On valuing caregivers, from Anne-Marie Slaughter,
I imagine a new America in which citizens recognize that providers of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual care are as indispensable to our society and our economy as providers of income. If we truly valued breadwinning and caregiving equally, as equal components of the American promise of equal opportunity, then we would value male caregivers as much as we have come to value female breadwinners and every combination in between. But we would also recognize that single parents, who must be sole breadwinner and caregiver for families that often include elder relatives as well as children, need special help and support. We would embrace marriage for everyone and support policies that would strengthen long-term commitments among family members, however they might be constructed.
Apt. 11d 
This is pablum! Yes, it would be swell if all runners got medals, etc. But Slaughter has to have some idea how you might make this reality. It’s also not so that care giving – even the very best – can make the kind of difference for the society as a whole that a breadwinner who invents an operating system, or breeds a new strain of rice can.
She is blowing pleasant smoke here. Not serious.
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And those guys spring forth self-bidden from the very bowels of the earth?
(Ironically, the guy who invents the operating system everybody wants to copy goes and dies thirty years prematurely because there was nobody in his life who could say, “I’m dragging you to the doctor and your going to sit there and listen.”)
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thank you! The article is meaningless feel good crap.
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dave s.,
I know a middle class family where after the wife joined the family business when the kids were getting bigger, the household went completely to pot for a couple of decades. With two breadwinners and no caregiver, mats of cobwebs grew for decades, cat hair covered every surface, the fridge turned into a huge science experiment where it was almost impossible for a visitor to locate any actual food other than rancid margarine and liquefied cucumbers, the cupboards were full of containers, each with one half-eaten energy bars that had been left there goodness knows how long ago, the dog’s fur looked like he had joined the Rastafarians, with every year, less and less floor was visible in the house, etc. It was awful.
Part of the problem was that in that family, you got brownie points for making money. There were no or few brownie points available for housekeeping or homemaking, so they let all of that slide, and they didn’t hire a cleaner, which they could have afforded, because theoretically they could have done the cleaning themselves. Homemaking didn’t make money, so they didn’t do it. Now to me, this is totally backward, because in my opinion, the whole point of making money is to be able to have a pleasant home, but this couple had gotten the ends and means of money terribly confused.
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Yes, I think it would be nice if everyone had a pony, too. As Dave says, this is pablum. Given that it’s Slaughter, it might be pablum with a goal. But if the goal was made explicit, we would probably argue about it, whereas the exhortation to “love the mothers” in the abstract might be appealing to everyone.
I disagree that the caregivers don’t have an economic/world impact, potentially an impact as great as the person who invents the operating system. It’s not just pablum to say that many people who accomplished great things had a caregiver behind them without whose impact they would have been lost. The problem with attaching economic value to that value, though is that it’s too hard to make the direct connection. Well, and whether the availability of that caregiving will change substantially as we devalue it and offer more economic value to those who chose not to do it (the incentive system AmyP describes). It could be that the biological pull of caregiving will be strong enough that only the caregiver will shoulder the economic burden, thus mitigating the effect on the general wellbeing of the world. It’s an experiment we’re undertaking.
We could argue that exploiting caregivers in order to benefit the world is a bad thing, but I think Slaughter has to take her arguments somewhere more directly because even I (who might be generally sympathetic) generally feel that she is talking in meaningless generalities.
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Hopefully, most of us, in our private lives, do assign equal moral value, and afford equal respect, to everyone who works hard at something socially beneficial. So that should make Slaughter happy. Beyond that, I don’t know what it would mean to value all contributions equally, unless it means that everyone gets paid the same, which sounds like a bad idea.
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There’s also a range of caregiving activities of more or less value. Staying home with a one-month old baby or a person with Alzheimer’s, huge. Feeding a home-cooked meal to your grade-school aged children, pretty big. Making sure there is no cat hair on your floor, less big. Choreographing a birthday party for 9 year olds with fabulous home-made gift bags, still less. Scrapbooking and gourmet cooking and making your home look like Better Homes and Gardens…you get the idea. Of course this is also true of other types of work, which doesn’t always (or even often) get reimbursed properly relative to its social value.
