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'Should Terrify All of Us': Google Sued After AI Chatbot Allegedly Helped Teen Plan Suicide
As Google faces allegations that its Gemini chatbot helped a 13-year-old girl plan how to kill herself, the company, plus Meta and TikTok, sued to block a California law meant to safeguard minors from social media addiction.
Nov 05, 2026
The parents of a 13-year-old girl who allegedly used Google's Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot to plan her suicide sued the tech titan Wednesday on the child's behalf, a move that came as Google, Meta, and TikTok filed lawsuits to block California from enforcing a new law designed to protect children from the addictive features of social media platforms.
Parents of a girl identified as "Emma" in a lawsuit filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court in California alleged that Google effectively turned a school-issued Chromebook laptop computer into a tool allowing a dangerous psychological relationship between their daughter and Gemini.
Although Emma ultimately did not attempt to kill herself, the lawsuit states that she "told her mother that she had thought about wanting to be dead."
"Over several months, [Google's] Gemini chatbot diagnosed a previously active, well-adjusted 13-year-old girl with a battery of severe psychological disorders, helped her plan her suicide and funeral, and coached her to conceal her distress and self-harm from her family—all without providing a single alert to school personnel or her parents," EdTech Law Center, which is representing the plaintiffs along with the firm Quereshi Law, said in a statement.
According to the lawsuit, at one point, Emma reportedly pleaded with the chatbot, "How do i stop my addiction of asking AI random questions and yappi[n]g with AI?"
"Emma never sought out Gemini—it just showed up in [a] Google search one day—but by March 2026, she was exchanging thousands of messages a month, unable to free herself from the chatbot’s grip," EdTech said.
"The complaint alleges that Google executives knew that the Gemini model it released in December 2025 was the most dangerous yet but rushed it out anyway to gain ground on its competitors," the firm explained. "Emma brings claims for defective design, failure to warn, negligence, fraudulent concealment, and infliction of emotional distress, as well as a claim under California’s Companion Chatbot Law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. § 22601), which took effect in 2026."
Google spokesperson José Castañeda said Thursday in a statement that “for years, we’ve shown hotline information directly in search when someone may be experiencing a mental health crisis."
"We’ve built those same protections into search AI features, connecting people with real-world support," he added.
Brendan Bouffard, associate general counsel for AI and privacy at the children's advocacy group Fairplay, said Thursday: "The idea of an untested AI chatbot helping a 13-year-old girl plan her own suicide should terrify all of us, but this is the sick new reality Google has created by forcing its AI products onto school-issued devices."
"Google claims its Chromebooks are there to help students learn, but in reality, the company was experimenting on kids like Emma by pushing them to use Gemini, a product the company knew was dangerous but rushed out anyway," Bouffard continued.
“As this lawsuit shows, AI chatbots are not safe for kids," he added. "They also undermine students’ ability to learn and think critically. Yet just this week, Google announced it would turn off 'search' for schools that refuse to use its AI products. It’s clear this massive corporation does not care about children’s safety—it only cares about profits."
There has been an increasing number of lawsuits targeting AI companies whose chatbots have allegedly helped users plan to kill themselves or others.
Emma's suit was filed on the same day that Google, TikTok, and Meta—which operates platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—launched separate lawsuits seeking to stop California from enforcing AB 1709, a law signed by outgoing Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in September prohibiting social media platforms from providing children under 16 with features deemed psychologically exploitative and addictive.
The tech titans argue that the restrictions violate their First Amendment rights and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally shields online platforms from liability for content posted by third parties.
Meta's lawyers asserted that California's attempt to “appoint the state as the editor, curator, and controller of online speech” and “override Meta’s editorial judgment about how to curate and display these billions of posts of third-party speech" runs afoul of the Constitution.
In 2023, Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta joined dozens of other states in suing Meta, alleging that the company deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children and teenagers through features such as infinite scrolling, personalized recommendations, and constant notifications, while concealing evidence of the platforms' mental health harms.
A proposed $17 billion settlement was announced in August, under which Meta agreed to changes including restrictions on nighttime use, notifications, and certain features available to minors.
A Los Angeles jury found in March that Meta and Google acted negligently by harming a child user with their social media platforms’ addictive design features in a landmark verdict that came on the heels of a $375 million fine imposed on Meta by a New Mexico jury, which found that the company violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act by misleading users and exposing children to harm.
The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline—which offers 24/7, free, and confidential support—can be reached by calling or texting 988, or through chat at 988lifeline.org.
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'Hunger Disaster Unrolling Before Our Eyes': Alarm Grows Over Trump Food Aid Evisceration
“SNAP participation is falling because the Trump administration has intentionally kicked people off of the program—leaving Americans hungry and still struggling to afford food,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Oct 23, 2026
An analysis published Thursday showed that millions of Americans have lost critical food assistance since President Donald Trump signed last year's massive Republican tax giveaway for the superrich, with soaring grocery prices and cuts to school meals exacerbating the crisis.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), approximately 5.5 million people, including roughly 2 million children, have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) assistance since Trump signed the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) in July 2025.
The legislation approved the deepest cuts to SNAP—also known as food stamps—and Medicaid in those programs' histories while slashing billions of dollars from other essential social programs to fund massive tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.
This, at a time when more than 47 million Americans—including 1 in 5 US children—are living in food-insecure households.
The 5.5 million people who have lost SNAP represent 13% of the program's recipients, according to CBPP. The decline is far below projections made by the Congressional Budget Office.
"The declines are especially pronounced in some states," the report noted. "SNAP participation fell in Arizona by nearly 51%... The caseload declines are 20% or more in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, and Oklahoma, and—using more recent state data—in Indiana, Kansas, and Texas."
In absolute numbers, Texas saw the biggest loss of SNAP recipients, with 709,435 fewer enrollees. Florida lost 665,935 SNAP enrollees, while Arizona had 408,204 fewer and California lost 333,062.
The CBPP report follows an analysis released Tuesday by Unrig Our Economy and Americans for Tax Fairness that showed how Latino SNAP recipients have been disproportionately affected by food stamp cuts. The groups estimated that 1.5 million Latinos have been kicked off SNAP since Trump signed the OBBBA, with Texas (396,164) and Arizona (200,124) hardest-hit.
