Retired Brigadier Generals Jack Hammond and Gary Pappas. Photo courtesy of Mission:Readiness.

Retired Brigadier Generals Jack Hammond and Gary Pappas came to Boston earlier this month to talk about the link between child care and the military – and about the findings in a new, related report, “Child Care and National Security: How greater access to high-quality child care in Massachusetts can help improve military readiness.”

The upshot: high-quality child care is a key ingredient in preparing children to become successful adults who could serve in the military. But right now, most of this state’s potential military candidates could not join the armed forces because of poor health, limited educational attainment, and histories of illegal activities.

“If a basic part of the population, 70 percent roughly [in Massachusetts], cannot pass a simple entrance exam,” Pappas says in an NECN interview, “you have a recruiting problem.”

General Hammond and General Pappas at NECN. Photo courtesy of Mission:Readiness.

“When you look at this and you see a national security concern, not a crisis yet, but certainly a concern, and then you look at it from the other side of the equation… you want to set the conditions of success for men and women so that they can thrive in this nation, they can have good employment, [and] they can have happy lives,” Hammond says to NECN. “But when it costs more to send someone to daycare in Massachusetts than it does to send them to UMass, that’s astounding.”

To spread the word about this challenge and learn more about high-quality child care, the two generals made the rounds, visiting the Ellis Early Education Center in Boston as well as the Massachusetts State House where they spoke with House Speaker Robert DeLeo (D- Winthrop), Representative Alice Peisch (D-Wellesley), co-chair of the joint committee on education, and Senator Sal DiDomenico (D-Everett).

The time to act is now, according to the report, which was released by the Council for a Strong America, through an initiative called Mission:Readiness, a group of retired admirals and generals who are working to strengthen national security “by ensuring kids stay in school, stay fit, and stay out of trouble.”

“From our military experience,” the report says, “we know that training is critical to success. Without improvements to the child care system, as well as adequate training and professional development opportunities for those who work in early care and education, our nation risks an even smaller recruiting pool in the future.”

Among the child care challenges that the report points to are access, cost, and quality.

The report also points to child care’s benefits, noting, “Research shows that high-quality child care can support children’s success, and military readiness, in three categories,” education, obesity, and behavior.

Massachusetts has an acute need. A State House News story explains:

“Just more than half (53 percent) of Massachusetts residents live in a ‘child care desert,’ where there are more than three times as many children as there are licensed child care spaces, the report found.”

WBUR covers the story here.

It’s not surprising that retired military leaders would focus on child care because the Department of Defense “operates the largest employer-sponsored childcare program in the United States, serving approximately 200,000 children of uniformed service members and DOD civilians, and employing over 23,000 childcare workers, at an annual cost of over $800 million,” according to a 2018 report from the Congressional Research Service. Key features of the military’s child care programs are quality and affordability.

The military’s example should inspire widespread change. As the Mission:Readiness report concludes:

“Given the long-term benefits of high-quality child care to children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development, commonwealth and federal policymakers should continue to promote quality, access and affordability. Massachusetts policymakers should also prioritize efforts to attract and retain high-quality educators by continuing to build upon recent bipartisan efforts to increase the early education rate reserve.”

“Support for high-quality child care is an investment in our future national security.”