Forced to Care

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.

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

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.

But an infrastructure of care is also about imagining — and enacting — more robust and informal communities of care.

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

In her excellent book Forced to Care, Evelyn Nakano Glenn refers to this ongoing scenario as a care crisis. It’s not just that there isn’t enough care — it’s that those who end up providing it are coerced, in some form, to do so.

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.

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.