Policy brief
It is not a slogan until it is a decision rule. The rule is simple. When the interest of a child and the interest of an adult conflict, the child wins. This page sets out what United States policy would change if the country applied that rule, and what it would cost.
"Put children first" has three parts. All three are necessary.
Every law, budget line, and public service must show its effect on children before anyone approves it.
When the interest of a child and the interest of an adult conflict, the child wins.
The state measures the result each year and publishes it.
The second part changes policy. The first and third parts only make the second part visible.
Apply one question to any policy. Does this policy improve the life of a child who has no vote, no money, and no lawyer?
A policy passes if the answer is yes. A policy fails if the answer is no. A policy also fails if nobody measured the answer.
Children lose for three structural reasons, not because anyone intends harm. They do not vote, and politicians answer to voters. They do not own property, and budgets follow property and income. They cannot sue, and courts hear the parties in front of them.
The rule corrects for those three facts. Everything else on this page follows from that correction.
This rule is Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The best interest of the child is a primary consideration in all actions that concern children. The United States signed the Convention in 1995 and has never sent it to the Senate for a vote. Somalia ratified in 2015. Since then the United States has been the only UN member state outside the treaty.
That is 5.8 times more per older adult than per child. The Penn Wharton Budget Model uses wider age groups and finds a larger gap. In fiscal year 2025, retirees received 38.6 percent of all federal spending. People under 26 received 10.3 percent.
Federal spending on children was $532 billion in 2024. That is 8 percent of the federal budget. The Urban Institute projects 6 percent by 2035. The share falls because spending on children is discretionary, and spending on older adults is automatic.
Add a child impact statement to the budget process. The Congressional Budget Office must report, for every bill, the effect on child poverty, child health coverage, and child housing stability over ten years. No committee votes without it.
This is the first change, because it costs almost nothing and it makes every later argument factual.
The statement will show that some popular programmes for adults are funded by leaving children poor. Nobody can un-see that.
The expanded Child Tax Credit of 2021 paid families monthly and paid the poorest families in full. It cut child poverty by nearly half in one year. Estimates of the number of children lifted out of poverty range from 2.1 million to 3.7 million, depending on the measure. Families spent the money on food, rent, and school costs. Employment did not collapse.
Congress let it expire in December 2021. Child poverty then returned to its earlier level. This is the clearest natural experiment in modern American social policy, and it ran in both directions.
Make the credit fully refundable and pay it monthly. The 2021 design is the working model. A credit tied to a parent's earnings gives the least to the children who need the most.
About $100 billion a year. Some studies find a small reduction in work by second earners. The evidence for a large work effect is weak. The evidence for the poverty effect is strong and immediate.
A child cannot earn. A payment tied to a parent's earnings punishes the child for the parent's labour market. The rule forbids that.
Paid parental leave of at least 12 weeks, paid by social insurance, available to both parents.
Public funding of care from birth to age five, with the family payment capped at 7 percent of income.
Pay early years staff at parity with primary school teachers. Low pay is the reason places are scarce.
High quality programmes from birth to five return about 13 percent a year for each child. The return appears in education, health, adult earnings, and reduced crime. That figure comes from long follow-up of the Abecedarian and CARE trials. Programmes that start at age three or four return 7 to 10 percent. Earlier is worth more.
This is the most expensive item on this page. It is also the only item with a measured return that beats the stock market.
Local property tax funds schools. Districts with expensive houses have well funded schools. Districts serving the most students of colour receive about $1,800 less for each student. Along the 100 most segregating district boundaries, the gap in local revenue averages $4,119 for each student.
Lower Merion in Pennsylvania spends near $30,000 for each student. Philadelphia, next door, spends under $15,000.
Fund schools per child, and weight the funding by need. The state becomes the funder of first resort. Local money may add to the state amount only if the state matches the same addition for the poorest districts.
An increase of $1,000 for each student, held for four years, raises college attendance by about 2.8 percentage points.
This is the hardest political fight on this page. House prices in well funded districts already include the value of the school. Changing the funding rule transfers that value. Homeowners will resist, and homeowners vote.