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“Making sure there is no cat hair on your floor, less big.”
Making sure mice aren’t colonizing your home and infecting the family with hantavirus–huge.
“Choreographing a birthday party for 9 year olds with fabulous home-made gift bags, still less. Scrapbooking and gourmet cooking and making your home look like Better Homes and Gardens…you get the idea.”
I think there’s a good case to be made for moderate versions of each of these achievements.
Inviting every 9-year-old child and making sure that everybody has a good time and that all the parents who stay feel welcome and have a chance to talk and make friends with each other–very important.
Making sure that all your kids eat some veggies–very important.
Scrapbooking enough to preserve your famiy history, eliminate clutter, and to share your kids’ past with them–very important.
Obviously, any of these things can be done to an extent that is narcissistic, anti-social, consumerist and competitive, but the basic versions are not really frills.
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Really, you can’t predict the value of those different caregiving tasks in AF’s list. Morally they depend completely on the people involved. Economically the set that matter might depend on a lot of other factors (including, say, the fact that the alzheimer’s person is not going to produce anything of significant economic value, if we’re going to use utilitarian arguments). And even morally, one could argue that the alzheimers patient nor the 1 month infant is going to be significantly influenced by the person doing the caregiving as long as the individual is competent.
On the other hand, we can take an equivalent of choreographing the 9 yo birthday party, the story of Steve Jobs and Paul Jobs and the fence: “Touching the boards of inside of the fence, he [Steve Jobs] said that “He[Paul Jobs] loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.” and consider, as Steve Jobs argued, that the experience of being raised by such a man is evident in the products Steve Jobs built that changed the world.
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-obsession-with-the-quality-of-the-things-unseen/
I’m not, incidentally, saying that everyone should care what the inside of a fence looks like or about scrapbooking or beautiful giftbags. But, style can be substance, too, in the right circumstances (though then we call it design).
At a elementary school we once considered, the director asked us to rank a series of caregiving activities for their level of importance, including “decorating a lunchbag”. Needless to say, that was really low on my list. After the “quiz” and discussion, she told us about the lunchbags her father lovingly decorated for her with drawings — brown bags — with original drawings. She said they were an important part of her school years, and one that touched the lives of her friends, with whom she would share the drawings. No, that did not mean I should start decorating bags (and I didn’t), but it was a good reminder of how love and care can be shared in many different ways.
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“Hopefully, most of us, in our private lives, do assign equal moral value, and afford equal respect, to everyone who works hard at something socially beneficial.”
I think there’s plenty of evidence that this is not a generally reliable truth and reminders to assign “equal respect” do involve more than simply saying it.
Applying the principle out of the private sphere, to me, means recognizing that some activities (often caregiving ones) require individual relationships between individual human beings and are thus unlikely to scale into any efficient system scaling those activities looking for short term economic efficiencies could have significant consequences in the long run. Teaching comes to mind, and nursing, and some forms of doctoring.
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The family home that I was describing upthread also has this copious black mold in the runners (?) of the windows that open (I believe that the windows turned out to be somewhat defective and they let in a lot of water into the window area, which has wooden frames). I try not to think very hard of exactly what that black stuff is, and what the long term effects are of spending very much time breathing it.
I’ve read a book called “The Secret Life of Hoarders,” and it seems that there are some health problems that are typical of people with catastrophically badly kept homes. As you can imagine, at some point, it becomes impossible to cook healthy meals in one of those houses.
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Argh. Slaughter has taken what parents do in their lives when they’re not working and called it “caregiving.” I would call it having a life.
There is no other word for the shorthand she uses for mostly-at-home parents besides insulting. Parents who are available to their kids are not “caregivers.” Slaughter, at a loss for why her teenagers do not want to spend time with her, calls all available-at-home parents substitutes for paid nannies.
