No One Arrives Alone: Care Creates Freedom

To my mother, who never spoke of freedom. She simply cared. And in doing so, she made mine possible.

We all admire stories of success. We celebrate those who found ventures, make discoveries, teach, govern, or transform reality. We recognize talent, discipline, and perseverance. Rarely, however, do we stop to think about the stories of care that made those achievements possible.

Who fed, protected, taught, and accompanied the scientist who today develops a vaccine? Who cared for the children of the entrepreneur who creates thousands of jobs? Who sustained the lawyer, the doctor, the judge, or the legislator while they built their life’s work? Behind every success story lies a less visible one, but no less decisive: the story of someone who cared.

For a long time we have nurtured an idea deeply rooted in our culture: that of the self-sufficient individual. We like to think success is the exclusive result of personal effort. Merit exists and deserves recognition, but that explanation is incomplete. No one arrives alone at where they are. All of us have needed, at some point in our lives, someone to feed us, protect us, teach us, listen to us, or give up part of their time so that we could develop our abilities.

This is not an ideological claim. It is a universal human experience.

We were all once completely dependent children. All of us have gone through moments of illness, fragility, or uncertainty. All of us have received care. And yet we have built a social order that treats care as though it were strictly a private matter and, in practice, as a responsibility that falls disproportionately on women.

Herein lies one of the great contradictions of our time.

We have expanded women’s rights like never before in history. Today, millions of women study, start businesses, conduct research, take part in political life, hold leadership positions, and contribute decisively to economic and social development. This is an extraordinary advance that we must celebrate and protect. And yet the way care itself is organized has barely changed at the same pace.

The consequence is plain to see. When a child is born, when a parent grows old, when a disability or a prolonged illness appears, the everyday responsibility of care continues to fall mostly on women. Not because women are the only ones capable of caring, nor because care is inherently feminine, but because we still organize social life as if that responsibility could be resolved entirely within the private sphere of each family.

That is the true challenge of the twenty-first century.

For decades, the women’s agenda was rightly focused on winning rights and opening spaces for participation. Today we face a different challenge: making it possible for those rights to be exercised fully.

Because freedom does not depend solely on the law recognizing our rights. It also depends on the material and social conditions existing to exercise them.

What good is the right to work if a mother has no one to leave her young child with? What does the right to political participation mean for someone who spends most of their day caring, permanently, for a dependent family member? How can we speak of equal opportunity when millions of hours of indispensable labor remain invisible and fall almost exclusively on one part of the population?

These are not merely social questions. They are profoundly legal ones.

Law has been the great builder of freedoms. It has protected freedom of expression, religious freedom, freedom of association, equality before the law, and political rights. But perhaps the time has come to ask a different question: what conditions actually make the exercise of those freedoms possible?

That is where care stops being a domestic matter and becomes a matter of public concern.

Not because the state should replace families. Nor because the market can, on its own, resolve a task that belongs to society as a whole. But because care constitutes the invisible infrastructure on which all the others rest.

For a long time we have understood infrastructure as what can be seen: roads, ports, hospitals, schools, power grids, or communication systems. All of it is indispensable. But there is another infrastructure, silent and invisible, without which none of the others could fulfill their purpose.

It is made of time. Of presence. Of affection. Of shared responsibility. It is called care.

And its importance is not only moral. It is also economic. In Mexico, the value of unpaid care work equals 22.8% of Gross Domestic Product — a figure larger than the contribution of many of our economy’s strategic sectors. Paradoxically, the very thing that sustains much of the country’s functioning continues to be seen as a private, invisible task, all too often simply taken for granted.

But the real problem is not only that care work remains invisible. The problem is that this invisibility has concrete consequences for freedom, equal opportunity, and the country’s development.

For years we have thought that care belongs to the sphere of private life, and that each family must therefore resolve it as best it can. But that idea is becoming harder and harder to sustain in the face of a reality that is transforming Mexico and the world.

We live longer than ever before. Families are smaller. Women’s participation in higher education and the labor market has grown extraordinarily. The number of people living with a disability is rising, and chronic illnesses require care over much longer periods. At the same time, millions of households are sustained by a single person, or depend on both parents working just to get by.

The need for care has grown. The availability of those who traditionally did that work has not.

We are not facing a crisis of the family. We are facing a demographic and social shift of enormous scale that demands a new way of organizing ourselves.

That is why it is no longer enough to see care as an exclusively domestic matter. What is at stake is not simply how household tasks are divided. What is at stake is whether millions of people can fully develop their talent.

