Courtney E. Martin | Vox

The elder care solution that everyone with aging parents should know about

2026-04-01T11:21:36-04:00

Key takeaways

Adult day care centers provide crucial, affordable relief for caregivers, especially members of the “sandwich generation” who are taking care of parents and children at the same time. But the estimated 3,100 programs serving an estimated 200,000 people nationally are under constant threat from inadequate funding.
The coming wave of aging baby boomers will dramatically intensify demand for elder care, and put pressure on the federal budget, while a growing “forgotten middle” of seniors — too wealthy for Medicaid, too poor for private care — falls through the cracks of the existing funding system.
There are some promising policy experiments in adult day care, but advocates say they’re still fighting to protect what exists rather than expand to meet growing needs.

You walk into the room and a whole crowd of people is belting out an uneven but spirited version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. A former lawyer dressed in a Beatles T-shirt taps his knees as if he were a professional drummer. Another guy, long and lanky in a well-pressed suit, closes his eyes and quietly sings the chorus with real feeling: “Ain’t no valley low enough / ain’t no river wide enough / to keep me from gettin’ to you, babe.”

A woman with long silver hair and a knit hat shouts, “This is my favorite song!”

She said that last time. And the time before. No, this isn’t a dive bar. And no, this woman isn’t in love with every song in the karaoke binder. This is a day program for elders with dementia and Alzheimer’s. And it’s an oasis for so many older people and their families.

There are over 3,100 programs with about 200,000 people nationally, and they are in constant threat of being shut down at precisely the moment when we need them most — as the largest generation of Americans that ever lived ages into retirement, and their children struggle to care for them while often raising children of their own.

The “sandwich generation” needs help

By 2030, the entire baby boom generation will be 65 and older — creating an unprecedented need for elder care at a moment when “sandwich generation” caregivers are outnumbered, and often already financially squeezed, including by their younger dependents. Add to that the reality that there is a profound national shortage of professional caregivers to call on.

Twenty-three million Americans now care for elders, surpassing the 21 million caring for preschool children. That unpaid care is valued at over $600 billion annually, placing tremendous strain on the 63 million family caregivers in America, many of whom are stressed to the point of burn out. According to AARP, half of working caregivers caring for a family member or friend report having to rearrange their work schedule, decrease their hours, or take an unpaid leave in order to meet their caregiving responsibilities.

Add to this the reality that more people than ever work from home — the latest government statistics put it at about a quarter of us — and it’s increasingly challenging to maintain professionalism on a Zoom call when your elderly dad is popping into the frame to ask when lunch is!

So how can America meet this inflection point with real, viable solutions?

One answer is hiding in plain sight: day programs (or what insiders call “community-based adult services” or “adult day centers”).

These programs, like child care centers, not only make all the other work of our country possible — freeing up adult children and partners to stay in the workforce — but they also offer socialization for our elders and allow for wraparound services, like podiatry, physical therapy, and enrichment like arts and music, all of which are crucial for keeping their quality of life high and their hospital admission low.

What’s more, day programs are far less costly than the alternatives of home health care and assisted living. According to recent estimates, the median day program costs $100 a day vs. about $200 for assisted living and over $200 for in-home care. And as spending on the elderly is taking up larger and larger chunks of the federal budget, any savings could go a long way toward freeing space for other priorities.

I became interested in adult day centers when I became a caregiver for my own dad, who has early-onset dementia. He and my mom lived with my family — me, my husband, and my two kids, 9 and 12 — for over a year, and it was tumultuous. He would wander out of the house while my mom showered or I was taking a meeting and be found confused and dehydrated miles away. When we tried to bring a professional caregiver in, my mom and I would have to hide in our rooms so he wouldn’t see us; people with dementia often develop shadowing behavior, where they follow their primary caregivers around wherever they go.

His brief stint at Alzheimer’s Services of the East Bay, a day program in California designed for elders with dementia, was a golden time for our whole family — my burned-out mom could get a nap, I could get my work done, and my kids could have friends over after school without worrying that the noise would cause my dad to become agitated.

But our golden time was short-lived. This program, beloved by so many local families for nearly three decades, was shut down because it couldn’t sustain itself on Medi-Cal reimbursement rates — the states’ Medicaid program — that hadn’t budged since 2009. According to Brian Rutldedge, executive director of the California Association for Adult Day Services, the state gave the organization $76.27 a day for care that costs $250 to provide. Leadership at the program was forced to turn Medicaid-qualifying seniors away, or put themselves in financial ruin; they chose the latter and it eventually bankrupted them.

