Where Does Our National Security Come From?

It baffles me that the most common problems in American households are not getting more attention during this campaign season. Every single person in the US has received care from parents or other family members.  Nearly all of us will or already have had to care for a child, an aging parent, spouse, partner, or an ill family member. Care is no longer transacted outside the national economy.  It’s increasingly right in the middle of it!

Image: DVIDSHUB via Flickr
When child-care is too expensive, a parent may pass up employment, missing out on income and benefits.  That means less discretionary income circulating through local businesses, supporting more jobs.  The public purse collects less tax revenue.  If a frail parent needs help with a daily task, his or her employed adult child must make it work around their job.  It’s just no use pretending every single household can manage to keep itself afloat financially and meet its care demands effectively on a case by case basis.
As  women are the better-educated gender, every effort should be made to ease their progress into work and up the ladder to leadership and policy-making positions.   When becoming a mother ends your career or makes pursuing it ridiculously stressful, our whole society is losing out.  It’s a failure of policy, a waste of talent, and a dangerous loss of opportunity that makes us vulnerable, as a country.  It also makes it damn hard to pay off your student loans!
If you think national security means an aggressive leader and a military armed to the teeth, you’re missing something important.  National security comes from a steady supply of creative problem solvers with access to the resources they need to fully realize their ability.  That kind of labor pool comes from lots of care over several decades.  It requires time, good health, and academic education.  It also requires life training, which is a large part of what parents do.  Of course, parents are usually earning a living at the same time.  Both functions, providing cash AND care, are essential, and both contribute mightily to our national security.
It’s no longer possible to limit men to being simply family breadwinners.  Research shows that men with children are happier both at work and at home.  They do more hands-on care than their fathers, and they want to do more.   They struggle with stress from work/life conflict, just like mothers.  Millennial men in particular expect to share both child care and  earning a living with their spouses.  That will simply not be possible unless they force change on the way we live and work in America.
Bizarrely, when fathers have access and actually take paid leave, they make things better for moms.  When both parents are moving between work and family, women’s employment rates and salaries rise.  That is an effective way to narrow the gender pay gap, expand women’s opportunity, and stimulate the economy with higher wages, all at once.
Even voters without children need to be concerned about the candidates’ opinions on care.  Having children may be optional, but having parents isn’t.  With our over 65 population set to double by 2050, we’re looking at over 80 million people requiring assistance, many of whom will have one or more chronic health conditions.
If we don’t make it easier to move back and forth between the roles of cash earner and care provider, we are diminishing our labor supply.  What if the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg is a mother?  What if this country could produce 20 more Sheryl Sandbergs?  If you have to work long hours to make top dollar, we’ve marginalized workers with dependents.
We need to promote new ways of working, and more flexible circumstances.  Paid family leave, paid sick days, workplace flexibility, predictable schedules, convenient and affordable childcare – where is American ingenuity when it comes to these pressing issues?
A strong economy will not simply materialize without these adaptations to the way we live now.  We have to have that to provide for the safety and development of our children and ourselves.  If we can access and leverage the talent of our people, national security follows.  If we can’t, national security will elude us….and no strongman with all the guns in the world can keep us safe.