Executive Summary

American families confront major challenges in balancing work and family life. Workers report that they would prefer fewer hours, while new technological capabilities require parents to bring more job responsibilities home with them. Mothers and fathers encounter strain in work and home environments alike. Polling and surveillance data confirm that the balance between work and family care needs attention. Some of the most quantifiable and severe costs of this burden on families are adverse health outcomes.

Why aren’t Republican presidential candidates talking more about job training?

Wherever they go on the campaign trail, candidates are asked about off-shoring, layoffs, and wages. Despite the strong U.S. economy and near full employment, middle class anxiety is real.

Today nearly 5.7 million grandparents only have to walk downstairs or down the hall to celebrate Grandparents Day with their grandchildren. They are part of a growing segment of the American population that is living in multigenerational households.

With the increasing demands of a global society, Americans are looking outside the nuclear family and using extended family members to assist with household responsibilities. Grandparents are helping their children manage their hectic lives and alleviate some of the parenting burden.

In his famous work on American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that "Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of [America's] rapid progress, its strength, and its greatness." This observation, made in the mid- 1830s, is one with which few of those who comment on economics and American commerce today would disagree. The "boldness of enterprise" that Tocqueville referred to is entrepreneurship, the process of innovation, which, under conditions of risk and uncertainty, results in the creation of a new venture.