A few months later, we drove my dad to a memory care facility where he has lived ever since; an alternative that we are lucky enough to be able to pay for, despite the fact that it is three times what we were paying out-of-pocket for his day program.

Many of the other families in that program have not been so lucky.

“A year later, my mom still gets up every morning asking when the van will pick her up,” one adult daughter of a former client told me. “This is heartbreaking for me.”

She’s yet to find a long-term alternative solution that can fit their needs and budget.

What’s holding adult day care centers back

Adult day care centers were originally designed with the kinds of issues facing families like ours in mind. William Zagorski’s parents started Tennessee’s first medical-model day program when he was just 11 years old in 1991 after his grandmother was discharged from a social model program because of her tendency to wander (she had dementia) and the fact that she needed medication assistance. He now runs three centers in his home state and is the chair of the board of the National Adult Day Services Association.

Day programs, Zagorski says, cost a fraction of more intensive services like skilled nursing facilities and assisted living. They “combat loneliness, and they are far less vulnerable to worker shortages” in an industry where help is chronically in short supply. “They really are the best-kept secret in America,” he said.

An increasing number of elders in the United States fall into what some researchers call the “forgotten middle.”

But my own family experience struggling to find care options isn’t unique. And precisely as the silver wave of boomers is cresting, the One Big Beautiful Bill will make it harder for centers to stay open. The bill dramatically reduces state funding and flexibility, which advocates warn will force decision makers into lose-lose decisions, such as which Medicaid services to pull back on. The vast majority of those in day programs depend on public benefits of some kind — whether Medicaid, Veterans Affairs, or Older Americans Act.

This isn’t the first time these programs have been in jeopardy. During the Great Recession, an economic-driven drop in government funding led states to reduce Medicaid’s reach and impact. In California, where I live, the state proposed eliminating adult day health care entirely as a cost saving measure, even though adult day is unarguably cheaper than the alternatives. Advocacy and lawsuits were the only thing that kept it going.

There was also a dramatic drop in day programs during the height of the Covid pandemic, which made it dangerous for elders to gather in person. Tia Sauceda, who is now the executive director of the National Adult Day Services Association, ran four day programs in Colorado at that time, and three of the four had to shut down. “We’re back there again, just needing to defend what we have, rather than having the luxury of imagining how we can expand to meet the growing need,” Sauceda said.

The funding formula for these programs also creates additional difficulties for families. An increasing number of elders in the United States fall into what some researchers call the “forgotten middle” — meaning their annual income and accumulated savings are too high for them to qualify for Medicaid and too low for them to afford in-home professional care, day programs, or assisted living. One report estimates that over the next decade, the number of middle-income seniors will almost double — reaching almost 16 million by 2033.

Families are often forced into an impossible choice — spend down their parents’ hard-earned assets so they can be destitute enough to qualify for Medicaid, or let them hold onto what they’ve earned and go into debt in other ways trying to get them the care they need. One adult daughter I spoke to had to make the heartbreaking decision to sell the home her mother had worked her entire life to buy — a symbol for her of breaking generational hardship after the Great Migration — and plunge her mother back into poverty just so they could get the care she needed as her dementia advanced.

New models of adult care offer hope for future growth

One of the largest day program operators in the country is called Programs of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE). There are currently 198 PACE programs operating in 33 states plus the District of Columbia. Over 90 percent of elders enrolled in PACE are dual eligible for Medicaid and Medicare, which pays for their participation. PACE is the epitome of a one-stop-shop for vulnerable elders — providing medical care, prescriptions, activities, home care, transportation, various kinds of therapies, meals, and even housing navigation.

But PACE isn’t a panacea. It’s designed for vulnerable elders 55 and over, but not specifically people like my dad and the 7 million other Americans with Alzheimer’s/dementia who need particular kinds of environmental conditions and support with transitions. Its one-stop-shop nature also isn’t for everyone; some elders would like more discretion about their health care providers.

Perhaps the most powerful solution, certainly for sandwich generation caregivers, is colocated care programs, where child care and elder care happen on the same site, and even intermingle. Studies show that elders with dementia are often supported by the Montessori approach that’s typically associated with children. The emphasis on tactile learning, sense of roles and responsibilities, and collaboration are all excellent for both stages of brain development. But, unfortunately, these kinds of colocated programs are still relatively rare in the United States; by most estimates there are only about 150 total.

