Taking Care Seriously

Part 1 of 3 of our Civic Art of Parenting Series

A neighbor in mud boots

In the final episode of our Civic Art of Parenting series, Lura described a moment that we keep coming back to on the podcast. After a rain storm, she came across a neighbor in his mud boots, clearing leaves from the drainage grates. She asked how it became his job. He said: “I can’t see that anybody else does it.”

That sentence is a small masterclass in civic care. He saw a problem. He felt capable of addressing it. And he did.

Those two pre-conditions for civic health, awareness and a sense of agency, are both eroding. And we think that erosion is a far bigger concern than most of the political problems we spend so much time on.

We’ve organized our lives so efficiently that care has become almost entirely invisible. It’s segregated and siloed into institutions — schools, nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, and hospice wards. It happens in dedicated spaces staffed by trained professionals, separated from the rest of daily life.

And what we don’t see, we can’t value. What we can’t value, we don’t practice. What we don’t practice, we lose.

The COVID moment was clarifying on this issue. Overnight schools closed and millions of parents were confronted with a fact they had never before had to fully process: school is, in significant part, child care. The invisible work of not just educating kids but keeping them safe and engaged suddenly became visible when it became the responsibility of parents trying to work from home.

It’s not that parents weren’t aware of what happens in school. Of course they were. But going from spectator to participant was, for many of us, a wakeup call.

It’s also important to remember that care isn’t just about children. It’s needed across the entire lifespan. Prior to roughly 1900, most people would have witnessed someone give birth and watched someone die. Most people would have cared for sick and elderly relatives as a matter of course, because that’s what it meant to live in communities where people depended on each other across generations.

You cared for elderly relatives. You were present at births. You helped neighbors who were struggling. Death, dependency, and vulnerability were part of ordinary life, not things that could be outsourced to a professional.

Now they happen somewhere else, usually in institutions. Separated from daily life and increasingly things to avoid or fear. And the consequences are measurably worse. People with serious mental illness have somewhat better outcomes in more traditional societies, not because those societies have better psychiatric medicine, but because those societies are more likely to integrate vulnerable people into community life, give them meaningful roles, and surround them with people who know them. A controlled facility is safer in a narrow sense, but it does not produce flourishing.

When Care Becomes a System

We’ve also made care structurally harder through (sometimes) well-intentioned regulation. A woman who offered to let neighborhood kids wait for their school bus in her front hall during cold weather was ordered to stop by Michigan Department of Human Services, which argued that caring for neighborhood kids for free for 20 minutes a day meant she was running an unlicensed daycare.

Washington, D.C. just implemented a requirement that daycare workers have a college degree. Not only do these kinds of regulations misunderstand what really goes into high-quality care, it’s also guaranteed to increase the cost and decrease the availability of desperately needed childcare. Lauren’s former nanny was a former long-haul truck driver with ADHD who got her kids outside and moving every single day in a way that an exhausted parent at the end of a work day simply wasn’t going to do. A college degree requirement would have screened her out, a loss to the nanny, Lauren, and her kids.

What these policies share is a theory of care as professional specialization, requiring centralization and standardization. Get the right credentials, put the right people in the right facilities, and care becomes a system you can audit and certify. What gets lost is the informal, embedded, distributed network of care that humans have been providing each other for thousands of years: the stuff that the leaf-clearing neighbor does in his mud boots because he can see the problem and knows he can address it.

Making Care Visible Again

Taking care seriously means, first, making it visible again. Some societies have figured out pieces of this. Many beer gardens in Germany have playgrounds next to them. Dementia villages in the Netherlands let people with cognitive decline wander through a community where the post office workers are trained attendants. A dementia cafe in Japan has people with cognitive decline take your order, with patrons knowing full well the order might go sideways. The point isn’t efficiency. The point is that care is woven into ordinary life rather than quarantined from it.

Making Care Everyone’s Job

Second, taking care seriously also means resisting gendered logic that says care is women’s domain or that it is a low-status activity. There’s nothing biologically inevitable about care being assigned to women. The majority of elementary school teachers were once male. For much of the church’s history in Europe, monastic orders ran hospitals, hospices, orphanages, and poorhouses.

What we have is a history of incentives and norms, and history can change. The data on millennial fathers, who are spending roughly triple the time with children that boomer fathers did, suggests it already is.

Rather than professionalizing, standardizing and institutionalizing care in an effort to improve its status, finding ways to make care visible and valued is the path to getting more people engaged in providing it to their communities.

Making Care a Practice

But the third and deepest piece of taking care seriously is recognizing that care is a skill that requires practice. You don’t become a good caregiver through credentialing or instruction. You become one by doing it, repeatedly, when situations require it. We used to get that practice unavoidably, just by living in extended families and communities where people only had each other.

We’ve designed that practice out of most people’s lives. And then we wonder why care feels so fraught, so specialized, so far from ordinary life.

The leaf-clearing neighbor had it right. See the problem. Trust that you can do something about it. And then do it.