What Future Can You Give Your Child: The cost of raising a child in NYC | This Robin Hood Moment

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What happens when every choice you make for your child comes at the cost of another?

For parents living in poverty, raising a child in New York City can feel like navigating an impossible maze of tradeoffs. Do you skip work to care for a sick child and risk losing your job? Do you buy groceries or pay for internet so they can finish their homework? Do you move into a more affordable apartment — even if it means transferring your child out of a good school? While most parents make choices to give their kids more, low-income parents are often forced to choose which basic needs they can afford to meet.

In this episode, we sit down with Phoebe Boyer, President & CEO of the Children’s Aid Society, to explore how poverty reshapes the possibilities of childhood. We’ll hear what’s at stake for kids when families live paycheck to paycheck, and the systemic investments — in education, health, housing, and family support — that can help children thrive. This is a conversation about protecting potential, and the urgent need to create a city where every child has a real shot at a better future.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at info@robinhood.org.

“This Robin Hood Moment” is hosted by Kevin Thompson and Crystal Cooper. The show is produced and edited by Cory Winter, with graphic design by Mary Power. Additional motion graphics and footage are provided by Motion Array. Our theme music is from Epidemic Sound.

The views and opinions expressed by external podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Robin Hood or its personnel, nor does Robin Hood advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.

TRANSCRIPT

This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Kevin Thompson: From Robin Hood—New York City’s largest poverty-fighting philanthropy—I’m Kevin Thompson. Welcome to “This Robin Hood Moment.”

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On this podcast, we often talk about the structural forces that shape poverty—and the solutions that help New Yorkers rise above it.

But today’s episode centers on something deeply personal. It’s about what it means to be a parent in poverty. It’s about the cost of raising a child in this city—and the impossible tradeoffs families are forced to make when the support systems we’ve built are often too underfunded, too complicated, or just too far out of reach.

What happens when a parent has to choose between picking up another shift or showing up to their kid’s parent-teacher conference? What happens to a child when a parent loses a job? In fact, according to our Poverty Tracker, a third of young children in NYC experienced parental job loss during the COVID pandemic and unemployment in NYC is still stubbornly higher than the national average.

Right now, federal cuts are looming over programs like SNAP, housing vouchers, and Medicaid. The expanded Child Tax Credit—perhaps the single most effective policy in cutting child poverty—was allowed to expire.

The safety net is fraying. And when it does, it’s not just wallets that suffer—it’s futures.

That’s why I’m grateful we’re joined today by someone who has spent her career helping families navigate these systems—and advocating for the policies that expand choice, rather than constrain it.

Phoebe Boyer is the President and CEO of Children’s Aid—one of the leading and most trusted child welfare and education organizations in New York City. From health care and mental health to early childhood education and college access, Phoebe and her team are tackling the full ecosystem that surrounds a child growing up in poverty.

And, of course, I’m joined today by my co-host, the ever-insightful Crystal Cooper, to join me in conversation.

But before we begin, if you have guest suggestions or comments about this episode, be sure to get a hold of me at info@robinhood.org.

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Crystal Cooper: Kevin, this conversation hits close to home. When I was growing up, my mom was (and still is) a child caretaker, and when I think about the families we meet across the city—their aspirations, their stress, their hustle—so much of it boils down to being forced to choose what gets left behind.

Do you pay for groceries or after-school programs? Do you risk losing your job because your child has a doctor’s appointment? Do you give up a housing voucher just to be closer to a better school?

Kevin Thompson: That’s exactly it. These aren’t choices anyone should have to make. And yet, they’re baked into how our systems operate. It’s one of the great injustices of poverty—this notion that you have to prove you’re poor enough to qualify, or stable enough to benefit, all while carrying the weight of every missed opportunity.

Crystal Cooper: And that’s why Phoebe is the perfect guest for this conversation. Children’s Aid works across the full lifespan of a child—and really understands how systems interact. But even more importantly, they center the dignity and agency of families in everything they do.

Let’s start out with the core tension in this episode: choice. Author Matthew Desmond says, quote, “poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.”

Phoebe, you’ve worked in this field for decades. You’ve run a few major social service organizations in New York City that help families take charge of their lives and the lives of their children. So I want to start out by asking, what does choice mean to you in the context of your work and your clients? What does it mean to truly choose the best for your child— whether it’s school, health, or enrichment—if poverty means that your options are constrained or non-existent?