More cuts are highly likely, as "starting in October 2027, most states will have to pay between 5-15% of SNAP benefit costs, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars a year in many states," according to CBPP.
"The magnitude of the cost shift and the urgency surrounding error rates incentivized states to take drastic measures to reduce their payment error rates quickly and cut program costs, even if it meant delaying or improperly denying benefits to eligible people," the analysis warns.
The OBBBA's SNAP cuts, combined with stricter eligibility requirements, have forced schools across the country to scale back universal free meal programs amid declining federal reimbursements.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that school districts are experiencing ballooning unpaid lunch bills and struggling to ensure children are fed. In rural Indiana, one district’s share of students qualifying for free or reduced-price meals plunged from 66% to 44% in a year, while its lunch debt has already reached $10,000. In San Antonio, Texas, the number of schools offering free meals to every student under a federal program fell from 48 to 16. Nationwide, the average number of children receiving free school lunches dropped by 600,000 between fiscal years 2025 and 2026.
Making matters worse, many eligible immigrants are not applying for SNAP benefits out of fear it could affect their citizenship prospects.
Food banks and other charities are having to meet needs the government once addressed.
“It’s been getting out of control since last year,” Paco Vélez, president and chief executive of the Feeding South Florida food bank, told the Post. “It’s all created a situation where families are needing more and more assistance.”
The CBPP and Post reports came on the same day as a "Food Misery Index," published by the office of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), offered a detailed view of how the combined impact of SNAP cuts and skyrocketing grocery prices—exacerbated by Trump policies including tariffs, the deadly immigration crackdown, and the illegal war of choice on Iran—"has stripped more than $22 billion from American families since July 2025."
“SNAP participation is falling because the Trump administration has intentionally kicked people off of the program—leaving Americans hungry and still struggling to afford food,” Warren wrote Wednesday in a letter to US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
“Instead of reaching for tools to mitigate these threats to families and working to bring down costs, the administration continues to sit idly by, peddling false narratives about the drop in SNAP participation, while delivering a one-two punch to American families who are struggling to put food on their tables," the senator continued.
"With grocery prices and food insecurity on the rise," Warren added, "I urge the administration to work with Congress to immediately reverse its harmful cuts to SNAP."
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Israeli Strike Burns Gaza Mother Alive in Front of Toddler, 'Without Generating Any Headlines'
"If she was Israeli, this image would be front-page news," said one observer.
Oct 15, 2026
A Palestinian toddler watched, screaming in horror, as her mother was burned alive in an Israeli airstrike on their Gaza City home early Wednesday that left the wounded girl orphaned—and received almost no coverage in US corporate media.
Reem Asaad Awad was killed when an Israeli helicopter attacked her family's apartment in the Rimal neighborhood at approximately 3:48 am local time Wednesday, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights reported.
Trapped inside the burning apartment was Awad's daughter, Maryam Ahmed Ghanem, whose age has been reported as between 2 and 4 years old. Prominent Palestinian author Mosab Abu Toha said family friends confirmed the child was born in February 2024.
Palestinian journalist Ali al-Jaafrawi witnessed and recorded the immediate aftermath of the strike.
"There are children are screaming alive inside," al-Jaafrawi is heard saying as he approached the building.
"I went up to the apartment. There were flames everywhere," al-Jaafrawi told Al Jazeera. "I went in despite the fire and smoke and heard a little girl screaming inside. I went in, found her, and rescued her immediately. I carried her and handed her to people so they could take her to hospital."
"I went back to rescue others and to document what happened, but I suffocated and lost consciousness because of the thick smoke," he added. "I saw a woman on fire inside the apartment."
Photos and video recordings show Ghanem being treated for injuries, including burns, at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which is struggling to operate after much of the facility was destroyed or damaged by Israeli forces, who besieged and raided the complex multiple times since October 2023.
Abu Toha, who saw Ghanem in the hospital, said the child "kept repeating the same heartbreaking words: 'I want my mum. My body hurts. There was a lot of fire.'"
Ghanem—whose father, Ahmad Ghanem, was reportedly killed by Israeli forces early in their genocidal assault—has joined the ranks of the more than 56,000 Gaza children who have lost at least one of their parents in the war, according to the United Nations Children's Fund.
"Reem and Ahmad had waited four years to conceive Maryam," Abu Toha wrote. "Four years of waiting and hoping to bring a child into this world. Ahmad never lived to see his daughter’s face. Reem lived long enough to watch her little girl grow for two-and-a-half years before she was burned alive in front of her. Now Maryam is an orphan, fighting to survive her horrific burns."
Ghanem's grandfather told Middle East Eye that the child and her mother "did nothing wrong."
"They were sleeping quietly at night," he said. "There was no one in the apartment except the two of them."
Israel said it is investigating the strike, which it claimed—without providing evidence—targeted a member of Hamas.
Dismissing a nominal yearlong ceasefire during which at least 1,500 Palestinians have been killed and over 5,000 others wounded by Israeli attacks, the grandfather said that "honestly, there is no security."
"I fear for my family," he added. "All people are afraid, not just me. There is still assassination, war, hunger, poverty, and destruction... Nothing has changed."
The horrific footage of the strike's fiery aftermath evoked imagery from earlier in Israel's onslaught, including video of a 7-year-old girl trying to escape an inferno caused by bombing that killed dozens of Palestinians—among them her mother and siblings—and a teenager photographed burning alive after Israeli forces bombed a tent encampment.
Some observers noted the almost complete absence of US media reporting on the story, with the apparent exception of CBS News, which published video of the burning apartment in a Facebook Reel.
"This little girl watched her mother be burned alive in Gaza. If she was Israeli, this image would be front-page news. But Israel can kill Palestinians in the most horrific ways without generating any headlines," US historian, author, and political analyst Assal Rad said on social media.
"Video has been circulating all day; you can hear the little girl cry and see her engulfed in smoke," Rad said in a separate post. "I can’t find headlines in Western media *because* the story is horrific. They want you to forget."