A child does not choose an address. Funding education by address makes the accident of birth the main fact about a child's schooling. The rule forbids that.
The United States infant mortality rate was 5.1 deaths for every 1,000 live births in 2024. That is 71 percent higher than the average of comparable countries. Sweden is 2.3. Japan is 1.9.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 cut close to $1 trillion from Medicaid. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 11.8 million people lose coverage by 2034. Child enrolment in Medicaid and CHIP fell by at least 2.1 million between January 2025 and May 2026. Several causes contributed, and new paperwork rules are one of them.
Make coverage automatic and continuous from birth to age 19. Enrol at birth with the birth certificate. No renewal forms. No waiting periods. No work test applied to a parent that removes a child's cover.
Automatic enrolment costs money, and it removes a control that some states use to limit spending. It also removes the main mechanism by which eligible children lose cover, which is paperwork.
A child cannot complete a renewal form. Losing cover because a parent missed a deadline is a penalty on the wrong person.
Firearms became the leading cause of death for people aged 1 to 19 in 2020, and have stayed there. Nearly 22,000 people aged 17 and under died by firearm between 2014 and 2024. The rate reached its peak in 2022 and fell from 3.5 to 3.0 for every 100,000 children between 2023 and 2024. Most child firearm deaths involve a gun kept in a home.
Two measures have the clearest evidence for children. Require secure storage, and make the adult owner liable if a child gains access. Fund enforcement of child access prevention laws and extreme risk protection orders.
This is the sharpest collision on this page between an adult constitutional interest and a child's life. The rule does not remove the adult right. It places the storage duty on the adult who chose to bring the weapon into the child's home.
These three items survive because of inertia, not because anyone defends them with evidence. They are the cheapest changes available.
Child marriage is legal in 34 states as of May 2026. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have banned it completely. Four states set no minimum age at all when a waiver is granted. Change: set 18 as the minimum age of marriage, with no exception, in every state.
Public schools may hit children in 18 states. Private schools may do so in 45. Use is concentrated in the Deep South. The research finds that physical punishment does not improve behaviour and does increase aggression. Change: prohibit physical punishment of a child in any school that receives public money.
At least 16 states have introduced bills to weaken child labour protection since 2023. Iowa expanded hazardous work for children as young as 14. Indiana let 16- and 17-year-olds work adult hours from January 2025. West Virginia removed youth work permits, then weakened its hazardous work rules. Kentucky allowed some employers to hire children at age 12. Federal child labour violations in fiscal year 2025 were the highest since the Great Recession.
Change: set a federal floor that states cannot go below. Restore hour limits during school terms. Raise penalties above the value of the labour saved. Fund inspection.
Almost none for the first two. Some employers in agriculture, meat processing, and food service depend on young labour, so a few prices rise. Nobody has produced a child-first argument for a 14-year-old on a roof.
Thirteen states set no minimum age at which a child can be prosecuted as an adult. Georgia, Texas, and Wisconsin routinely charge 17-year-olds as adults. The most common minimum age of criminal responsibility worldwide is 14.
Change: set a minimum age of criminal responsibility at 14. End adult prosecution and adult confinement for anyone under 18. Keep serious offences in a juvenile system that has the power to hold a young person and the duty to educate them.
The honest cost: serious violent crimes by 16- and 17-year-olds will carry shorter maximum sentences. Victims and their families will object, and their objection is real. The counter-argument is that adult prison raises the chance that the same young person offends again.
An estimated 400,000 interior immigration detentions between January 2025 and April 2026 affected about 205,000 children. About 145,000 of those children are United States citizens. About 60,000 citizen children had a parent detained. Arrests have taken place near schools and bus stops.
Change: make schools, clinics, shelters, and courts protected places, with no enforcement action inside them or next to them. Require a review of the effect on children before any detention of a primary carer. Prefer alternatives to detention when a child depends on that adult.
