Too many families like mine are buckling under weight of the American dream
From the outside, it looks like I’m living the American dream — a homeowner in Norcross with my wife, our twin daughters and my parents under one roof.
But behind the doors of our modest house, we’ve been balancing on a financial knife’s edge.
Medical bills, unstable work, car repairs and the daily cost of raising children stacked up our debt until we finally cracked. We enrolled in an aggressive debt assistance program, akin to declaring medical bankruptcy, and I started asking myself, “Why did it come to this?”
We were not ‘poor enough’ to qualify for government assistance
Four years ago, my wife and I were surprised to find out we were having twins. Seven months into the pregnancy, my wife’s kidney and liver started to fail and she was rushed into an emergency cesarean section. Our twin daughters were born prematurely and spent over a month in the NICU at Northside Hospital.
Every day, we watched them struggle to breathe and eat — their survival only made possible by the incredible staff and facilities at the hospital. Our $750,000 NICU bill was covered 100% by insurance, but the extensive care my wife needed leading up to and following our daughters’ births racked up thousands in insurance copays.
When they finally made it home, I woke up every few hours at night to feed our frail newborns, reminding them to breath when they forgot. My wife — an independent contractor with no maternity leave — was sidelined with medical complications.
Meanwhile, rent ran half my paycheck, my wife could not work and credit cards became the only way to buy groceries. We tried to apply for help. But government programs are built on rigid income thresholds that exclude families like mine — families not “poor enough” on paper.
We even considered filing my wife as a single parent to qualify before deciding we couldn’t go through with the deception. Through loss of work, medical bills, emergency car repairs, rising utilities and the need for necessities we got crushed under credit card debt.
Four ideas to support child-rearing parents in America today
This is not just our story. It is America’s story. Families who work, pay insurance premiums and follow the “rules” can still be one crisis away from financial collapse. A complicated pregnancy, a job layoff, a broken-down car — these are not rare events. Yet they strip us of sleep, health and the ability to provide a secure life for our children.
As a biologist I am pro-life, but this belief extends to a person’s whole life — not just their birth. A society that makes food, housing and health care unaffordable is not pro-life. Human life demands nutrition, shelter and stability. If those basics are unreachable, how can we expect families to thrive — or even to form?
We need policies rooted in biological reality. Raising children requires stable access to shelter, food and medicine and here’s where to start:
- Housing: Remove zoning restrictions and streamline permit review to expand affordable housing through modular units and accessory dwellings that deliver based on community needs.
- Social support: Guarantee automatic family support for newborns and toddlers, independent of the federal Child Tax Credit, or labyrinthine government assistance applications.
- Medical debt: Rein in pharmaceutical monopolies that dictate drug costs, insurance copays and hospital bills. This isn’t just about high insurance premiums. It’s about an entire system optimized for profit that jacks-up prices and creates shortages in health care workers.
- 0-5 Childcare: Recognize child care as a basic infrastructure, because day care should not cost an entire paycheck. While we were blessed with twins, the average American can’t realistically afford day care for one child let alone two at the same time.
The truth is simple: biology doesn’t care about ideology. Families need roofs, medicine, food and child care.
Right now, too many Americans like my family are deprived of those basics, while policymakers argue abstractions. Life is a constitutional right, it’s time to stop bickering about political ideologies and align our communities with the basic biological needs of shelter, food, child care and health care.
Anthony Junker is a developmental biologist, ecologist, teacher and father in Norcross who writes about science, faith and the everyday realities that shape how Americans live and care for one another.