While advocates continue to fight for Medicaid reimbursement rates to be raised, and the pie-in-the-sky dream of Medicare coverage for day programs, all eyes are on Washington state, where the very first public mandatory long-term care insurance program — WaCares — is starting to make its first payouts. The program provides funding for Washingtonians to pay for, among a variety of things, professional care like that provided in adult day centers. If it works, many other states are poised to adopt this model. Nationally, only 4 percent Americans 50 and older have long-term care insurance despite the fact that seven out of 10 Americans will need long-term care at some point.

Private sector solutions could also make a huge difference. Forward-thinking employers could include elder care as part of their benefits — most significantly, on-site care, or even just investing in local programs, reimbursing employees for the costs associated with sending their aging parents to programs, or at the very lightest touch, care navigation (whereas their employees can count on support finding local resources). Only 7 percent of employers are currently offering subsidies or on-site services for eldercare.

One bright spot is Medicare’s Guiding and Improved Dementia Experience (GUIDE) program, which officially began in 2024. It will run for eight years. It is a federal effort to support both people with dementia and their caregivers by providing care navigation, a 24/7 support line, caregiver training and education, and most importantly, respite services — short-term relief for caregivers — of up to $2,500 annually. This is the first time that Medicare funds are going directly to ongoing respite care, which is, in a sense, a policy gateway to arguing that adult day programs should be funded more broadly by Medicare dollars rather than Medicaid.

Advocates are encouraged by these experiments, but they’re still only a start. In the coming years, they’re hoping to protect existing programs, advocate for additional ones, and collect more data to make their case.

“The economic argument is there, but it’s more than that,” Sauceda, the National Adult Day Services Association executive director, said. “These programs are a life raft in the caregiver space. At the end of the day, we are truly changing lives.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

Teachers are striking for more than just pay raises

2023-07-14T18:57:53-04:00

Striking Chicago public school teachers picket outside of George Westinghouse College Preparatory High School on September 17, 2012, in Chicago, Illinois. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

The school year ended in dramatic fashion in Oakland, California.

Teachers went on strike on May 4, 2023, just three weeks before the last day of the academic calendar. The strike lasted seven school days. In negotiations, teachers not only fought for higher salaries and a better schedule, but for a set of what they called “common good” demands — like ensuring that all unhoused families in the district are expedited for Section 8 housing vouchers and implementing a task force on reparations. The strike had what appeared to be fairly widespread support based on turnout at school sites, though many caregivers and community members expressed confusion about the broader demands on climate and housing. Wasn’t this a salary renegotiation? Why were the teachers talking about transportation?

These demands are part of a broader movement among unions to bargain for the common good by including provisions in teachers’ contract demands that don’t just affect them directly, but also the quality of life for their students and the city. The movement for “common good bargaining” in the educational context — other industries are increasingly making common good demands too — was born during the Chicago teacher strike of 2012 and has been gaining steam ever since. In a country where increased privatization is too often the response to its most pressing problems, common good bargaining is a provocative counterforce. It’s a promising strategy for birthing new coalitions within communities that — in the best-case scenario — might get people talking about more than just third rail topics like charters, enrollment policy, and the “reading wars.”

But, like all organizing strategies, it also risks becoming little more than a label. And it may generate backlash from the parents, like those in Oakland, who didn’t understand why those issues were on the table in the first place.

As an Oakland Unified School District parent and a journalist who writes about education, I wanted to better understand the growing movement of common good demands. Here’s what I learned.

Common good bargaining is a national phenomenon

Increasingly over the past decade, teachers unions are introducing what they call “common good demands” alongside salary and benefit requests during bargaining. These demands can include defunding campus police, offering more eco-friendly and free transportation options, shielding students from evictions, and more.

In 2012, more than 25,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) included common good demands when they walked picket lines in front of 580 schools during a strike that lasted seven days; it was the first school strike the city had seen in a quarter-century. The teachers won salary increases and more job security — typical bargaining fare — but they also got more collective wins, like pushing back against the testing obsession of the education reform movement and fighting for more support staff, such as counselors and nurses, to serve their most marginalized students.