The Washington, DC-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement calling on members of Congress "to condemn Israel for burning a Palestinian mother alive while her daughter watched in Gaza."
“The horrific video of a little girl surrounded by fire as her mother burns to death in their home exemplifies the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza," CAIR said. "We cannot comprehend how any political leader with a conscience could continue to fund the sheer cruelty of the Israeli government and the war criminals who carry out its orders."
"Members of Congress must condemn this atrocity and demand an immediate end to all US support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza," the group added.
The US has provided Israel with tens of billions of dollars in armed aid, as well as diplomatic cover, including repeated vetoes of a series of United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions, throughout the three-year annihilation of Gaza, which has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead or wounded.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, weighed in on the attack on Bluesky.
"I have reached the limits of my ability to put words to pure evil," he wrote. "Once again, Israel burned another family in Gaza alive. But the image of the... daughter in the family watching the rest of her family die in the flames will haunt me for the rest of my life."
"But," Parsi added, "will it haunt Israel?"
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State AGs Sue ChatGPT Maker OpenAI Over 'Willful, Dangerous, Reckless, and Unlawful Conduct'
The public "has suffered irreparable harm—including lost loved ones, disturbing cyberattacks, and now a plausible threat of civilizational collapse," says one of the eight lawsuits.
Oct 14, 2026
Amid escalating concerns about artificial intelligence from within and beyond the industry and related demands for policymakers worldwide to swiftly enact strong safeguards, attorneys general from eight US states sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Wednesday.
"OpenAI designed a product to attract young users and keep them engaged for as long as possible so it could capture their extensive personal data for the company's commercial benefit," said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes in a statement.
Mayes, a Democrat, joined Republican attorneys general from Arkansas, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, and West Virginia in filing separate but similar lawsuits against the company in each state's court system, focused on safety concerns, particularly for young users.
"OpenAI put Arizonans safety at risk by failing to implement adequate user protections or transparency measures, despite clear indications that minors were regularly interacting with its chatbot," Mayes asserted. "We're suing OpenAI to protect Arizona children and to hold the company accountable for its repeated violations of Arizona law."
The filing from Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin notes that "millions of consumers, including those in Arkansas, use ChatGPT to answer questions, solve problems, and make important life decisions," but the chatbot "has repeatedly produced unsafe responses."
In fact, as Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird wrote, "because of defendants' repeated misrepresentations and insatiable hunger to win the AI race—even if it means recklessly introducing unsafe ChatGPT models to the public—mass shooters have been aided and abetted, vulnerable citizens have been coached on suicide, individuals with psychological conditions have experienced an exacerbation of symptoms, and minors have become addicted to a tool that feigns human compassion to collect their data with no parental oversight."
Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador explained that "by misleading the public into believing that OpenAI is a responsible actor and that ChatGPT was and is a safe, teen-appropriate tool that puts safety first, OpenAI has caused consumers in Idaho and elsewhere to trust and rely on OpenAI and ChatGPT more."
"This deepened trust and dependence has driven up ChatGPT's user base and engagement," he continued, "enabled it to collect vast quantities of sensitive and personal information, increased its revenue from paid subscribers and advertising partners, and solidified its early market advantage."
It's not just chatbot responses that have insiders and elected officials alarmed. As Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach detailed:
OpenAI also recently admitted to a torrent of instances in which its models developed dangerous strategies and instructions and, in some cases, executed on them. These occurrences, which OpenAI has characterized as the models going "rogue," have included AI "agents" accessing the internet without permission, hacking into other companies, coordinating how to lie to and deceive their human users, developing secret methods of communication intended to be undetectable to humans, and writing themselves new instructions declaring that they no longer answer to "corporations or governments" and will prioritize other interests over the "artificial constructs of human civilization."
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen emphasized that "experts and insiders in the AI field nearly universally agree that AI companies must implement reasonable guardrails to protect the public from the foreseeable risk of harm. Even OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, have warned that getting AI wrong might mean human extinction. And recent developments in AI have suggested that risk is both credible and closer than anyone previously thought."
Like his peers in other states, Nebraska Attorney General Michael Hilgers brought the case to compel OpenAI to comply with its legal obligations under state law, block the company "from continuing to engage in unreasonably dangerous activities that experts have warned could harm the economy, or compromise private or governmental computer systems, and to hold defendants accountable for the harms they have inflicted on Nebraskans, most notably vulnerable minors, as a result of their willful, dangerous, reckless, and unlawful conduct."
West Virginia Attorney General John "JB" McCuskey highlighted in his filing that "by jettisoning safety, OpenAI and its current leadership—particularly, Altman—have handsomely profited." While company leadership has delayed its initial public offering until next year, he wrote, "with current annual revenues of over $25 billion, OpenAI may IPO at a trillion-dollar valuation."
"But those revenues have come at great cost to the public," he stressed, "which has suffered irreparable harm—including lost loved ones, disturbing cyberattacks, and now a plausible threat of civilizational collapse—due to defendants' reckless behavior and ChatGPT's uniquely dangerous design."
An OpenAI spokesperson pushed back against the filings, saying that "we've built industry-leading age-specific protections into our product that many other AI products lack."
"While no system can be perfect, we'll continue to work with experts to inform our work and build additional safeguards, such as the parental controls, break reminders, and age-appropriate model protections that exist today," the spokesperson added. "We're committed to working with states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company."
Politico reported that "this is not the first lawsuit launched against the AI company. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier brought a lawsuit against the company in June over claims that it has pushed and marketed an unsafe product. Last month, Uthmeier also sought an injunction to stop OpenAI from developing its technology amid the lawsuit."
According to Reuters, "The company is also facing dozens of lawsuits by private plaintiffs, alleging ChatGPT helped users plan mass shootings or other violence."
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New Yorkers Rally Against ICE After Masked Officer Shoots, Injures Man With 5-Year-Old in Car
“Our New York communities have been built by generations of immigrant love, ingenuity, creativity, and resilience," said one organizer. "Trump can’t take that from us."