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There’s a real phenomenon that I call “middle class squalor”: people who have homes that are dirtier and more unhealthy and uncomfortable than their income level would suggest. I’ve seen a number of examples around the country over the years and I suspect that it’s just the tip of a large iceberg. The ones I’ve seen probably aren’t even the really bad ones, since if things were just a little worse, I think you might stop having company out of shame.
I think self-caretaking is really hard, whether we’re talking about home, diet, exercise or health. (As MH suggests, it’s important that there be somebody in your life to drag you to the doctor.)
My grandparents are 88 and 91 right now, and while they have been getting steadily more fragile over the last year or so (my grandpa is finally selling his cows this year and they’ve bought some labor-saving yard equipment), it’s interesting and inspiring to see how effective they’ve been over the last few years at mutual-caregiving, at preserving their independence through pooling their remaining physical abilities. Grandma sees poorly, so grandpa sees for her. Grandpa’s mobility is limited, so grandma moves around for him. When either of them dies, it’s going to be nearly impossible for the remaining spouse to remain alone in the house living independently.
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I find paying people for cleaning pretty effective at avoiding squalor.
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Some people don’t have the money, but I think others who do have the money for cleaning help don’t do it because they believe that they ought to be doing the cleaning themselves. It’s this weird guilt thing. Also, at some point, the squalor gets so bad that people are embarrassed to have cleaners see their home in its natural state.
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Whoa, I don’t know how this turned into a discussion of how families with two working parents live in squalor, but just to clarify, we all know that’s not the norm, right? Here in my area of New England, we have this phenomenon apparently known as Portuguese mothers. Apparently, Portuguese mothers keep their homes *spotless* regardless of how many hours they work. They will get up at 4 am to make sure you can eat your breakfast off that floor. Of course, there are also Portuguese mothers who are slobs. I am really just saying it’s all a complex matter of culture and personality, etc. and probably has very little to do with how many hours one works.
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I thought Portuguese mothers produced a venom that could paralyze fish and send unprotected humans to the hospital.
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Urban legend. However, Snopes has confirmed that they do put hard-boiled eggs in bread.
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Funny–I had Portuguese cleaning ladies in DC (a mother/daughter team). I miss them so much.
I think it’s pretty individual how families cope. My grandma worked when I was a kid and my grandpa had both his mill job and his farm work and my grandparents’ home was always spotless in those years, but my grandma has always been a perpetual motion machine. She’s one of those ladies who drinks coffee all day long and literally cannot sit down when they know something needs to be done.
I don’t have anything like that energy level or commitment, but I do believe 1) We are important 2) We deserve to live in a house that is hygienic, passable and reasonably tidy 3) It’s worth spending time and money on taking care of us and taking care of our house.
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This was my mother – the house was always, always spotless.
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My point is not that it’s not important to draw on your kids’ lunch bags or whatever, but that as *policy*, I’m not willing to support compensation of “caregivers” who primarily do that sort of thing. I am quite happy, as a taxpayer, to support welfare policies, tax breaks, etc., for people who are at home all day with pre-school aged children, or disabled family members or incapacitated elders. People who are not in those situations should be able to keep their houses hygenic (if not tidy) even if they’re working full-time.
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Wow. This thread took an odd turn.
I liked Slaughter’s quote for the very reason that I’m only able to follow this thread this morning and missed the discussion over the weekend. Caregiving is a huge part of my life. I’m not making Martha Stewart cakes or excessively cleaning. I’m watching kids, helping friends, and feeding extended family members.
The older kid, who is as normal and typical as any kid, still needed lots of hand holding when his dreams of making the high school soccer team were dashed. He needed help creating a workable system for organizing his high school binders. He needed ice packs on his legs when he got shin splints from his cross country training. The younger kid needed much, much more this summer.
Ian can’t go out and play by himself. He talks to strangers, which is extremely dangerous. We need to work on that major social skill this fall. He gets lonely, because he doesn’t have any friends near by. He needs to be driven long distances to special needs camps and activities. He needs his questions answered. He needs a dose of ADHD medicine in the morning. I have to get him registered with the state department for disability this fall, which will involve hours and hours of paperwork and interviews.
