually experience their lives?

Right now, the answer for many is: I can’t keep up.

For too many Americans, having enough time has become a luxury reserved for those with the income, flexibility, and security to protect it. Many find themselves rushing between work, meals, school pickups, bus schedules, and caregiving demands. Each day is a juggling act in which holding life together leaves little room to actually live it.

“I’m typically running on empty trying to get everything done,” one mother told the Thriving Families project, an ongoing qualitative research effort run by the New Practice Lab at New America. Another said she would do anything for a morning when her family could simply sit down and eat breakfast together. These are modest aspirations—to care without rushing, to be present with the people you love, to eat a meal together. Again and again in Thriving Family diary study entries, and more recently in our 2026 National Parent Survey, conducted by the New Practice Lab and NORC at the University of Chicago, parents told the same story. It’s not just too little money. There is too much competition between making enough to live on and actually having the time to live your life. The choices for low-income families are particularly stark, but the feeling that time is scarce unites people across the income spectrum.

America’s policy landscape has focused on affordability and largely ignored time. Health-care costs and rent are too high; child care and food are too expensive. So we offer a tax credit to reduce the cost of care, or, as both the Roosevelt Institute and the Center for American Progress are proposing, we seek to cap the price of a basket of groceries.

There is no denying that the cost of everything is rising—a full third of middle-class families struggle to afford basic necessities. But when we reduce every problem to a financial one, we miss the chance to ask families a broader question: “What would you need to be satisfied with your life?” Our research reveals that the answer to that question is not simply about money, but money as one of a handful of enablers to time—or put differently, to a life with enough room for the things that matter most.

People’s agency over their time is influenced by underlying structural forces that have shifted around us: school hours, work schedules and expectations around technology use, and the rise of households with multiple working parents. Public policy has shaped time before: Consider the establishment of the 40-hour workweek. The question that public policy must answer now is not only whether we can create financial stability, but how we can claim and increase agency over our time.

I. Money Matters, but Money Alone Misses the Mark

“We struggle with the variety of prices and everything being very unexpected with those expenses. It’s hard to budget for specific things when you get stuck with a $500 bill this month and last month was only $75,” said Ava, a mother in Minnesota who participated in our Thriving Families study.

Economic indicators reflect Ava’s experience. Grocery prices have increased an eye-popping 30 percent since 2020. Home prices jumped 47 percent between early 2020 and the end of 2024. Electricity prices rose 27 percent between 2019 and 2024. The national average price of child care increased by 29 percent between 2020 and 2024, a rate higher than inflation over that five-year period.

As wage growth has stalled, family incomes cannot keep up with the cost of living. Three in ten lower-income households were living paycheck to paycheck in 2025, and one-third of adults with incomes below $25,000 did not pay their bills in full. This affordability crisis creates widespread economic precarity. In 2024, about one in seven households experienced food insecurity, or the lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet. Half of low-income parents say there have been times in the past year when they could not pay for food or housing. Almost half of U.S. adults say it is difficult to afford health-care costs. None of this is debatable, which is why politicians left, right, and center are chasing the affordability crunch to win votes.

Asking Better Questions

Rising costs and suppressed wages do matter. But to make those issues the sole centerpiece of a new vision for the country misses the mark. From the New Deal to the Four Freedoms to the Great Society, big progressive visions for the country have always been anchored in more than the cost of goods. President Lyndon B. Johnson, speaking to students at the University of Michigan in 1964, wanted us to “pursue the happiness of our people” and described the Great Society as “a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” We must not fall prey to the reduction of family needs to money alone. Money matters to American families, but families’ concerns, and their hopes and dreams for the future, are about much more than money.

We might have missed this too, if we hadn’t been focused on listening closely to families. Most of both our careers have been about lowering costs—from health care to child tax credits to child-care subsidies. The New Practice Lab, where we work, has teams of data scientists, policy wonks, designers, and engineers working daily with state partners to make tax credits, child-care subsidies, and other government supports reach the families that are eligible for them. We currently measure all of our work and are philanthropically funded around a goal of helping 3 million families access material support. Imagine our curiosity, then, when the families we work with, families at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line (that is, making $66,000 or less for a family of four) who are high users of government programs, continually spoke about aspirations that reached far beyond the struggles of rising costs and low wages.