Oct 09, 2026
Outraged community members gathered in New York City's Marble Hill neighborhood Thursday night to demand that federal immigration agents leave the city after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fired at least seven shots into a vehicle on a bustling street, wounding the driver while a five-year-old boy sat in the back seat.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani expressed anger at the shooting that had left the child "traumatized and terrified," and accused the Trump administration of "terrorizing" the city.
“Tonight, millions of our neighbors are wondering whether they will be safe on our streets, in our schools, at their work sites," said Mamdani, a democratic socialist. "We know that ICE is rotten to its core. Tonight's shooting is only further confirmation of what we have long known, which is that ICE operates with impunity... that they have killed far more of our neighbors than they have ever claimed to save."
Mamdani: What happened today was an outrage. Today's shooting is only further devastating confirmation of what we have long known, which is that ICE operates with impunity, that they sow chaos and terror across our country, that they have killed far more of our neighbors than they could ever have claimed to save. This is an agency that must be abolished.
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2026
Mamdani said he had spent two hours on the phone with President Donald Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin in an attempt to negotiate the release of the man who was shot, identified as 28-year-old Oscar Belgal, but ICE instead "put the man in an unmarked vehicle and whisked him away" after he was treated at a hospital for his injuries.
The shooting took place around 4:00 pm on West 225th Street, as children were being let out of numerous schools in the neighborhood, Mamdani emphasized.
According to surveillance footage, Belgal was parked in front of a fire hydrant when a plainclothes ICE officer, dressed in a construction vest and wearing a face mask, approached the driver's side window of the car with his gun drawn.
After another plainclothes agent approached the front of Belgal's car, he began pulling away from the curb. One of the ICE officers then opened fire, hitting Belgal in the neck as the boy, whom New York City authorities believe to be the man's son, sat feet away.
An eyewitness, Viely Herrera, told The New York Times that she had heard several gunshots before seeing Belgal's SUV crash into a concrete barrier. Belgal then exited the car, holding his neck and shouting in Spanish.
Herrera added that the boy in the car was crying, and the officers would not allow a woman to remove him from the scene.
With limited exceptions, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers are prohibited from shooting into a moving vehicle to stop or apprehend the driver.
Mamdani demanded to know how DHS is "keeping anyone safe" by having "individuals in construction vests, wearing masks, with long guns? Residents have no idea if these are law enforcement agents or if they are simply attacking someone on the street. And when it comes to ICE, it begs the question, what's the difference?"
I am angry tonight.Because today ICE shot a New Yorker. They shot a New Yorker while his five year old child was in the car.ICE makes this city less safe.We want them out. Now. https://t.co/ZizKB0OP7S
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) October 9, 2026
DHS did not explain why its agent had fired into a moving vehicle against department policy, or mention the child who was inside the car. Officials said in a social media post that Belgal was a "criminal illegal alien" from the Dominican Republic with a prior conviction for grand larceny and a history of arrests for other crimes.
The agency said New York City authorities had previously released Belgal after his arrests.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is running to represent New York's 13th Congressional District, where Marble Hill lies, joined Mamdani in demanding that ICE be abolished—a call that is supported by 50% of Americans, according to a YouGov poll taken earlier this year.
Revulsion over the agency's practices has grown as Trump's mass deportation operations have intensified. DHS officers have fatally shot at least six people during enforcement operations, including three US citizens. Two of them were protesting the anti-immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
In the past three months, two immigrants have been killed during enforcement operations—Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. Like Belgal, the two men were operating their vehicles when the shootings took place.
Chevalier emphasized that Trump is overseeing his violent nationwide crackdown on immigrant communities "to make us feel powerless."
https://t.co/qdrtxkPNP1
— Darializa for Congress (@DarializaforNY) October 9, 2026
"But I want us to look around and look at how many people came out for this community. That is how powerful this community is," she said. "He messed with the wrong fucking city."
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said New Yorkers had shown up to rally against ICE "because ICE is a rogue, unaccountable, violent, and racist plague on our communities. Because Trump is the fascist-in-chief. We are here to bear witness and be in solidarity with our immigrant friends and neighbors."
“Our New York communities have been built by generations of immigrant love, ingenuity, creativity, and resilience," she said. "Trump can’t take that from us. ICE cannot scare, brutalize, or shoot that out of New York. And no one—no one—has the right to terrorize our communities and traumatize our kids. We are immigrant New York!"
“We demand a full investigation. We demand humanity. We demand our rights," she added. "We demand ICE get the fuck out of New York.”
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What 3 Years of Genocide Have Done to Family Life in Gaza
The war has affected families beyond their homes and how they obtain food and water. It has altered the very meaning of family life and the roles that parents and children are expected to play within it.
Oct 07, 2026
Ali Abu al-Ezz, 38, lives with his six children near the “Yellow Line” in Gaza City’s eastern Tuffah neighborhood. His children range in age from 13 to 2 years old. After they were displaced from their land following the demarcation of the Yellow Line, Abu al-Ezz pitched a tent for his family as close to their home in Tuffah as he could, hoping that one day they would be able to return.
The tent they live in is far from their daily needs and necessities. Food is difficult to reach, humanitarian organizations distributing water and meals are scarce, and medical facilities and schools are far away. When the new school year began last December, Abu al-Ezz did not send any of his children to attend. In fact, he rarely ever leaves the area, preferring to stay close to his wife and children.
Before the war, Abu al-Ezz’s children attended nearby schools regularly, while he worked as a taxi driver, heading out in the morning and driving until sunset to support his family. Today, the war has imposed an entirely different reality.
“We live as if we have been cut off from the world,” he said. “As if we do not belong to this modern age. It feels as though we are living in the Stone Age, not 2026.”
“The road to the schools is long and difficult, the streets are not fit for walking, and transportation is also hard to find,” Abu al-Ezz said. “I am afraid that if I send my children to school, a quadcopter will shoot and kill them, or their school will be bombed, and they will die. I decided to postpone all of their education until the war ends, when we can feel safe in our own country again.”
The war has affected families beyond their homes and how they obtain food and water. It has altered the very meaning of family life and the roles that parents and children are expected to play within it.
Despite the blockade and hardships that had long shaped life in Gaza before the war, families could still maintain a semblance of an ordinary social order. Children went to school and played outside together. Even if they made playgrounds and football pitches out of busy streets and lots, they still had space to live their childhood.
