Health Is the Foundation—Families Are Showing Us What Works

This post is part of the Forward With Families series.

Forward With Families is a multi-year strategy powered by Ascend at the Aspen Institute to amplify ideas and initiatives that make life affordable, economic mobility possible, and security attainable for every family in America. This strategy drives policy and systems leaders at every level to act on proven and promising solutions to ensure resources go farthest for the children and families who need them most.

Health systems shape some of the most intimate moments in family life — from birth, to mental health care, to how parents and children are seen and supported. Yet too often, families encounter systems that overlook context, caregiving, and dignity at the very moments they matter most.

At the same time, leaders working closest to families are rebuilding health systems from the inside out. They are midwives restoring dignity to birth, clinicians making fathers visible in prenatal and perinatal care, and mental health leaders designing services that reflect how families actually live. Their work starts with families — and in doing so, shows what’s possible when health systems are built around people.

This post highlights a few of those leaders and what their work reveals about how health systems can function better for families from the start.

What Whole-Family Health Looks Like in Practice

Integrating whole-family approaches across perinatal care

• The vision behind Beloved Birth 50 by 50, an initiative of Birth Equity Center (BCE), is rooted in what founder Leseliey Welch describes as a “beloved birth culture of the future”— one that is family-centered, midwife-led, community-held, and honors the inherent value of all people.
  
  By 2050, the initiative aims for half of all U.S. births to be supported by midwife-led, family-centered care. What makes this effort transformative is not only its goal, but how BCE pursues it. BCE recognizes that durable systems change requires a shared narrative that restores dignity to birth and invites families, providers, funders, and policymakers into a collective vision rooted in trust and belonging.
  
• Originally developed in 1987 by the CDC to track maternal experiences before and after birth, the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) has long shaped how systems understand women’s health in the perinatal period. Under the leadership of Dr. Craig Garfield, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago launched PRAMS for Dads — the first large-scale public health surveillance effort focused on men during the perinatal period as they transition into fatherhood. By closing a long-standing data gap, this work is reshaping how systems understand and support fathers as essential contributors to family health. When fathers are visible in data, they become visible in care, thereby strengthening outcomes for parents, children, and families as a whole.
  
  

Expanding access to family-centered community mental health services

• At Thrive Center for Children, Families, and Communities at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Dr. Matt Biel is advancing family-centered mental health through initiatives like the Family Mental Health Demonstration Project. The project, which gathers evidence from communities nationwide — including early efforts in California and Arkansas — is showing that bundled, whole-family approaches improve mental health outcomes while reducing overall system costs, pointing toward more effective and sustainable payment models for family-based care.
  

Why This Matters Now

Across these examples, families tell a consistent story. When health systems recognize the full context of family life — birth, caregiving, mental health, and parental roles — care becomes more accessible, more effective, and more humane.

These efforts show that supporting the healthy transition to parenthood, mental health, and parental engagement are deeply interconnected. When systems fail to account for any one of them, families feel the consequences. When systems are designed around how families actually live, outcomes improve across health metrics and in trust, continuity, and long-term well-being.

Moving Forward With Families

When systems are designed around how families actually live, outcomes improve. 

What’s already working across communities shows how health care can be more humane, effective, and trusted.

Forward With Families elevates these proven and promising approaches and helps move them from practice to policy so families don’t have to navigate fragmented systems alone.

How are you moving families forward? We invite you to share your work to help map the momentum and spark new opportunities for connection, collaboration, and support. Tell us how you’ll take action here.