Beginning in 2023, in church meeting rooms and daycare playrooms across Minnesota and Pennsylvania, we sat with families to learn what they felt they needed to experience “thriving.” At that time, headlines fixated on the rising price of eggs, and we began our conversations there, too. Yet the responses we encountered proved far more expansive, touching on social connection, what it takes to truly show up for children, and the daily complexities of navigating conflicting work and school schedules.

Candace, a mother in Minnesota interviewed by the New Practice Lab, explained how economic necessity drives her work arrangement: “I now work at a nursing home overnight. I am able to take my child, and she sleeps at my job. The reason I have and plan to keep my job is the fact they allow my child to come with me to work.” Similarly, another mother, Hope, described shifting to nights in order to avoid child-care costs: “When I switched to night shift, I didn’t have to use any babysitter…before I leave for work at night, my husband will come home to take care of the kids.”

The team stayed connected to dozens of families across three states, keeping in communication with the same set of families for 18 months. Over and over again, we heard parents making hard choices driven not just by money, but also by time—and, more precisely, by their desire for agency over their time. While money would certainly ease some problems these families faced, the things they described wanting, like to spend more time with their children and spouses, were larger structural challenges.

Across the Thriving Families research, parents describe lives marked by exhaustion and the constant pressure of competing demands, but they also talk about precious moments of the good stuff of life. Participants describe a longing for time that is not compressed or constantly interrupted. Ava, the mother in Minnesota, reflected: “I would say that the time that I felt the best would be when I’m able to do all of those things and not have to rush through them…without just feeling like everything is just go, go, go, go, go.” Bianca described the mental and physical toll of such a pace: “My brain is always going, ‘This is what we need to do’…when I finally get home, I’m dead.” Grace put it even more starkly: “I barely don’t have time for myself, literally don’t have time for my family.” And for Jamilah, long and misaligned work schedules erode even the most basic forms of connection with her husband: “We don’t even see each other until Sundays.”

The more we listened, the more a complex and multilayered onion of competing family obligations and work unfolded. While higher wages would certainly help low-income families, they would not solve every problem. For Jenifer, a single mother in New Mexico, work hours are tightly constrained by caregiving demands: “My work hours are from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., my kids’ schedule is hectic and will not allow me to work more hours…. It is hard to have to call into work when my children are sick or for school breaks.”

When we interviewed Kathy Edin, co-author of the book $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, she painted a picture of how the structures of work and parenting today make it more difficult for families. She described how without a predictable schedule, you can’t go to church or coach Little League. Scheduling shifts fray not just family life but the community ties around us.

Research on time use reinforces this pattern. The activities that people consistently rank as most meaningful—such as talking to family members—are relational and time-intensive. Yet these are precisely the activities most constrained by the time pressures of modern work schedules, caregiving demands, and the growing complexity of daily life.

When we interviewed economist Nancy Folbre, she explained that the “economic inequality crisis compounds the care crisis.” She summed up the challenge simply: “Families need time and money.” It isn’t a new idea. But it is time for the policy conversation to tackle what we heard from families, which are priorities closer to the heart: family time and connection.

II. Time for What? Family

So if Americans had more time, what would they do with it?

At a time when Americans are divided on many perspectives and issues, families across the income spectrum are remarkably aligned on this question: They would spend it with family. Forty-nine percent of U.S. adults name “family” as one of their top three personal values, according to a June 2025 Gallup survey. In decades of research and their book Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time, time researchers John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey show that the activities that people consistently rank as most meaningful include talking with family, sharing meals, reading with children, and playing together. When we listened closely to what families most longed for, the answer was concrete, ordinary, and deeply human. They wanted unhurried time together. The 2026 National Parent Survey of more than 5,500 parents of young children sought to further explore these themes findings quantitatively. The findings overwhelmingly held: Fully 72 percent of parents, consistent across income groups, want to spend more quality time with their children—their top choice when asked what they would do with more time.

Less Time at Work

For most parents, even across a wide range of incomes, there’s a clear struggle between time with family and time at work. As dual-earner households have become more common, the total paid work time of families has risen, intensifying the challenge of coordinating employment and time spent on other priorities. Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, sociologists studying gender, work, and family, find that the length of the paid workweek for married couples has increased from 52.5 hours a week in 1970 to 63.1 in 2000.