Phoebe Boyer: I think the reality is that our families and other families living in poverty are so incredibly vulnerable that it’s not just an issue of no choice. It’s that when something happens that happens to anybody in our lifetime, a toothache, a fever of a child, right, that ends up having that parent not be able to go to work? The results of that, because of the fundamental vulnerability are extreme. And I think that’s part of what we try to do in things as we think about our work as a real continuum and understanding also the dynamics of our systems, because those systems, as you very well said in the introduction, are designed in theory to help, but often are the very barriers. And so our work is about meeting parents where they are and helping them accomplish what they need to.

The reality is that families wrestle with this stuff every single day, right? Poverty threatens health. It undermines education. It disrupts families. And they’re interconnected challenges. And the systems don’t operate in an interconnected way or even acknowledge that there are other systems involved, sometimes. And that’s what we’re trying to bridge.

Crystal Cooper: I want to just, you know, to drill down on that point. How do you see that dynamic play out in the families that Children’s Aid serves?

Phoebe Boyer: So I think you see it in lots of cases. Let me just even take a parent bringing a child to our health center for care. A multiple follow up visits would result in that parent losing their job, potentially.

So we design our interventions so that a family can have their dentist appointment, their doctor’s appointment, their mental health appointment all at the same time to minimize the resulting stress. Because the minute they lose, maybe that paycheck, right. Or some of them have no days off, right. In order to even meet these needs of their kids. It becomes a very vulnerable situation.

And ultimately can end up in them losing their housing. It’s also places where I think affordable child care is a critical, critical issue and parents are having to make choices about does their school have an extended day program that’s reliable? Is there, how many days is that program closed that they will have to take off of work?

Will they have to pull their older children out of programing in order for them to be the caretaker of their younger siblings?

Crystal Cooper: That’s a very real day to day trade offs of choice.

Phoebe Boyer: It’s very real. And I think we forget to put ourselves in the position of the parent. These are impossible choices if you have no resources. You don’t make that preventive doctor’s appointment. You don’t enroll your child in after school. And then the compounding issues, right, can undermine somebody’s ability to work.

Kevin Thompson: So, Phoebe, you’ve said before, I’ve heard you say this in other venues that poverty is a policy choice. And you were talking about all these systems just a few minutes ago. I want to talk about a few of those systems as policy, like SNAP and the Child Tax Credit and, and subsidized child care.

Let’s start with SNAP. And as we understand it, you know, there going to be fewer people that are going to get SNAP. As you know…

Phoebe Boyer: I mean, yeah that’s happening right now; we just lost our SNAP funding.

Kevin Thompson: Yep. Okay. We’re going to get to that. And I want to hear about that. And they’re changing some of the rules you know, about like what you can buy and what you can’t buy on SNAP.

I want to maybe help our listeners understand what the consequences of these kinds of, changes for snap really are for families who rely on these benefits and talk about those families that you had been serving and now you don’t have, you know, have that benefit.

Phoebe Boyer: Absolutely. I mean, so SNAP benefits are a lifeline for families. It’s a way to supplement an income, make sure they can deliver high quality food and healthy food for their families, and the benefits barely last a month, especially as we see rising costs. So it’s the barest minimum benefit to begin with, and we are about to remove that for a lot of families.

In particular, Children’s Aid has a a contract with SNAP contract where we do health education and fresh food delivery at a much reduced cost. It has contributed to families with pre-diabetes being able to address that and not needing the health care.

And again, this perfect example of the interconnectedness: our policies are designed to be preventions so that we don’t have to have the resulting very high cost interventions. Right. Someone who is diabetic, if that can be solved with healthy food, you know, the price tag of about $12 a box of food. We as a society, from a choice, we’d rather hospitalize that person and have them deal with a significant health care issue around diabetes? That seems like a very bad choice.

And yet we make that choice over and over and over again. Be it early childhood education, we know what that means in terms of the long term impacts on kids. We know what quality after school means for families in terms of kids doing better at school and addressing mental health needs.

They are these systems, you know, I describe it sometimes like a Jenga game. The fact is, for it to be standing and for our kids to be standing in our families to be strong, we need all of these pieces. And they’re interconnected. And we’re pulling many, many, of these pieces out. Be it SNAP or Medicaid benefits, and it’s the most vulnerable that are going to suffer.

Crystal Cooper: That’s quite a way to to visualize it. And, you know, one policy lever that’s shown measurable results is the expanded Child Tax Credit. What did you see change tangibly in the lives of children’s aid families when the Child Tax Credit was expanded? And what have you seen in the a couple of years since it expired?

Phoebe Boyer: Absolutely. So we really saw a reduction in stress, of our families. They had a little bit more resources for the basic needs. And that also you reduce stress, you increase family stability. All of those things matter.