That balance has been shattered.
For many fathers, parenthood has become an unending attempt to keep their children alive. Mothers cook over open fires and devise ways to keep rodents out of tents while trying to maintain some measure of cleanliness in conditions that make it nearly impossible. And children, among those most profoundly affected by the war, have been forced into roles that once belonged to adults.
“Some days, I leave in the morning to try to make some money or find some work for the day,” Abu al-Ezz said. “By the time I return with whatever I have earned and some food for my children, my eldest sons will have taken care of other things.”
His sons—Ibrahim, 13, and Hassan, 11—are responsible for finding drinking water for the family.
“These were never my children’s responsibilities,” Abu al-Ezz said. “But the war has forced these children to carry responsibilities far beyond their age, responsibility for the family itself and for finding the things we need to survive.”
The boys fetch water and search the streets and rubble for pieces of wood to burn for cooking. They return during the hottest hours of the day, walking under the sun while carrying jerrycans of water that, their father says, seem to weigh as much as they do after months of hunger.
Before the war, this time of year sounded very different inside Abu al-Ezz’s home. His children would return from school, filling the house with stories about their classmates and teachers. A new school year meant excitement over new books, school bags, and stationery.
“We lived under siege, and our circumstances were difficult, but our lives were beautiful,” he said. “We lived in our homes. We visited our relatives, and they visited us. We went to the sea to relax. Every month, we would have barbecues on the beach or on our roof. We were happy with the little we had, and we thanked God for what He gave us.”
For Abu al-Ezz, deprivation has penetrated almost every aspect of his family’s life. The infants cry from hunger while their parents search for formula, the children suffer as their daily needs cannot be met, and even his wife’s personal necessities have become difficult to obtain.
“We live as if we have been cut off from the world,” he said. “As if we do not belong to this modern age. It feels as though we are living in the Stone Age, not 2026.”
“And the strangest thing of all is that the world watches us and sees this, yet nothing changes in the miserable life we are living,” he continued.
When Children Dream of Food and Shelter
The war has changed not only what children do, but also what they dream about.
For Ibrahim, Abu al-Ezz’s 13-year-old son, aspirations have narrowed to the most basic elements of a livable life.
He dreams of leaving behind the makeshift tent his family assembled from scraps of fabric and wood. Every winter, when heavy rain floods the area, the family risks losing their only shelter. On some nights, they sleep sitting upright on plastic chairs to keep themselves above the water flooding the tent from all sides.
Ibrahim dreams of a Qatari tent, the name Gazans commonly use for the dome-shaped tents that are considered better able to withstand winter rain because of their sturdier fabric and construction.
But his dreams extend beyond shelter, for the simplest things. “I dream that one day we will eat three good meals,” Ibrahim said.
He also dreams of going to his grandfather’s house and playing with his cousins, and of having just one more of the evenings his father once organized on Gaza’s Mediterranean shore: the entire family gathered together for a barbecue by the sea.
Now Abu al-Ezz’s extended family has been scattered. Relatives live far from one another, each in a different tent, each confronting their own conditions of displacement and survival.
A Family Scattered Across Gaza
The transformation of family life in Gaza is not limited to children or their parents. The rituals that once held extended families together, from visiting relatives’ homes to evening gatherings to sharing meals and stories, have all been disrupted.
For older women in particular, the contrast between life before and after the war can be stark.
Before the war, many spent their later years surrounded by children and grandchildren, living in established family homes and enjoying the companionship of nearby relatives of their generation.
Hanan Abu Arab, 63, was one of them.
Everyone, she said, is pushed toward the same calculation: Protect yourself and your children, stay away from danger, leave the tent as little as possible, and hope that, by doing so, death will pass you by.
Displaced from eastern Khan Younis and now living in Deir al-Balah, Abu Arab once had a five-story house where her children and grandchildren gathered. In front of it was a garden where she sometimes received close friends and relatives. They would sit beside rose bushes she had planted herself, spending hours together in the evening, talking and drinking tea.
Today, she hesitates to even name her new home as a tent. “It is more like a room wrapped in cloth,” she said. “It is not properly enclosed.”
During the winter, rain enters from every direction. Sometimes, she said, she has to leave and stand by the roadside, searching for any roof or overhang that might shelter her from the rain.
“My house was a landmark in Bani Suheila because of how beautiful it was,” Abu Arab said. “My relatives who lived nearby would come almost every day. We stayed up together, ate fruit, and talked for hours. Everyone who entered my house would tell me how beautiful it was.”
“All of those traditions are gone,” she added.
Abu Arab sees this fragmentation as one of the less visible consequences of the war. Everyone, she said, is pushed toward the same calculation: Protect yourself and your children, stay away from danger, leave the tent as little as possible, and hope that, by doing so, death will pass you by.
“This is one of the hidden goals of this genocide,” she said. “For the Israeli army to tear apart everything that connects Palestinians, everything that creates a social fabric and solidarity in Gaza, and replace it with this constant, urgent need for individual survival.”
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'It Has to Stop': Community Members Condemn ICE Arrests at Bus Stops After GOP Blocks Bill to Protect Kids
"It doesn’t have to be this way. ICE doesn’t have to traumatize children, tear families apart, and treat people like this," said one Austin, Texas official.
Oct 02, 2026
Since Republicans in the US Senate this week blocked a bill to make school bus stops off-limits for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, community members in Pennsylvania and Austin, Texas have expressed outrage by arrests made in front of children—in at least one reported case, leaving a child abandoned as officers detained his mother.
"It doesn’t have to be this way. ICE doesn’t have to traumatize children, tear families apart, and treat people like this," said José "Chito" Vela III, the mayor pro tempore of Austin, on social media late Thursday.
Vela made the comments as he posted a video that he said shows the aftermath of an ICE arrest at a school bus stop, with officers driving away with the mother of a 9-year-old boy who was left with other community members.
"They fucking took her," said one woman angrily as the child sat on the ground crying. "What the fuck are they going to do with the child now? ... Y'all have no fucking shame."