Outside of my own kids, I helped a friend who parents passed away this spring and had an entire house to empty out. I spent hours on the phone talking to an old friend whose son is very sick. I made dinner for my parents and the extended family many, many times. I supported my husband as he went an many rounds of interviews for new jobs. (He starts a new position in two weeks. Yay! Health insurance!)
I worked really hard this summer and, outside of my family who knows the score, I received no appreciation for my efforts. I certainly received no monitary compensation for this work. No social security credit. I’m surprised this thread turned into a mommy-war thing, because for me, this isn’t about SAHP v. working parents. It’s really about acknowledging that care-taking is a valuable activity.
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Laura, most of your readers admire you. I’m sure your friends do too.
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I’m holding out for a new strain of rice.
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Sure, it’s extremely valuable (probably more valuable than how most paid workers spend their time), and I don’t mean to suggest that there’s a black and white split between people who 100% deserve legal “full-time caregiver” status and people who don’t deserve it at all, or that it’s even clear what kind of work counts. It just seems to me that if you’re talking about basing policy on the idea, you have to start making some distinctions. I didn’t mean to go off in a mommy wars direction either – though maybe it’s unavoidable once you start talking about compensation, benefits, etc. for caregiving (One more reason for universal health care! But there’s another potential veering off point.)
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But the original quote wasn’t talking about paid compensation for caretaking. Slaughter says that she would like to see that caretaking is equally respected/valued as paid employment. Valued doesn’t necessary mean a dollar amount from the government.
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Exhorting people to value something they don’t is an ineffective way to raise its worth. I wish Slaughter would have explored why we as a society don’t value caregiving–and, clearly, we do not–when at the same time we put a lot of pressure on women to take on that role.
If the dirtiness really bothered the husband, son, daughter, or any other member of the household Amy P describes above, they would have stepped up to clean it. That they didn’t is a sign that they probably don’t care, in which case, why should the mom be charged with a task that no one else in the household cares about one bit?
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“If the dirtiness really bothered the husband, son, daughter, or any other member of the household Amy P describes above, they would have stepped up to clean it. That they didn’t is a sign that they probably don’t care, in which case, why should the mom be charged with a task that no one else in the household cares about one bit?”
Actually, the really bad stuff started happening once the husband and wife were empty nesters, had a bit of money and there weren’t any kids at home (although the fridge was always a little scary–you could always find a dozen plates with margarine in the fridge if you looked hard), not to mention all the dishes with a few leftover canned green beans from dinner that nobody was ever going to eat and probably weren’t worth eating in the first place.
The marital dynamic, as far as I can tell, was that back when the wife was a SAHM, her husband griped at her about the house quite a bit, but once she was working, she gained just enough leverage at home that the two of them entered into a sort of cease-fire, a tacit agreement that neither of them was going to have to do any substantial housework.
I was there once and the husband of the family asked me to clean the refrigerator (we are near relatives). I agreed, but explained to him that when I took the dishes full of rotting scraps out of the fridge, that that meant that the dishes would need to go into the dishwasher and that in turn meant that the dishes that had been in the dishwasher would need to go into the cupboard, but that since the cupboard was full of containers with half-eaten stale energy bars and other containers with stale remnants of baked goods, that we would also need to clean out and rearrange the cupboards in order to have a place to put the dishes from the dishwasher. So I was going to need his help. He did help me, but before I explained that to him, he had no idea the magnitude of what he was asking me to do all by myself.
This story has a surprisingly happy ending. A few months later, one of the kids in the family explained to that couple that the grandchildren would not be visiting until the couple did something about the filth (and she offered to hire a cleaner for them, which they vociferously objected to). There was some whining and some hard feelings, but they really did clean up their act after that.
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I’m not at all convinced that society at large doesn’t value caregivers. For instance, I note that at any large non-elite gathering (a television audience, a town hall meeting etc.), the surest way for a woman to receive a big round of applause is to announce, “I’m a full-time wife and mother.” Obviously, in the workplace circles where I suspect Slaughter spends her time, people spend less time valorizing caregiving, because people tend to value their own activities.