Single parents, meanwhile, are among the most time-pressed groups. The share of children living in single-parent families rose sharply between 1970 and 2000, with these families making up roughly one in five households with children by the turn of the century. Single parents now spend more time on paid work, intensifying the strain on their already limited time for caregiving and family life.

According to our 2026 National Parent Survey, a majority (75 percent) of parents and caregivers of young children do not have their ideal work arrangement. Among parents who are currently working, more than three-quarters of respondents (78 percent) work full-time, but fewer than half (46 percent) say that is their ideal. Meanwhile, 14 percent of working parents currently work part-time—but nearly one in five parents overall (19 percent) say part-time would be their ideal arrangement.

In the survey, money was the top barrier to parents spending their time the way they wanted to. When they were asked what prevents them from spending time the way they want, the top two responses were related to finances: They can’t afford activities they would like to do (37 percent) or they need to work more hours to support their household financially (27 percent). For many families, there is often a real tension between working enough hours to make ends meet and showing up for their children. One mother in Louisiana shared: “Being able to provide for my child without being panicked every single day on whether or not I can afford anything and everything for her to have a wonderful life. And worrying constantly about how I can somehow make more money without taking away time that I could spend with my child, because it’s the most important that I am there for her always.” This tension between time at work and time with loved ones has higher stakes for low-income families, but it exists across the income spectrum.

More Time for Care

With more children now being raised by two working parents, there is a greater need for care support. Millions of children rely on after-school care or child-care programs, but a gap remains between what parents are doing and what their ideal arrangements would be. According to data from the 2026 National Parent Survey, most parents of young children don’t have the care arrangements they want. When asked about the top barrier to their ideal arrangement, a full 54 percent, including parents from across the income spectrum, cited financial reasons—nearly three times as many as named the next most common barrier. The lowest-income parents were more than twice as likely to say their care does not match their ideal at all (21 percent) compared to the highest-income parents (8 percent). This might mean that they wish they worked less or had more flexible hours. A majority of both men (52 percent) and women (59 percent) said they had less time off than they wanted to care for a new child. There is no perfect care setup that a majority of parents want, but a majority wish for something different than what they have today.

Time to Play

Notably, the last half-century has seen a steep decline in the number of hours American children spend at play. One of the larger studies on children and play, published by sociologist Sandra Hofferth, documented a 37 percent decline in outdoor activities for 6-to-12-year-old children between 1997 and 2003. This data has more recently been validated by a large 2019 cross-national study of children and adolescents’ time use. While there are many factors­—from the rise of devices to safety concerns—that impact how children spend their time, data from a multitude of sources suggests we need to take a deeper look at how families, parents, and kids alike spend their time.

If parents had more time with their children, the top thing they would use it on is play, according to the 2026 National Parent Survey. While so much policy emphasis is put on child care, work schedules, and the financial burdens of child-rearing, when parents are asked about what they actually want, they are more focused on the qualitative side of parenting. What parents really want is quality time with their kids—the ability to play, vacation, and simply be outdoors with each other. In other words, what parents feel they’re missing isn’t just rest. It’s connection and memory making.

III. The Structural Forces Shaping Time 

It is tempting to think of time scarcity as an individual problem, one that can be solved with better choices or more money. It is true that higher-income households can “buy time” by outsourcing certain tasks, like child care, transportation, or meal preparation. But this approach does not address a deeper reality: There are structural forces shaping how time is organized, distributed, and experienced across society.

More Time for the “Art of Life”

Nearly a century ago, John Maynard Keynes, in “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” predicted that by 2030, humanity would have solved the “economic problem” and would instead face a new challenge: “the art of life itself.” With rising productivity and compound interest, he imagined people would need to learn “how to use this freedom from pressing economic cares…to live wisely and agreeably well.” The central question of modern life, he argued, would no longer be survival, but how to spend our time.

In one sense, Keynes was right. His projections of sustained productivity growth have largely held. As economists Valerie Ramey and Neville Francis note: “Keynes predicted that productivity would increase by four to eight times over the 100 years starting in 1930. Productivity in the United States is now 9.2 times that in 1900 and 5.6 times that in 1930.” Yet Keynes was wrong about what this would mean for time. Despite unprecedented productivity, Americans have not seen a corresponding expansion of leisure. Rising productivity, it seems, has failed to translate into an experience of the “art of life.”