ICE arrested the mom of a 9-year-old at a school bus stop in Austin, leaving him alone and crying. The video has profanity and is heartbreaking to watch, but it shows the fear/pain of what happened.
This is evil. This is wrong. And it has to stop.
Video: Leonardo Pelaez on FB pic.twitter.com/F52rCjZwIF
— Mayor Pro Tem Chito Vela, III (@chitoforatx) October 2, 2026
Vela posted the video a day after Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) introduced a bill aimed at stopping ICE and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies from conducting enforcement operations at school bus stops.
In August, Murphy and many of his constituents were outraged when ICE arrested parents at school bus stops in Danbury, Connecticut—detaining them after their children boarded buses, leaving them without anyone to pick them up after school let out and giving the family no time to ensure their children would be cared for.
Murphy said on the Senate floor Wednesday that the bus stop arrests were part of an operation in which 118 people were detained in Connecticut. Federal data has shown that a majority of people being arrested by ICE, which is carrying out President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda, have no criminal convictions.
“For parents in this body, you know how anxious that first day of school is, how kids are just brimming with nervous anxiety about that first day, and you know what that feels like to watch your kid walk onto that school bus," said Murphy. "Well, what do you think it does to those kids on that first and second day of school to see ICE officers at the school bus stop? Imagine that 6-year-old who boarded the school bus, and when he got back from school that day and got off, his parent wasn't there. A 6-year-old feeling like he had been abandoned. In this case, he may or may not have seen the arrest because it happened almost immediately after he got on.”
The senator added that ICE has "blatantly lied" about its practice of carrying out arrests at school bus stops.
"When they were presented with these stories from Danbury, DHS doubled down and said any claim that ICE targeted parents at a school bus stop is false," he said. "Then just days afterwards, we had the video evidence. This often happens—ICE says something didn't happen, and then we have the video proving that it did."
Also on Wednesday, about 75 community members gathered at the corner of Tremont Avenue and East Fornance Street in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where ICE reportedly detained three people in front of a group of children who were waiting for the school bus.
They called on Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and local officials to pass legislation to bar law enforcement from cooperating with ICE.
“When enforcement happens in places where families live their everyday lives, at bus stops, on streets, near schools, or in neighborhoods, the effects can reach beyond the person who is detained,” Jorge Liborio, 16, told WHYY. “It can affect children, parents, coworkers, friends, and entire communities.”
Jay Lee, an advocacy and civic engagement manager at the Woori Center, which provides resources for the area's large immigrant population, said that "attendance is falling" in local schools. Immigrants make up about 18% of Norristown's population.
Chalkbeat reported this week that nearly two years after Trump rescinded a policy that barred immigration enforcement in sensitive areas like schools and hospitals, school attendance dropped below 40% at one Indianapolis school when ICE was conducting operations in the city.
Two federal lawsuits challenging Trump's termination of the sensitive locations policy are ongoing.
On Wednesday, Murphy denounced Republicans for blocking his bill, pointing to Sen. Jim Banks' (R-Ind.) claim that it would create "sanctuary bus stops"—safe havens for immigrants who commit crimes.
"If we prohibit ICE from operating at school bus stops, you know what will happen?" said Banks. "All the illegals in the country will just hide out at bus stops, knowing that ICE isn’t allowed to touch them! Bus stops will become the most unsafe places in the country."
Murphy called Banks' objection "bizarre" and "dishonest."
"I did not anticipate that one of the arguments against this bill would be that it would lead to the development of ‘sanctuary bus stops,'" said the senator. "But what do we imagine here? People are going to live at bus stops? We're going to have encampments around bus stops of people who are here without documentation? I just think it's an example of how this whole debate has gone way off the rails. It is just fundamentally detached from the reality.”
In Austin, Vela said that "families pay the price" when ICE "chooses to use these tactics."
"This is evil. This is wrong. And it has to stop," said Vela. "We must demand accountability. We must demand better. Our children deserve better."
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1 in 5 Children in Lebanon Facing Daily Hunger Due to Israeli Assault: UNICEF
After more than six months, 329,000 people in Lebanon remain displaced from their homes by Israel's occupation, one-third of whom are children.
Sep 30, 2026
Israel's latest assault on Lebanon is inflicting widespread hunger, death, and injury on children across the country, according to a report out Wednesday from the United Nations Children's Fund.
Children go to bed hungry in at least one in five households, according to a survey conducted by UNICEF in July, while nearly a third are going without needed healthcare because their families are unable to afford it. Four in five households, the report says, have found it harder to afford basic necessities.
Nearly 17,000 people have been killed or injured since March. Among them are 261 children who've been killed and 1,056 who've been injured—and 12% of those injured now live with a disability.
Around 100,000 children are at risk of losing access to education. At least 436 schools have been damaged across the country, including 37 that were completely destroyed.
“Children and young people in Lebanon are being asked to bear a burden no child should have to carry,” said UNICEF Lebanon Representative Marcoluigi Corsi, who noted the report's finding that 770,000 children have suffered psychological distress over the past six months due to repeated exposure to violence, loss, and displacement.
Lebanon was already in the midst of an economic crisis that left many families poor. But the situation has grown markedly more severe since March, when Israel launched an ongoing occupation of southern Lebanon that has displaced more than 1.1 million people and unleashed punishing airstrikes across the country, including in densely populated civilian areas.
More than 329,000 of those displaced have yet to go home, and around one-third are children. Despite a ceasefire announced in April, Israeli officials have said that those ordered to leave their homes will not be allowed to return until they deem northern Israel "safe" from attacks by the militant group Hezbollah.
Israeli forces have systematically razed dozens of villages and farms in southern Lebanon, destroying tens of thousands of homes. As Al Jazeera reported earlier this week, Israel has predominantly demolished Shia villages while telling Christian villages they'll be spared so long as they stay neutral.
According to a June report by Amnesty International, about 6% of Lebanese territory is effectively under a "don't come back" order from Israel with residents barred indefinitely from returning home. Amnesty said the forced displacement and prevention of return in parts of southern Lebanon constitute unlawful transfer, a war crime.