Proponents say that common good bargaining is a wise strategy because it ensures legally enforceable gains. In theory, if districts agree to common good demands during the bargaining process, they can be sued if they don’t follow through. Many well-intentioned resolutions either die before they ever get voted on by school boards or they get approved and then end up being discussed to death in committees. Too often, little action is actually taken. When leadership shifts — at the school board or superintendent level — these resolutions are often lost in the mix. And we’ve all seen how dramatic and dysfunctional school board meetings can be because of increased political polarization. A binding contract requires a board to follow through.

Teachers involved in this more expansive type of bargaining also argue that including common good demands is reflective of the reality of a teacher’s workday. If a portable classroom without air conditioning is too hot for kids to focus or an unhoused kid is constantly absent, it makes sense to address these issues during teacher bargaining. In this way, “working conditions” for teachers organically overlap with the most pressing problems of our time — particularly climate change and racial and economic inequality.

“Our students have needs, and if those needs aren’t being met, that’s impinging on our ability to do our job,” said Kasondra Walsh, a kindergarten teacher in an Oakland school serving low-income students. Walsh was on the bargaining team during her union’s recent renegotiation. “So often these things are outside of the control of a classroom teacher. So when the board fails to take action, our next option is to try to get something embedded into our contract.”

Sarah Wheeler, an educational psychologist and public school parent in Oakland, said, “Imagine the daily experience of a teacher. You’re underpaid, under-resourced, under-supported, and contending with all of these huge societal forces every day in your classroom. I can imagine that demanding real action on some of these larger common good issues could give you a sense of agency. It might even help you have the stamina to stay in the job.”

This isn’t an insignificant point when one considers that teacher turnover is at an all-time high in many states. Even if some of the common good demands are challenging to win or ultimately difficult to implement in cash-strapped districts, the act of advocating for them may feel like a restorative practice for some teachers.

Common good bargaining is not a new phenomenon

This expansion of bargaining terms is building steam in part because of a national group called the Bargaining for the Common Good Network, which first met a couple of years after that catalytic moment in Chicago. Hallmarks of a successful common good bargaining effort, according to the network’s materials, include: getting grassroots community groups to collaborate and inform which demands end up on the bargaining table, centering racial justice, and keeping the campaign going with community allies long after the union settles its contract.

Joseph A. McCartin, a labor historian and the executive director of Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, where the network is housed, is quick to point out that common good bargaining isn’t new. Rather, he says, its resurgence is “a rediscovery of an old labor tradition. In the early 20th century, when teachers unions first formed, the teachers’ first priority was trying to reform the tax system because the schools were so underfunded. Teachers have always had an interest in fixing a school system that’s broke on purpose.”

Alex Han, the executive director of the progressive magazine In These Times, and Emma Tai, the executive director of United Working Families, writing last year in Nonprofit Quarterly, also trace the way that broader bargaining is a modernization of an old approach, not an innovation. “Beyond equity issues,” they wrote, “the CTF” — the all-female predecessor to the Chicago Teachers Union — “took on fights that could be seen now as ‘bargaining for the common good’— against a University of Chicago-led and business-backed ‘factorization’ of Chicago’s public schools, and in favor of fair funding.”

Today, Chicago stands out as a case study of what happens when teachers get real political power in a city. Last month, Brandon Johnson, a teachers union organizer, was sworn in as Chicago’s 57th mayor after an extremely tight race. Johnson started as a middle school teacher, leaving the classroom a decade ago in order to get involved in common good organizing. Under the mentorship of the late Karen Lewis, then Chicago Teachers Union president, Johnson was part of school closure protests in 2013 and an effort to elect the first teacher to the City Council in 2015. All the while, Johnson mentored other cities’ teachers unions on rabble-rousing for more than just higher pay, but also broader support for public school families.

Mayor Johnson wasted no time establishing his credentials. Some of his first executive orders were directed at getting money into programs for youth, and his first speech as mayor largely focused on his vision for a more collaborative and equitable public school system for all of Chicago’s kids.

Common good bargaining requires long-term organizing and awareness efforts

Johnson’s mayoral run didn’t come out of nowhere; it began when he quit teaching in 2012 to start knocking on doors. Likewise, successful common good bargaining campaigns need long runways, or else their demands can seem unintuitive at a tense moment in bargaining. According to Han and Tai, teachers unions must invest in “deep partnership” with community allies in the lead-up to the bargaining moment. They should also build relationships for the moments that require more civic stamina and engage in broader consciousness-raising efforts — door-knocking, listening tours, informational workshops, and any and all gatherings that make community members feel heard. Where that doesn’t happen, experience suggests, backlash is possible.