Over time, reported happiness has remained flat—a phenomenon known as the Easterlin Paradox. A recent analysis of 37 indicators finds that although the United States leads in growth and innovation, “[R]ising incomes are not translating into greater perceived well-being and social relations.” Rather than delivering widespread leisure, productivity gains have often coincided with longer hours and greater time pressure, as economist and sociologist Juliet Schor documented in The Overworked American.

These shifts in employment arrangements have reshaped care and household labor. The Care Board, a project at the University of Kansas highlighting the economic contributions of care work, found that parents of minor children—though only making up about a quarter of the population—carry a disproportionate share of unpaid care work, accounting for 43 percent of all care hours and shouldering two to four times the caregiving load of nonparents. Our survey found that 28 percent of parents with children under the age of six are also caring for an older adult family member. As journalist Brigid Schulte observes in Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, standard labor metrics obscure this reality: “[L]abor and workplace policies don’t take into account the true workload of the average American, especially the average American mother,” who spends 41 percent of her unpaid time caring for others, compared to 20 percent for fathers.

Research on working time and family structure suggests that many families are trying to piece together care in a labor market that was not built around caregiving realities. Today, 60 percent of service-sector workers receive less than two weeks’ notice about their schedules, and more than half experience last-minute changes. For the roughly 40 percent of these workers who are parents, this instability makes it nearly impossible to arrange child care, attend school events, or reliably show up for family and community life.

Leisure Time and the Intensification of Childhood and Parenting

Despite real wages rising by 820 percent and labor productivity by 460 percent between 1930 and 2000, leisure time grew by only 3 percent. Why has leisure not expanded in proportion to productivity gains, contrary to Keynes’s famous prediction?

Parents and guardians in the Thriving Families study describe leisure as standing in constant tension with household income. Juanita, a grandmother, shared: “We like going to the beach, having BBQs, playing soccer. Sometimes we can’t because of someone’s job, because they work on Sundays, and that’s the day to go out.”

Time pressures on families are shaped not only by the changing realities of paid work, but also by shifting expectations around childhood itself. Over the past several decades, childhood has become more structured, supervised, and time-intensive for parents. Developmental psychologist Peter Gray argues that this reflects a broader cultural shift in beliefs about child development. Where earlier generations allowed children greater autonomy and unstructured outdoor play, contemporary norms emphasize adult-guided activities, safety, and constant supervision. As Gray notes, increased schooling, organized activities, and heightened fears about safety have “left less and less time for free play,” while forms of independence once thought of as normal parenting have come to be viewed as neglectful.

This transformation has significant implications for how families allocate time. Activities that were once child-directed—playing outside, exploring neighborhoods, or spending time with peers—now often require adult coordination, transportation, and oversight. The result is an expansion of parental time commitments beyond the domain of paid work.

These changes are reinforced by broader technological and cultural shifts. The rise of television and digital media has drawn children indoors, while increased perceptions of risk have reduced children’s independent mobility. At the same time, norms of “intensive parenting” have taken hold, placing greater expectations on parents to actively manage and cultivate their children’s development.

Beyond the Data: Feeling the Squeeze

While observers offer conflicting opinions on the amount of time Americans spend on work and leisure, surveys on how Americans feel about time are clear: They believe they have less than ever, and this feeling shapes the stories they tell about time and in turn their lived experience. Families describe schedules shaped by external constraints—work shifts, transportation, school, and caregiving—that produce a sense of fragmentation and overload. The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory from 2024 underscores this, noting that parents face “heightened stressors,” including financial strain. Schulte describes this fragmentation as “time confetti.” Even if leisure has increased, Americans feel more rushed, reflecting a sense of “time poverty” amid material abundance.

This sense of time scarcity is also shaped by the broader acceleration of modern life. German sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa describes a “speeding up of everything,” where technological and social change compress time and heighten expectations. Today, 75 percent of knowledge workers report lacking the time or energy to do their jobs, suggesting that even productivity-enhancing technologies have not alleviated time pressure.