We watched our families, again this is not a lot of money, right, it’s a few thousand dollars. But the reality is it’s that additional dollars that lets them buy food lets them go to a doctor’s appointment. It is something where they are meeting basic needs, not extravagant things. Things that we want for all of our kids and families. And so, you know, paying rent, utilities, all, all of the basics. And when that was removed, all we saw was an increase in stress. And those choices delaying a doctor’s appointment, not putting food on the table for every meal, all of the the stress and strain back in place.

We’re in a very fortunate position at Children’s Aid to be able to provide sometimes those basic supports to our families and the demand only grew.

Kevin Thompson: Phoebe, talk to us a little bit about subsidized child care. That’s a huge issue for New Yorkers of every economic strata, but in particular for people that have the least flexibility and the type of jobs that they perform.

What are you seeing in that space? What are you all experiencing in terms of subsidization? Is that increasing? Has it been cut back?

Phoebe Boyer: Yeah. So it’s absolutely critical to any parent in this city. They want to have a reliable, safe and high quality opportunity for their child in terms of care and the reality is we have, not enough supply, certainly not enough high quality center based supports.

And obviously we have family daycare as well. But it’s a vast, complicated network and it feels like a lottery ticket if you win it. Unfortunately, we all know what the the statistics are on winning the lottery. That is not what we as a city should want for our kids. We have all of the research that says what it means for a child to be in a stimulating, caring environment in terms of their brain development and their school readiness.

Why would we not invest in that and then pay the price later with lots of intervention, not as effective in the K-12 space or, you know, and health care issues? I mean, we often talk about the fact that in our early childhood programs, we provide 80% of a child’s food because we’re an extended day, extended year program.

Kevin Thompson: Wow.

Phoebe Boyer: That’s an enormous benefit to families. And if you happen to not be able to be in one of those settings, there are a lot of strains. We also work very closely with our parents so that when they’re in our programs, they’re also setting their own goals so that their trajectory changes along with that child. We think very, very carefully about designing our programs to focus on the child, the family and the community in which, our children and families are living.

Kevin Thompson: And before we jump to the to another subject, I just want to stay on this for one last point, because what I think I’m picking up here, it’s not just how interconnected so many of these services are, but that there’s an overlapping sort of need, from the clients that you’re serving. And they’re frequently accessing one or several of these, services at one time.

Phoebe Boyer: Well, and I think to go back to, to the theme here about choice.

Kevin Thompson: Yeah.

Phoebe Boyer: They’re often making one choice without realizing the compromises that might come with it.

Kevin Thompson: Say more on that.

Phoebe Boyer: For example, we might have a family who’s in our comprehensive 0 to 5 early childhood program. They get to work with a family advocates. It’s a holistic approach. They have access to all of our services, but they may be in a position where they need to pull that child and put them in a different program that doesn’t have all of those additional supports, and find that it actually undermines their ability to manage crises.

We have helped families navigate funerals, domestic violence and illness, a whole host of things that could be fundamental crises that lead to what we consider the worst outcome, which is potentially a child being removed from a family.

Not only is that costly, the trauma that comes with that is significant. It should be the very last resort, but we can actually intervene and support that family along. Whatever the the hiccup that happens that frankly, every single individual and parent has experienced in this city, right.

The thing where you’re you walk through the doors of Children’s Aid as a parent and a kid, and you’re going to be helped with whatever it is we might not be able to to provide every support and service, but we’re going to help you network to that because we know family stability is one of the key elements for a child to be successful and to thrive as an adult.

Crystal Cooper: We talked a bit earlier about, child care for infants and toddlers and how we now recognize that is an essential part of the education system. I want to focus on education a bit, because we often describe it as the great equalizer, but that’s only true if every child has access to the same or, you know, meaningfully, similar opportunities.

What are the opportunity gaps that you see most often in New York City, and how do those gaps reflect the cost of choice?

Phoebe Boyer: There are so many gaps in our education system.

Crystal Cooper: What an understatement, right?

Phoebe Boyer: What an understatement! There’s a gap. I mean, you started with early childhood. There’s a gap from early childhood to our K-12 system, right? That’s early childhood is a distinct component, and yet it should feed in and be aligned.

We see tremendous progress in kindergarten readiness, but not every school has the ability to have that early childhood connection. It should, and not just not just for the educational components, but for the transition components. Right? We all know what it’s like to to do well, those of us who are parents, you drop off a kid at school, it’s the most traumatic thing you do.

All you want is your child to be waving back at you not in tears, right? Those transitions are important. Not just for that teary eyed child or teary eyed parent. It’s about will that child be successful long term in that school? So there’s a gap there, right? We have a gap in almost every transition because we don’t even think about it as a meaningful place.