In a city like Oakland, for example, which has experienced three teacher strikes in the last five years, there is strike fatigue among some parents and educational advocates. After all, additional demands, especially those that require coordination across so many institutions, slow down negotiations, which means more days that kids are out of school during strikes (on the tail end of a deeply disruptive pandemic). As Jesse Antin, a public school parent, wrote in the Mercury News in response to the third strike, “The union is holding our kids hostage over common-good principles that we all agree on, but which have no place in a labor contract. Most of us are liberal people who choose to live in a liberal city, but activism has a time and place and this isn’t it.”

Many labor experts argue that too-narrow bargaining demands lost teachers unions much of their popular support. What became known as the Red for Ed movement — a wave of teacher strikes starting in West Virginia in 2018 that swept across states, including notoriously conservative ones — therefore felt like a profound departure. The resurgence of teachers unions, and community support for them, has coincided with a sense that educators are the canaries in the coal mine of democracy, demanding that our public institutions serve everybody better. Chris Jackson, a special education teacher who led the common good bargaining committee in Oakland last month, said, “Now we’re actually bargaining for the community. It’s not just about us; it’s about the students that we serve.”

Jackson said that the Oakland Education Association curated the common good demands from a mix of district data, information gathered from door-knocking, and their long-term organizational allies like the Black Organizing Project and Bay Area PLAN.

The strike in Oakland came to an end in mid-May with a tentative agreement that promised all union members a 10 percent raise, retroactive to November 1, 2022, and a 15.5 percent pay raise for most. It also promised all full-time union members an additional one-time payment of $5,000. (This was not significantly different from what the district offered before the strike started.) The union also won four common good demands, not technically in the contract language but as included memorandums of understanding.

Lakisha Young, the founder and CEO of Oakland REACH, says she is intrigued by a common good strategy in theory, but not to the point of prolonging a teacher strike. According to Young, common good bargaining should never be a justification for keeping kids out of school in a district where absenteeism is already such a problem. “The district isn’t the villain,” Young said. “The villain is the collective behavior of adults. When adults get distracted from reading and math, that’s the issue.”

For other organizers, though, common good bargaining can be part of a long-term strategy for labor. Stephen Lerner, a veteran organizer who got his start five decades ago in the farmworkers movement, is one such activist. “The way I’d look at it is, the labor movement needs to be more utopian,” Lerner said. “We need to have a bigger vision of what we want. Why do we exist if we are just taking the status quo?”

After experiencing last month’s strike in Oakland, public school parent Rebekah Otto told me, “My new question is: What else needs to change to make the common goods a reality? We need a district and union that have a good relationship, we need a city council more invested in pushing for change, we need new ideas about county and state advocacy.”

Garrett Bucks, founder of community organizing group The Barnraisers Project, argues that teachers unions, using tools like common good bargaining, have the potential to be the catalysts for radical collectivity in America’s cities, but too often default to smaller questions around power and status.

“Is the question here about the transformation of a city or is it a question of turf?” Bucks said. “In the last 15 years, there are a larger number of big-city teachers unions who are asking turf-based questions in more inspiring ways, and I like that, but it also bums me out. We don’t need adults on every side of education debates jockeying for power. We need organizing that is accompanied with soul searching about our relationship to our kids.”

Courtney E. Martin is the author of Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from My Daughter’s School and a public school parent in Oakland, California.

The lessons we should really be teaching kids in the pandemic

2020-04-22T10:10:03-04:00

With schools closed in many countries around the world, parents are having to homeschool their kids. But the lessons to be learned in the coronavirus pandemic go beyond the academic. | Ute Grabowsky/Photothek/Getty Images

The words “Zoom call” now slip off of my three-year-old’s lips as easily as “birthday party” (and she loves to disinvite people to her birthday party right now, me included). My six-year-old, meanwhile, throws her scooter to the side outside our front door and runs straight into the bathroom to wash her hands. Kids adapt fast. Much faster than their parents.

America’s parents — particularly my peers of the white and privileged variety — seem not to be adapting in the face of this coronavirus crisis, so much as attempting to schedule our way out of it. The homeschool porn on social media — the elaborate charts, the explosive science fair projects, the Facetiming with all manner of experts — telegraph to the world that even a deadly flu can’t get in the way of our family’s achievements. One mom sent me a schedule she devised for her kid that includes a timer so she can switch academic subjects every 15 minutes. Her kid is five years old.