The honest cost: enforcement becomes slower and more expensive. The rule does not decide the immigration question. It decides who pays for it. A citizen child is not an instrument of enforcement against a parent.
The count rose 12.6 percent in one year and 28.5 percent in two. In New York City, more than 154,000 public school students had no permanent home in 2024-25. That is nearly one child in seven. Housing assistance is not an entitlement, and most eligible families receive nothing.
Give a household with a child priority for housing assistance. Make assistance an entitlement for households with children below a set income. Give a family with a school-age child a right to counsel in eviction proceedings.
High, and it competes directly with early years funding. Housing instability damages school results, physical health, and mental health at the same time. The return therefore appears in other budgets rather than in this one, which is why no single department will pay for it.
The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate 91 votes to 3 in July 2024 and then stalled in the House. The House passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act in July 2026. States moved first. Virginia has required age assurance at 16 and limited users under 16 to one hour a day since January 2026. Courts have blocked several state laws on First Amendment grounds.
Place the duty on the platform, not on the parent. Prohibit engagement-optimised feeds, streak mechanics, and behavioural advertising for accounts that belong, or probably belong, to a minor. Set every default to the most private setting.
Age assurance creates a privacy problem for adults. Design rules are the narrower path, because they restrict what a company may do to a child rather than what a child may read. That distinction is also why design rules survive in court.
The full package costs several hundred billion dollars a year. It comes from taxes, from borrowing, or from spending on adults. There is no fourth source.
Storage duties, a ban on physical punishment, and a minimum marriage age all limit what an adult may do to a child or near a child.
Funding by child rather than by address reduces the price of some houses.
A child impact statement adds a step to every bill.
Protected places and carer reviews slow immigration enforcement.
Child labour floors and paid leave raise labour costs in low margin sectors.
The argument is that the return is larger than the cost. The argument is not that there is no cost.
Ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child converts the domestic rule into a global position. It costs no money. It commits the country to report on children and to treat their best interest as a primary consideration.
Ratification also removes the standing objection that the United States asks of others what it will not accept itself. Opponents cite sovereignty, parental authority, and home schooling. Other federal states met the same objections with reservations. The choice is political, not technical.
The United States cut foreign assistance by about 83 percent and dismantled USAID during 2025. A modelling study in The Lancet estimated 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including more than 4.5 million children under five. A follow-up study published in February 2026 projected at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030 at current funding levels. The same research associated USAID funding with 91 million deaths prevented between 2001 and 2021, and with a 32 percent fall in child mortality in the countries that received it.
Change: restore child survival funding as a separate multi-year line that does not move with each administration. The core items are vaccination, malaria control, nutrition, maternal and newborn care, and clean water.
A child in a low-income country is the cheapest life to save that exists. No domestic programme comes close to that ratio.
4.9 million children died before their fifth birthday in 2024. In 1990, one child in 11 died before age five. In 2024 it was one in 27. That is the largest improvement in human welfare of the last 35 years, and it is slowing. The annual rate of reduction fell from 3.9 percent in 2000-2015 to 1.5 percent in 2015-2024. Pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, premature birth, and complications during birth cause most of the remaining deaths. All five are treatable with known methods.
The United Nations verified 38,558 grave violations against children in armed conflict in 2025. They affected 24,174 children. That is the highest number in the 30 years of the mandate. Killings rose 34 percent against 2024. For the first time, government forces were the largest single category of perpetrator.
Change: apply the rule to arms transfers. Make verified grave violations against children a bar to transfer, with no waiver for allies. Fund the monitoring work that produces the verified numbers.
The honest cost: this constrains the relationship with several partners, including close ones. It is the point at which the rule is most expensive in diplomatic terms, and the point at which an exception is most likely to be demanded.
Apply the same test to imports. A product made with child labour fails the test regardless of price. Enforcement needs supply chain evidence and a customs mechanism that can act on it. Prices rise a little, and demand moves away from the worst producers only if the major buyers act together.
Sequence matters more than ambition. Items one to five establish the principle at almost no cost. That makes items six to ten arguable on evidence instead of on sentiment.