But we have gaps in high-quality schools. We’re also see tremendous gaps in what we are asking schools to be now for children and families. We are suffering from tremendous chronic absenteeism, of which there are all sorts of reasons that we could actually address that would lead, again, to better outcomes from kids. But we’re also dealing with profound mental health issues, and we’re asking teachers and principals to be everything.

And they can’t be, right. No one adult can be everything. It’s why our community school models are so critically important because we’re bringing the resources into a school. We also have school-based health clinics again, reduces the need of a parent having to miss work. Right. So should we have school-based health clinics and every single school are 100%. Do we? No. Even at Children’s Aid, we have them in 6 of our 20 community schools. But we know what it does in terms of a child’s health. Again, reducing stress on a parent and ensuring a kid is in school and learning.

The other piece I would say is we have tremendous gaps in afterschool, right? We have not committed as a city to say this is actually what we want for all kids to have access to high quality learning environments that also expose them to new ideas.

You know, we see, if we talk about high schoolers, there’s so much, so much potential. If you don’t have the exposure to different opportunities and supports, it might be easier to drop out, might be easier to be disconnected. And so there again, I think there are endless gaps. And there are also on a more positive note, there are lots of examples of high-quality options if we made the choice to commit to supporting them.

Kevin Thompson: Phoebe, let’s talk about some of those afterschool programs, because, you know, enrichment programs, as you said, are, you know, vital for the development of kids. But a lot of parents have to, you know, they’ve got to make choices. They have to balance, you know, their work schedule, the stress of all of that against being available to have their children participate or just the real hard reality of, you know, this is too expensive for our family to be able to participate in that. Where does Children’s Aid step in to any of that?

Phoebe Boyer: And so we often are, and in the schools in which we work, we are, the community school partner, and we run afterschool programs. We also run afterschool programs in our community centers. And I think both settings are critically important.

And they are subsidized, right? I mean, every in in some small cases we have a small fee, but that depends on the income level. But for the most part…

Kevin Thompson: So it’s a sliding scale.

Phoebe Boyer: It’s a sliding scale. And for the most part, everybody’s sliding right off that scale. And so they are welcoming, environments where kids have the opportunity to create relationships with adults, get help with their homework, be exposed to new skills they didn’t even know they have. And for us to be able to intervene if there’s a serious mental health issue, I think, you know, we’ve all talked about the realities of mental health issues for kids post, I would argue, post the pandemic, but also with all of the evils of social media and our inability to connect with each other, places that we create, be it in our centers or in our community schools are designed to combat that.

It’s sort of your first level of of defense in some way. A mom who’s worried about their child’s mental health is distracted from whatever she’s trying to do in the workplace that you we all know the adage you are only as happy as your at least happy child, and it is 100% true.

And for our parents, sometimes it just feels impossible. But if they walk through the doors of one of our community centers or one of our community schools, they’re met with an adult who knows how to connect with a child. And in fact, it might not be a mental health issue. It might be about having a sense of isolation or no hope, or not seeing opportunity, or not feeling like you’re good at anything.

And we can connect that child to a whole network of supports and experiences, and all of a sudden they’re blossoming and have some confidence and have a sense of community and belonging. And maybe it’s not a mental health issue. Every once in a while, it’s a serious mental health. There’s been serious trauma. There might be domestic violence, and we have all the tools to get that child what they need.

And I think that’s part of why we’re committed to such an incredible continuum and to recognize that mental health is over here. But there are lots of gradations of that before a system has to be involved. And I think that’s the that’s our desire is to give parents choices so that there we can have nuanced solutions and meet the needs of kids and families where they are.

Kevin Thompson: So we’ve been talking a lot about choice for parents and for people that are in poverty. But let’s just shift that just a little bit to talk about choice for organizations like Children’s Aid. Because what I think I’m hearing you say is you can have a lot of subsidized programs that you either have your hand and or you’re directly administering or you’re making a referral to. Help us understand what that landscape looks like right now across all levels of government funding.

Phoebe Boyer: Let me maybe frame…

Kevin Thompson: Sure!

Phoebe Boyer: …we are actually blending system dollars. So public revenue dollars that have all sorts of different restrictions and limitations with private philanthropy and our own dollars in order to make that seamless for a child and a family. Which means there are fewer choices. It is our choice because we understand how the education system works, how the health care system works, how the child welfare system; we are embedded in those systems, and there are places where they are broken, and we have the ability to use our dollars in that environment to enhance a program, right, provide additional staffing to something in order to get better outcomes for kids or families, or to say, you know what, we actually need to have social workers embedded in a particular program where they might not, or a master’s level social worker versus somebody who’s a BA. It is that flexibility and choice that we have.