IV. Remembering How to Make Policy Around Time

Public policy has shaped time before—and it can do so again. The rhythms we now take for granted, from standardized time zones to the weekend and the 40-hour workweek, were not accidents of culture or technology but deliberate policy choices that rebalanced power over time between workers, families, and employers. Time itself has always been “a creation of man,” in the words of author R. Newton Mayall, continually renegotiated in response to shifting social needs and economic realities.

Yet today, time has largely fallen out of our policy imagination. Economic debates focus narrowly on affordability while overlooking whether people have the time needed to live well. Asked what he wanted for his children’s future, one father in Illinois put it succinctly: He hoped that “They are content in life and not overwhelmed.”

If the purpose of economics is to support the good life—as Keynes once assumed—then time must be treated as a central policy concern. We cannot create more hours in the day, but we can reshape how time is distributed and who has agency over it—at work, at home, and in our communities. As history makes clear, these arrangements are neither fixed nor inevitable; they are the product of choices.

Recentering time in public policy requires asking a different set of questions: not only how much people earn, but whether they have the time to care, to rest, to participate in family and community life. In other words, what would it mean to design an economy not only around money, but around time?

Five Pillars of a Time-Honoring Agenda

First: make work predictable and malleable

Unpredictable scheduling, affecting nearly 60 percent of service-sector workers, creates additional stress for parents. And now AI-driven scheduling systems threaten to intensify this volatility, optimizing for efficiency while externalizing chaos onto workers’ lives. Fair scheduling laws—such as advance notice, compensation for last-minute changes, and worker input—would give people back the ability to plan their time around work. Currently, nine states plus the District of Columbia and 11 localities have some version of these laws, but they could be expanded to more locations and sectors and enforced more vigorously to ensure employers comply. The Schedules That Work Act, reintroduced by Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro last year, would create a federal fair scheduling law.

Legislation that supports fair scheduling practices matters, but expanding agency over time will require experimentation at many levels—federal and local, legislative and voluntary, employer-led and worker-driven. We need more policy and private-sector experiments with ideas such as the right to disconnect and reducing lifetime working time. Today, these ideas are emerging primarily through company-led experiments and early policy proposals rather than national legislation. States like California and New Jersey have introduced (but not yet passed) right-to-disconnect bills, while many organizations are testing practical measures like delayed email systems and “no after-hours response” norms. At the same time, companies and institutions are experimenting with longer-term time redistribution through part-time work, paid sabbaticals, mandatory paid-time-off policies, and structured career breaks. Efforts to raise wages are also a critical part of this equation and a top ask of parents who want to make their earnings go further and avoid picking up second and third jobs that cut into family time.

Second: align work and school days

In 2024, nearly 70 percent of children had all available parents in the workforce, yet the structure of the school day remains largely unchanged from the single-earner era. The result is a daily scramble during before- and after-school hours that forces families into impossible tradeoffs between time with their children and the paychecks they need to support them. Where feasible, policymakers should better align work and school schedules—and in the near term, significantly expand access to affordable after-school programs and safe, enriching places for kids to be.

There isn’t a single solution for every family or every worker, but we need more experimentation to turn what is now seen as an individual problem for each parent into a collective challenge for workplaces, schools, and public policy. Outside the United States, there is a lot of experimentation on shortening work hours, something the cereal company Kellogg’s did in the 1930s. And here in the United States, some leaders are attempting to close the gap. The proposed Family Friendly Schools Act would pilot expanding the school day to align more closely with the workday. There is no silver bullet that will meet all the diverse needs of our families, but more serious experimentation with job shaping and school timing is overdue.

Third: provide paid time for care

Without national paid sick days or national paid family and medical leave, time off remains a privilege rather than a right. Too many Americans must choose between a paycheck and caring for a sick child, an aging parent, or themselves. One in five private-sector workers does not have access to a single paid sick day. The Family and Medical Leave Act from the Clinton era covers just 56 percent of workers and guarantees unpaid leave only. A basic national floor of paid leave would recognize caregiving not as an interruption to economic life, but as a central part of it. It would give people time to heal, bond, and show up when it matters most.

We work collaboratively with numerous states that have passed and are implementing paid family and medical leave bills. Virginia is the latest to join the 14 states and the District of Columbia that have statewide paid family and medical leave programs. The FAMILY Act, which has been reintroduced by Representative DeLauro and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, would create a national program to provide workers with 12 weeks of paid leave to bond with a new child, recover from a serious illness, or care for a family member with a serious medical condition. Such a policy would put the United States on par with our peer nations, nearly all of which already provide paid leave.