I’m here to say stop the madness.

People are dying. Particularly black people, low-wage workers, and those who have been historically neglected by our health system and pummeled with our racism. Our emperor, President Trump, has no clothes. Now is the time to push aside the elaborate academic schedules and teach our kids something more lasting about humanity.

There’s never been a more necessary time than now to teach our kids about systems and structures. Bleary-eyed adults are looking at predictive models late into the night on their laptops and trying to explain them the next day over Cheerios. Instead of shying away from this, lean into it.

You might understandably be thinking, “But my kid is four years old. She thinks Daniel Tiger is actually talking to her. How am I going to explain redlining to her?”

Of course, there are developmentally appropriate ways to talk to our kids about race and class, among so much else. But too often, white and privileged parents let ourselves off the hook in moments like these, justifying our silence with the notion that these concepts are too complex and can wait. Professor and parent Jennifer Harvey, author of Raising White Kids, writes: “Our children can and do understand racism much earlier than adults give them credit for.”

So simply asking a four year old, “Who are you noticing are the helpers in this moment?” in a nod to Mr. Rogers’s classic message, could be a very fruitful question.

I promise that having a genuine, searching conversation with your kid about what constitutes an “essential worker” will have a far more lasting effect than grabbing the Caviar delivery from the porch and getting back to the geometry lesson as the driver speeds away. For an older kid, you might ask: “Who is still working outside the home? Why? How are they being protected or neglected by other people — their neighbors, their employers, or the government? What does this all have to do with the fish taco we’re about to eat?” In other words, don’t forget the climax of the lesson: complicity.

As civic advocate Eric Liu put it, “The moral question that comes with flattening the curve is not just whether I’ll do my part to stand six feet away or stay at home. The deeper moral question is: How can I change at least one system of power around me?”

In other words, we should be learning lessons during this time that go beyond logistical distancing measures and ways to replicate our pre-pandemic lives. These lessons are also bigger than “We’re all in this together,” which is the equivalent of our Boomer parents’ well-intentioned, but inadequate lessons about being “color-blind” to racism. Epidemiologically speaking, we are all in this together. But when one lays our historic and economic profile over our epidemiological one, it becomes very clear that not everyone is exposed to an equal risk here. Those in dense urban centers, those who depend on public transportation, those who work in low-wage, unpredictable jobs without enough protections or adequate health insurance — these are the Americans most “in it.”

That’s not because they didn’t shelter in fast enough or wash their hands enough times. It’s because we live in a country whose story is riddled with redlining, the undervaluing of care, and the long tail effects of slavery.

So follow your kid’s lead. They’ll start asking all the right questions if you let them look up long enough from their Zoom lessons to do so. On a whim, I asked my six-year-old, “Do you have any questions about the coronavirus?”

My usually slow processing, quiet girl didn’t skip a beat: “Where did it start? How does it spread? How does it end?”

Well, dang, someone has been listening. Of course the kids are listening. And they are making meaning out of every piece of news you share. We spent some time researching, and then I did what educators would call “scaffolding” — I built on her questions to ask her some more: Who do you think is most and least likely to get the coronavirus? Why might that be? Who is most likely to get the care they need in response? How could we change that?

If you’re worried about your kid falling behind, you’re not alone; in a recent Pew survey, 64% of parents said they were. But we can’t let our fear of short-term academic FOMO overtake our motivation for long-term, collective justice. Your kid’s success, as turns out, is dependent on our collective health. It’s time to start acknowledging that interdependence, to ourselves and our kids.

So if your kid emerges this summer from the cocoon of your nuclear family newly sophisticated about power and how it flows, you will have done something profoundly important — not just for your kid, but for this country. Even more, if your white and privileged kid understands that they aren’t the center of the universe, that there are limitations on what resources they should be consuming, that they can fight the very forces their ancestors seeded and be a part of healing this country’s moral wounds, they might emerge healthier themselves. They might have the muscles, not to cling to schedules and control in times of crisis, but to ask and act on the hard moral questions of our time.

Courtney E. Martin is an author, speaker, and co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network and FRESH Speakers Bureau. She is currently at work on a book about white parents and school integration. Sign up for her popular weekly newsletter here.