Every time a woman leaves a job because she found no alternative for caring for a child, an ailing mother, or a person with a disability, Mexico loses far more than a family’s income. It loses experience, creativity, leadership, productivity, and human capital. It loses years of professional training and opportunities for economic growth that will be difficult to ever recover.

The question, then, is no longer how much it costs to invest in care.

The real question is how much it costs the country not to.

For a long time we have treated care as an expense. Perhaps the time has come to understand it instead as a strategic investment. Investing in care means freeing up time to study, work, start ventures, do research, take part in public life, or simply exercise, more fully, the freedom to choose the life one wants to lead.

This is not about replacing affection with institutions, or transferring to the state responsibilities that belong to families. Care will always retain a deeply human, affective, and personal dimension. No public policy can replace a mother’s love, a father’s devotion, or solidarity between generations.

But an intelligent society can build the conditions so that care does not fall, in isolation, on a single person.

That is the true meaning of shared responsibility.

For too long we have posed a false dilemma: family or state, family life or professional development, care or economic growth. International experience shows that this opposition is artificial. The societies that have best met this challenge are those that understood care as a shared responsibility.

Families remain the first place where we learn to care and to be cared for. But businesses can offer work arrangements more compatible with family life; communities can build support networks; civil society organizations can multiply the alternatives for accompaniment; and the state can build public policies that bring these efforts together and ensure that no one is excluded for lack of care.

This is the logic behind the National Care Systems that various countries have begun to develop. They are not born from the idea of replacing families, but of strengthening them. They do not seek to displace individual responsibility, but to recognize that there are needs no single person can resolve alone.

At its core, a National Care System represents something far more profound than a social policy. It represents a new understanding of freedom.

Because freedom does not consist only in doors being open. It also consists in people having real possibilities of walking through them.

And those possibilities often begin with something as simple, and as profound, as knowing that someone will care for the person we love most while we pursue our calling.

“Freedom does not consist only in doors being open; it consists in people having real possibilities of walking through them.”

Freedom does not consist only in doors being open. It consists in everyone having level ground on which to walk through them. And that level ground begins long before the exercise of a right: it begins when a society organizes care in such a way that no one’s life plan is limited by having to bear, alone, a responsibility that in truth belongs to all of us.

Justice does not consist only in recognizing the same rights for everyone; it consists in building the conditions for everyone to be able to exercise them.

For centuries, law has sought to build freer, more equal, and more just societies. Our constitutions and our democracies are built on the principles of justice, freedom, and equality. And yet we rarely stop to reflect on the conditions that allow those ideals to stop being mere declarations and become part of everyday experience.

Freedom needs more than the absence of prohibitions. It requires real conditions to choose and build a life’s path.

Equality needs more than recognizing the same rights for everyone. It requires level ground from which each person can actually exercise them.

Justice needs more than well-written laws. It demands a social order that does not condemn some to give up their opportunities so that others can exercise theirs.

It is precisely at this point that care takes on a dimension that transcends the family sphere and becomes a matter of public interest.

When a society organizes care with shared responsibility, it expands the freedom of those whose life plans have, until now, been limited by a disproportionate burden. It builds equality, because it narrows the enormous gaps in time, opportunity, and development that exist today, particularly for millions of women. And it strengthens justice, because it distributes more fairly a responsibility without which no society can sustain itself.

Perhaps that is why the time has come to stop treating care as a private matter or a domestic chore. Care is a condition for making rights effective and for building a truly democratic society.

It is no coincidence that the countries that have moved in this direction have not weakened their families. Quite the opposite. They have understood that strengthening families means preventing the weight of care from falling, almost always in silence, on a single person. Shared responsibility does not replace love or family commitment; it makes them sustainable.

Because care does not limit freedom. It makes it possible. It does not obstruct equality. It makes it attainable. It does not replace justice. It makes it concrete.

Perhaps that is why one of the most important tasks of the twenty-first century is not only to recognize new rights, but to build the conditions to fully exercise the ones we have already won.

And among those conditions, few are as decisive as a society that understands caring is not an individual responsibility, but a shared commitment.

Only then will we be able to say that we have taken another step forward in the evolution of our democracies: when we understand that freedom, equality, and justice do not rest on laws alone, but also on the invisible web of care that allows those laws to come alive in people’s everyday experience.

For centuries we have refined our laws to protect freedom, equality, and justice. The challenge of the twenty-first century is to strengthen the social infrastructure that makes them real. Care belongs to that invisible infrastructure. It does not replace the great values that inspire our legal order. It makes them possible in everyday life. A society that understands this truth does not only care better for the most vulnerable; it builds more level ground so that every person can exercise their rights, develop their talent, and freely choose the life they wish to lead.