If you think Social Security is just about retirement, think again. In April, almost 51,000 Minnesota children and 4 million children nationwide under 18 years of age were recipients of Social Security benefits - over 8 percent of the total beneficiaries that month. 

Almost half of them were children of workers who died. The others were children of disabled workers or retirees. Contrary to popular belief, of the 47 million Americans who received Social Security benefits at the beginning of this year, only 63 percent of them were retirees. 

The deductions from each worker's paycheck are essentially life and disability insurance premiums, as well as contributions toward retirement. 
The largest life and disability insurance policy most workers have is Social Security. This is rarely discussed, perhaps because retirement is pleasant to think about, but death and disability are not. Go into any public high school class and ask for a show of hands as to how many in the class are on Social Security. You'll be surprised. 

None of this is new. The other day at lunch a group of my 70-something friends - all of us on Social Security - were discussing the program. When I piped up that it wasn't simply a retirement program and that many children were brought up on Social Security, a woman I'd known for 50 years said: "I was one of those." The group went on as if she'd said nothing. 

This got me thinking. Why do we persist in assuming Social Security is only about retirement? When my children were in college, Social Security was one of the biggest scholarship programs in this country. The child of a deceased parent could receive benefits until they were 19 if they were still in high school, or until their 22nd birthday if they were a full-time college student. As the Social Security Historian's office reports, "In the peak year of 1977, almost 900,000 students were receiving this type of benefit." 

When Social Security funding became an issue in the late 1970s, the law was changed to cut off children's benefits at age 18. Few lobbied Congress to prevent that change because then, as now, Social Security benefits for children seemed to be the country's best-kept secret. 

In 2004, there is a new concern that Social Security's current surplus will vanish when the baby boom generation is in full retirement. Will this concern lead to a reduction in support of children? Will nobody talk about the life and disability provisions of Social Security until they are gone? 

Do many of the baby boomers, who are expected to create the Social Security funding crisis, know that many of their contemporaries already receive benefits? 
Currently, 6 million disabled workers are drawing Social Security benefits. Only 2.5 percent have dependent spouses, and the proportion of children receiving benefits because of a disabled parent is lower than those receiving benefits because of the death of a parent. These figures reflect the fact that we now have a high proportion of women in the paid labor force and that Social Security was declared by the Supreme Court to be gender neutral. Less than 10 percent of currently retired workers have dependent spouses collecting benefits. Many women are now collecting Social Security based on their own work records, and many children are benefiting from their mothers' employment. 

We don't often think about young parents dying or becoming disabled, but they do. Disasters happen. My son has a friend whose wife died recently, leaving the husband with two very young children. A Social Security check arrives each month on behalf of the children to help pay the childcare costs the family incurred when both spouses were working. 

In short, it is time we acknowledged our big little secret: Social Security is not just a retirement program. It is, as President Reagan used to say, our safety net. It helps when disaster strikes a family, whether that is death or disability. 
But the danger is that, as we discuss our U.S. deficit and try to deal with it and the retirement of baby boomers, we may leave millions of citizens in the lurch. It's time we began understanding what Social Security really means.