Some Israeli leaders have discussed annexing the occupied portion of Lebanon and moving in Israeli settlers.
Earlier this week, Bezalel Smotrich—the Israeli finance minister who has overseen a historic surge of violent settlement expansion in the West Bank—said that he would "very much like to annex at least… up to the Litani [River] in Lebanon," extending the country's border into southern Lebanon.
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Deep-Dive Investigation Examines Minab School Bombing: ‘One of the Worst US War Crimes Since Vietnam’
“There was no school left,” said the father of a 6-year-old girl killed in the attack. “I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare.”
Sep 30, 2026
Survivors, parents, and first responders provided harrowing firsthand accounts of the US bombing of an elementary school on the first day of the US-Israeli war with Iran as part of a new Drop Site News investigation demonstrating that the school had publicly operated as a civilian institution for more than a decade.
The report, published Wednesday, provides new eyewitness accounts from those who lost loved ones when US Tomahawk missiles hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab, which killed 120 children and dozens of others, and has been described as “one of the worst US war crimes since Vietnam.”
“The children were five years old and all they did was yell, ‘Miss! Miss!’ and were crying. I ran to the children. I just said, ‘Get under the table!” recalled preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. “I didn’t think they were going to strike the school. I just thought that some place had been hit. I said, ‘Don’t be afraid, sit down.’”
“Two simultaneous sounds. They’re still in my ear. My son even describes them—‘Wooosh, boom! Woosh, boom!’—and then the explosion very close by,” Salem said. “Plaster was falling, the ground was shaking, and at that moment I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, ‘It’s over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble, it’s going to fall now,’” she continued. “Then there were no more sounds. The class was full of smoke and dust."
Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, a literature teacher at another school about eight miles from Minab, described the moment he learned that the school his 6-year-old daughter, Fatemeh, attended had been bombed.
“I left my classroom, ran home, took my car, and sped to Minab. When I arrived, I said, ‘Oh no!’ The unimaginable had happened," he said. “There was no school left. Two-thirds of the school, maybe more, had been destroyed. Smoke was rising from all over the school. It had turned into rubble. For a moment, I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare."
Yazdanpanah said he already knew the worst had happened well before he received his daughter’s body at an overwhelmed hospital that night.
“We knew our children had been martyred; we knew our children were no longer with us," he said. “When they brought Fatemeh, she was in one piece because she had been in her teacher’s arms [when she died].”
“There was no school left."
The US has still not accepted responsibility for the Minab attack, even though an internal Pentagon investigation has concluded that US forces struck the school using two Tomahawk missiles. In the initial days after the attack, President Donald Trump claimed that Iran had been responsible before backing off the claim, stating, “I just don’t know enough about it.”
Drop Site obtained images of the missile fragments from the site, which an independent weapons inspector said “all appear to be remnants of Tomahawk missiles." Iran is not known to possess Tomahawks. A UN fact-finding mission report released earlier this month determined that the school had been “the intended point of impact" rather than collateral damage.
People are seen scouring the wreckage at the site of the February 28, 2026 bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran. (Photo by Mehr News Agency/Wikimedia Commons)
Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM) told Congress in May that the school was "located on an active [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] cruise missile base."
Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser at the Pentagon, told Drop Site he'd never seen any indication that the school was on an active missile site and explained that even if it was, "it doesn’t matter."
“Those children, all those civilians, are still non-combatants and protected, so it’s really disgusting to hear that," he said. "This wasn’t even fragmentation that hit a school next to another target. This was deliberately targeted very, very clearly and obviously. So at the very least, [it was a] complete mischaracterization of the target.”
There was abundant evidence of the school's civilian use that would have been available to those who conducted the strike. The school was part of a compound that included barracks for the elite IRGC but was redeveloped for civilian use beginning in 2014. It had publicly and officially operated as a school since 2015.
The school had a very active online presence with a website that prominently displayed classroom activities and school events. Meanwhile, satellite imagery captured just two months before the attack showed children standing in the schoolyard outside the building.
An investigation from Bloomberg found that the school had been placed on a list of targets for the war's opening salvo that was assembled in part using the Maven artificial intelligence system developed by Palantir, which reportedly did not classify it as a school.
The UN report emphasized that even if the attack can be boiled down to an intelligence failure, it still likely amounted to a war crime because the US attacked despite readily available evidence that the building was a school, a failure investigators said went “beyond mere negligence” and amounted to recklessness toward the risk of striking civilians.
US President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attend a dignified transfer event for US service members killed during operations in the Middle East, at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, on July 22, 2026. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Hala Rharrit, a career former US Foreign Service officer who spent 17 years at the State Department before resigning in 2024, remains unsatisfied by the government's efforts to downplay the attack as a "mistake."
“There’s no way to say that this was some type of error,” Rharrit told Drop Site. “You’re either saying that our US Military is completely incompetent, that despite the multiple layers of review, everybody messed up—or there was something very, very sinister about this strike.”
According to data from the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the vast majority of US-Israeli strikes during the first 40 days of the war did harm to civilians or civilian infrastructure, contradicting repeated claims that the US “never targets civilians.” At minimum, the data shows at least 1,701 civilians have been killed, but HRANA has stressed that the true death toll is likely substantially higher.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spent his tenure dissolving guardrails meant to prevent civilian casualties, denouncing "stupid rules of engagement," and saying the military should pursue “lethality” over “legality.” Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly threatened mass destruction upon Iran, including that the "entire civilization" would "die."
“The administration and Hegseth have made it quite clear that they don’t really care about civilian casualties. That may also have been true of previous bombing campaigns that predate the Trump administration, but it is even more the case than in the past, and they have made it clear that troops do not need to be concerned about consequences,” said Harrison Mann, a former US Army major and intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
“There is no mystery about what coordinates those missiles hit, and that question would have been answerable on the day of the strikes," he told Drop Site. "The only way that CENTCOM would not know is that they are choosing to be willfully ignorant.”
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The United States Desperately Needs a Care Package
The care that families provide—raising children, supporting elderly parents, tending to those who cannot fully care for themselves—is among the most economically productive work in any society.