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We like to say we value caregivers but our actions speak otherwise, I think. The whole “Being a mom is the most important job in the world!” crap feels like a patronizing pat on the head rather than an actual recognition of how hard caregiving is.
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I think that there is a lot of regional variation on the appreciation of caregiving. Around here, it’s pretty uncommon for a woman to identify herself as a “full-time wife and mother,” even if that what she really is. A lot of women describe themselves a former lawyer or a former teacher or by a part-time job or by some vague goal in the future. “I’m home right now, but I plan to get back into publishing.” There is a lot of shame in being a full-time mother.
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My husband is from a small, Midwestern town that pays a lot of lip service to appreciating caregiving, specifically mothering. When his brother’s wife got pregnant the expectation was that she would stay at home to care for her kids and that was the right and natural thing for her to do. But as soon as both of her kids were in school and she continued to be at home, that immediately turned into “what does she do all day?” and “why doesn’t she get a job?”
I don’t know that people in this community necessarily value caregiving but I also don’t know that they necessarily value women either. It’s more that they recognize that caregiving is an often unappealing task that needs to be done so it might as well be the women doing it.
I think there are some communities (usually very religious and culturally conservative ones) that genuinely do value caregiving. I have a loads of problems with other aspects of their social order and how they treat women but I don’t question that they think mothering and caregiving in general is worthwhile work.
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Nearly everybody thinks that other people aren’t working hard enough. That’s why I make sure nobody understands what I do.
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“My point is not that it’s not important to draw on your kids’ lunch bags or whatever, but that as *policy*, I’m not willing to support compensation of “caregivers” who primarily do that sort of thing. I am quite happy, as a taxpayer, to support welfare policies, tax breaks, etc., for people who are at home all day with pre-school aged children, or disabled family members or incapacitated elders. People who are not in those situations should be able to keep their houses hygenic (if not tidy) even if they’re working full-time.”
But this is where we always end up getting stuck when we make policy. I’m not going to advocate an economic lunch bag drawing subsidy either, but — we were talking about what was morally valuable. When we start talking about which care should be subsidized we are going to have disagreements. When should we subsidize? How do we decide when we should subsidize? It’s the same argument we get into on what public schools should offer.
I think that Slaughter’s move to the foundation is premised on trying to answer these questions and advocate for changes, but I don’t know exactly what solutions I’d advocate for — as an example, I am more prone to offering group resources (day care, relief time, . . .) than individual subsidies (payment to caregivers). The debate is pretty strong in the disability community, too on when it is appropriate to pay related individuals for care that would otherwise be provided by a stranger (and paid for by the state).
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More generally, with respect to some of the comments above, I think there’s a lot of regional, class, and religio-cultural variation in the appreciation of caregivers. (With respect to class, being a Martha Stewart hostess and school volunteer would be considered a full life in many upper middle class circles.)
Unfortunately for Laura and, I suspect, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the circles where caregivers are valued are the circles they find unappealing for other reasons. Northeastern, secular, middle-class, intellectual/literary/academic circles may be the ones which value caregiving the least.
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I’m back to being a full-time SAHM after 2 years of doing part time work and full-time caregiving. I’ve got twin 7 year olds. 2nd grade homework every day, a husband who is looking to me to find him a new executive level job, I’m actually paying attention to meal planning again, doing PTA, playing golf and feel like I’m not constantly running on empty.I also feel much more present in my kids lives, I was on call for part time job and it bled alot into my “kid” time.
I’m lucky, my husband, when I had to give up my work, tasked me right away with his job search because he just can’t do it and meet his heavy work/travel and our family commitments. He also knows I’m smart enough that I can handle it. I get a lot of appreciation for being the caregiver. I guess we’re the exception not the rule, we’re upper middle class, educated, New England/Irish transplants living in the south. And starting to consider moving back up north.
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If you think conservative America “values” caregivers, try being a stay at home mother on public assistance in the suburbs of Cleveland. My cousin is doing that right now because her son has severe learning disabilities and she was fired because she missed too much work due to being called to school so often. People say things like “why doesn’t she work?”
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