What’s happening today, as many of the fundamental pieces are being pulled from us, is limiting our choices to be able to do what we know is needed, which is a holistic approach to helping kids and families be successful.

And that is profoundly real. Those dollars cannot be replaced at scale by philanthropy. They can’t. We have made a choice as a community to say we no longer want to provide these baseline supports.

Now, I need to go back to the beginning of Children’s Aid 173 years ago…

Crystal Cooper: Please take us there!

Kevin Thompson: Take us back!

Phoebe Boyer: …which is, individuals stepped up and said we didn’t have we had no government, we had no nonprofits. It was a time where some of the things that we’ve taken for granted didn’t, didn’t exist. And individuals said, this isn’t what I want for New York City. It’s not what I want for New York City’s kids. And they helped create some of these, what we call safety net programs that we still provide today. And we may need to go back to that place where it’s individuals who provide this support, because at least the choices that are being made today, are pulling away those supports, and we are going to be left with impossible choices for families living in poverty that are going to result in, I would argue they are going to result in compromises and catastrophe for all of us.

And I just let me give you an example. We only have one health care system, one set of emergency rooms, right? One set of hospitals. Some of the policy choices we’re making about who now is eligible for preventive care is going to result in people being in our emergency rooms and being in our hospitals.

Kevin Thompson: So you mean that increase in demand?

Phoebe Boyer: Absolute increase in demand, and that’s going to have an impact on all of us. When you have an accident and you need to go to an emergency room, that’s going to be a full emergency room. We are all too interconnected in so many different ways that these choices are going to impact all of us.

Crystal Cooper: Phoebe, you use the words continuum and holistic, and you also painted that really vivid picture of the Jenga tower, right? What are some examples where just enough support at exactly the right time prevented a crisis or opened up real choices for a family? It’s, you know, I’m taking away from your model that access is what enables choice.

Phoebe Boyer: Oh, I mean, there there are endless examples of where that intervention is true. And even the stories I tell are based in reality. I’m not making up the the parent that walks into a community center with a child that she’s worried about, who then starts to thrive. But I think, you know, there are endless kids who have come to our community centers who, gain a set of skills and now have jobs and are employed. We have a young person who participated in moot court, at one of our programs during Covid, and now is a law student at St. John’s.

And that’s not just today’s stories. These have been all of our stories.

We have five kids who just got a full ride scholarship to a, school upstate, all of whom had been in our programs and we were able to help them through their college and career process, but then also award full scholarships. And they’re a little powerhouse of five kids now on a college campus where none of them had ever been, where they’re supporting each other, right. We enabled them to do take advantage of an opportunity, and they’re supporting each other now. And it’s extraordinary. We should be building that type of city.

Crystal Cooper: Let’s end on your vision, Phoebe. If we invested boldly in family supports that remove these trade offs, what kind of city and future would we be building for New York’s children and for ourselves?

Phoebe Boyer: I think our city would thrive. All children should have equal opportunity and access to high quality schools and high quality after school. We see very clearly that when we invest in kids in all of these different ages and stages, that they become our future. Our motto is to learn, grow and lead. That’s not for Children’s Aid. It’s what we want for our kids. We want to see them learn, grow and lead. And they do. Our alums are fire chiefs, chiefs of thoracic surgery teachers, community school directors.

They are, in fact, the fabric of this city.

Crystal Cooper: Phoebe, thank you for your time today. It was a pleasure. And to our listeners, thank you for joining us on “This Robin Hood Moment.” If you’re inspired to get involved, visit us at robinhood.org to learn how you can invest in Robin Hood so all New Yorkers can live choice-filled lives. Until next time.

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Kevin Thompson: This episode of “This Robin Hood Moment” was produced and edited by Cory Winter. Graphics by Mary Power. Our theme music is from Epidemic Sound. I’m Kevin Thompson—joined by the ever-insightful Crystal Cooper—for Robin Hood: New York City’s largest local poverty-fighting philanthropy.

Thanks for listening.

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Crystal Cooper: Raising a child in New York City means making choices no parent should have to make—between work and childcare, between stability and opportunity.

At Robin Hood, we fight poverty by finding, funding, and partnering with nonprofits like Children’s Aid, helping families access early education, affordable child care, and the support they need to thrive.

To hear what that fight looks like up close, listen to the companion episode, “Marlyn’s Choice: Between child care and a paycheck.” It’s the story of a mother balancing her dreams for her kids with the realities of making ends meet.

Because behind every policy, there’s a person. And behind every person, there’s the fight for a fairer New York.