Fourth: ensure families have time to care for those they love

For decades, we have made incremental attempts to build up capacity for more child care. As of 2025, we still have a shortage of almost 4.2 million child-care seats, and expanding state capacity remains a necessary effort. But building a system that allows families to access care when they need it isn’t enough. Many want more time to care for their own children and nieces and nephews and grandchildren.

Today, the vast majority of care in the United States is unpaid care. Other nations have already tackled the challenge that unpaid care presents to lifetime earnings and found solutions. Canada formally recognized the tradeoff caregivers make and, in response, established a child-rearing provision that allows periods spent caring for children under age seven to be excluded from the calculation of average earnings, which can increase future retirement benefits. Since 2019, Canada has expanded these protections by introducing additional provisions to better account for time spent out of the workforce as a primary caregiver.

Our vision for care must include not only making more high-quality care available for all, but creating more structures that help parents and other caregivers find time to care for kids and that value the hours they already spend doing so. Project 2029 has a new proposal that would increase federal investment in child care while expanding cash to families to make their own choices in care arrangements. And the Roosevelt Institute is acknowledging time as a critical dimension of the good life.

Ensuring families have the time to connect often means finding ways to support what has been free labor. Many families’ first preference is for parents or other family members, such as grandparents, to be caregivers. But the number of seniors in the workforce has increased, making the role grandparents play different. Some employers are looking at ways to retain their grandparent employees by creating grandparent leave. In the meantime, though, taking a caregiving role isn’t possible for the many grandparents who cannot afford to quit work. According to AARP, 41 percent of older adults in the labor force report financial need as their main motivation for working. Other seniors would love to live closer to their grandchildren, but prohibitive housing costs prevent families from being closer together. Through cash for care or tax incentives, public policies could creatively support grandparents who care for kids and other family care arrangements that families say they want.

Fifth and finally: cut the government time tax

Americans lose countless hours navigating unnecessary paperwork, duplicative reporting, and outdated government processes. This administrative burden falls hardest on the people with the least time to spare. Too often the same government agencies are asking families for data on income status they already have buried in some other part of a system. Journalist Annie Lowrey’s upcoming book and 2021 Atlantic article chronicle how governments and companies rob people of time. By using technology to streamline access to public services and benefits, modernizing systems, and designing public programs around people’s lived realities, government could return millions of hours to households—time that could be spent working, resting, or caring. There are examples of what good could look like, from Civilla’s work to streamline Michigan’s integrated benefit application, which cut the time it takes to apply in half (on average down to 20 minutes), to our own work with Colorado on decreasing friction to apply for tax credits by prepopulating returns, which reduced the time to apply to four minutes and in a pilot returned $1.4 million to taxpayers in just a few weeks.

V. Reclaiming the Art of Life Itself

Nearly a century after Keynes first suggested that the primary pursuit of the future would be learning how to live well, that promise remains largely unrealized. As productivity has grown, it has not expanded our freedom over time. Instead, most of us now feel we have less of it than ever.

Policymakers must articulate and pursue a broader vision of prosperity—one that asks not only whether families can afford what they need, but whether they have agency over their time. Policy already structures how people experience time—through work schedules, labor standards, care systems, transportation, and the design of public benefits. The question is whether these systems will continue to extract and fragment people’s time, or whether they can be redesigned to return time to individuals and families, expanding their agency and capacity to live well.

Affordability matters, and politicians across the spectrum are right to focus on helping people regain economic stability. However, what troubles the American public goes beyond dollars and cents. The struggle to cover basic costs is real, yet even if we closed the financial gap, it wouldn’t fully restore a sense of wholeness or cohesion.

People are feeling unmoored and stretched thin not just financially, but in their ability to spend time on what matters most. Leaders who can authentically articulate a vision of the good life—one that includes financial security, but also time—will likely resonate in a powerful way. At its core, this moment calls for leadership that strengthens the structures that sustain us through economic strain—especially our families.

Time is our most precious resource.

Reclaiming it is a practical, urgent project for policymakers and beyond.