Texas ranks among the worst in the nation when it comes to women and children 17 and younger living without health insurance.
Our state trails only Florida and North Carolina in the number of children on waiting lists for state child-care assistance.
It's also one of 19 states, including Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, without laws guaranteeing job protection or benefits for new parents working in the private sector.
Those statistics and a host of other dismal numbers will direct the conversations at a free one-day symposium on family-friendly policies in Texas on Nov. 14 at the University of Houston.
Many of the men and women who most need the state to modernize its approach to designing laws and programs that help employees balance work and family roles likely will not to be there.
Low-wage earners rarely if ever get permission to take off a weekday to share with academics, lobbyists and lawmakers what they really need to make their jobs and family obligations work together.
But their presence can be felt if they call or e-mail their stories to conference organizers and the politicians that represent them. Go to www.friendsofwomen.org to register for the conference.
"The hope is that by starting to discuss these things, we can get on track to changing them in positive ways ... because we know this is a family values state," said Elizabeth Gregory, director of UH's Women's Studies Program.
I've known Gregory for several years through my affiliations as an adviser and former board member of the guild that supports the women's studies research. She truly wants to explore what is already here in the state and find ways to enhance and improve on those policies.
"We're not trying to blame anybody or cast aspersions on anybody," she said. "We just want to find a way to proceed in a positive way."
Regardless of income, access to high-quality child care is an issue for all working parents because going backward is not an option.
The days of a young family achieving and maintaining middle-class status on one salary, especially if it's earned by someone who has only a high-school diploma, are long gone.
Less than a third of U.S. families with children have stay-at-home parents today, down from 70 percent in 1960, according to a study released last month by MultiState Working Families Consortium.
More than 56 percent of Texas children under age 6 have both parents in the work force, says the Children's Defense Fund in Texas.
Today, it often takes two incomes to pay the mortgage, cover child-care costs, pay off student loans and erase credit card balances.
In Texas, full-time infant or toddler care for a year costs an average of $5,564. That's just $376 less than the average tuition and fees at a public Texas college, which is $5,940.