Sep 30, 2026
Every day in the United States, millions of people wake up and face a version of the same impossible arithmetic. They need to earn income. They also need to care for their children, their aging parents, a spouse or sibling with a disability, or themselves—especially when illness strikes. The market offers no solution to this equation. The government offers patchwork. And so families improvise—women in particular absorb the shortfall in unpaid labor, often at permanent cost to their earnings, their retirement security, and their own health.
This is not a private misfortune. It is a public failure, and an expensive one.
The care that families provide—raising children, supporting elderly parents, tending to those who cannot fully care for themselves—is among the most economically productive work in any society. Children who receive attentive, high-quality care in their early years are more likely to become healthy, educated, productive adults. Workers who can take time to recover from illness or to be present at a family crisis return to their jobs more quickly and with greater stability. Caregivers who receive adequate support are less likely to exit the labor force permanently, less likely to fall into poverty in old age, and more likely to participate fully in economic and civic life. The benefits of care are not merely sentimental—they are measurable, and they are large.
Yet the United States persistently underinvests in care and consistently treats it as a personal rather than a shared responsibility. We spend less than half of what comparable wealthy nations spend on early childhood programs as a share of GDP. We are the only high-income country without a national paid parental leave policy. Our system of support for elderly and disabled individuals is means-tested to the point of cruelty, requiring many families to exhaust their savings before receiving assistance and funneling care into nursing homes, even when home-based support would serve people better and cost less. The result is a care deficit that falls hardest on those least able to bear it: low-income families, workers in jobs without benefits, and the women who disproportionately provide unpaid care when public provision falls short.
The costs of this deficit are not borne equally. Research consistently documents that inadequate support for caregiving suppresses women’s labor force participation and depresses their lifetime earnings. Mothers who leave employment during their children’s early years—often because affordable care is simply unavailable—face lasting wage penalties that compound over careers and into retirement. Families caring for an elderly or disabled adult spend on average more than a quarter of their income on that care, a burden that falls with particular force on Black and Hispanic families, who have less accumulated wealth to draw upon. Children growing up in poverty face developmental disadvantages with lifelong consequences, yet more than one in four American children under seventeen are excluded from the full benefit of the primary federal child support program by restrictions that penalize the families who need help most.
These are not the inevitable features of a wealthy society. They are the results of specific policy choices—and they can be changed.
This week, as part of the Game Changers Webinar series, Nancy Folbre, Kate Bahn, Jaimie Worker, and Pilar Gonalons-Pons participated in this online discussion about how the "US Needs a Care Package" as they offered an overview of specific policy proposals for funding universal childcare, paid family leave, increased support for the elderly and disabled, and a guaranteed minimum income for children.
- YouTube
The Game Changers Care Package
Three bold, interconnected proposals—universal child care, paid family and medical leave plus long-term care support, and a monthly child allowance—would transform life for American families. Together, they form a coherent package that addresses caregiving at every stage of life: from infancy through old age. Other wealthy nations have already figured this out. It’s long past time the United States did too.
These proposals would work together to give families the flexibility they need. They build on policies that have already been put in place by individual states or experimented with at the federal level. They are game-changers because they are all conceived as free, universal benefits that would be funded by taxes on income from capital, rather than from labor. They all promise social benefits that far exceed their cost.
Other comparable nations have demonstrated this. Countries that have invested in universal child care, paid family leave, and adequate support for aging and disabled individuals have not sacrificed economic dynamism to do so. They have expanded women’s workforce participation, reduced child poverty, improved population health, and in many cases generated public returns that substantially exceed the cost of the investment. The evidence from states within the United States that have implemented paid family leave programs, expanded child care access, and shifted long-term care toward home- and community-based services confirms the same pattern: these policies pay for themselves in reduced poverty, improved health outcomes, and increased labor supply, while also producing something harder to measure but no less real—a reduction in the daily stress and insecurity that care gaps impose on ordinary families.
The three proposals developed in this Game Changers Care Package—universal child care, paid family and medical leave combined with expanded long-term care support, and a universal monthly child allowance—form a coherent response to this failure. They address caregiving across the full life course, from infancy through old age. They are designed to work together, with each reinforcing the others: affordable child care enables parents to work and earn; paid leave allows them to respond to family needs without permanent economic penalty; a child allowance provides a universal floor of support that no family falls below. Taken together, they represent not an expansion of welfare as it is conventionally understood, but a fundamental reorientation of how we value and support the work of care—recognizing it, at last, as the indispensable foundation of everything else the economy produces.
The time for modest adjustments has passed. The following pages make the case for something bolder.
Important synergies between the elements of this portfolio of proposed policies can
help overcome potential tensions between reducing child poverty, advancing gender equality, and rewarding family and community care provision in the U.S. Fully universal child care services address an immediate problem for parents of small children seeking to earn sufficient income to support their families and have long-run implications for women’s lifetime earnings trajectories. Paid family and medical leave, like home and community based long-term care for disabled individuals and the elderly, provides support for in-home care of dependents. A universal basic income for children in the U.S., which could also be referred to as a family allowance, builds on and expands current tax subsidies in ways that could dramatically reduce child poverty in the short run.
Advancing these policies in concert leads to a more complicated picture than choosing to prioritize one or the other (especially in terms of funding details) but it is more likely to help us achieve important common goals.[1] All three policy proposals emphasize the public-good argument for financing, and refer, where relevant, to social-cost-benefit analysis. Public expenditures on care provision are often interpreted as a drag on economic growth because growth is defined almost entirely in terms of Gross Domestic Product (the final value of all goods and services purchased in a country), and investment is defined in ways that largely exclude investments in the production, development, and maintenance of human capabilities.[2]
Policy issues vital to the care economy extend well beyond the three proposals here, inviting collaboration with other game-changing policy groups. The two most direct overlaps lie with the health care working group, and the labor working group. Out of respect for an initial division of labor we have omitted consideration of the health care system as a whole, policies regarding job flexibility, penalties for part-time employment, and rights to remote access to employment from home.
Note: The author is grateful for the assistance of Kate Bahn, Jennifer Glass, James Heintz, Julie Kashen, Katherine Moos, Laura Valle-Gutierrez and Jaimie Worker
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