Forced to Care

The experience is often so traumatic and exhausting that once they’re out of the thick of it, they don’t want anything to do with the ongoing struggle. There’s sympathy for others, but very little solidarity.

And so the care crisis keeps deepening — and will continue to do so, so long as we continue to treat a systemic problem as private responsibility.

our most venerated heroes are those who (ostensibly) “did it themselves,” even if they absolutely did it, whatever it is, with the invisibilized labor of women, or exploitative and racialized labor practices, or the benefits of familial wealth.

There’s coercion through kinship ties — aka, the person in need of care is my father, or my Aunt, or my kid, and it is my responsibility to provide it for them, even if I don’t particularly want to or am even able to.

Even if 80% of adults still live within two hours of their parents, as of 2016, only one in five American families has a “stay-at-home” parent (an increasingly antiquated word to describe not working for pay). An estimated 16.8 percent of the population — 41.8 million people — currently provides care for adult over 50, a number that will only conti... See more

it doesn’t have to be this way. We can create infrastructures of care — on both a societal and community level.

the politics of inevitability: there’s a palpable feeling of resignation and a paucity of imagination when it comes to what care could look like.

What we have, then, is a caregiving paradigm — not just for kids, but for elders and other adults — that relies heavily on proximity to family and presumed willingness. For those without those things, there are two options: 1) pay a lot of money for help, or 2) figure it out your damn self.

Most essentially, it’s about treating child and elder care as infrastructure: absolutely essential to the health of society, and deserving of holistic reforms that treat it as such.