Other people's problems
And why caregivers turn down offers of help
Courtney Martin recently shared a link to a 2016 essay — 2016 seems so incredibly long ago! — The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems. It was interesting to re-read it and notice how her criticism of young American’s “saving the world” through overseas projects has so much in common with my criticism of people aspiring to “solve” caregiver burden.
“If you asked a 22-year-old American about gun control in this country, she would probably tell you that it’s a lot more complicated than taking some workshops on social entrepreneurship and starting a non-profit. She might tell her counterpart from Kampala about the intractable nature of our legislative branch, the long history of gun culture in this country and its passionate defenders, the complexity of mental illness and its treatment. She would perhaps mention the added complication of agitating for change as an outsider.
But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girl’s secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable.” (Courtney Martin)
That’s the attitude that’s so familiar.
Martin quotes C.Z. Nnaemeka, reminding us that having entrepreneurs pay attention to the unexotic underclass is progress. Although I suspect that the target market for most caregiving services is more aptly referred to as the unexotic middle class:
“the unexotic underclass, has the misfortune of being insufficiently interesting. These are the huddles of Whites – poor, rural working class – living in the American South, in the Midwest, in Appalachia. In oh-so-progressive Northeast, we refer to them as ‘hicks’ and ‘hillbillies’ and ‘trailer trash,’ because apparently, this is the one demographic that American manners have forgotten.” (C.Z. Nnaemeka)
Not that the unexotic underclass doesn’t serve as caregivers. It’s just that they’ve always been the caregivers, for their own families and for those above them in the social hierarchy. Thus, what problem is there to solve? They’ve always been the ones to carry the burden. The problem, the caregiving crisis, is that the burden is spreading up the social hierarchy so even those who were previously “very comfortable” are floundering.
Or maybe it’s not about historic behavioral norms. Maybe they’re just less likely to have cellphones and cash to spend.
For a while I did marketing and communications work for engineers. I’d put together proposals and sell sheets bragging about the snazzy features of their buildings and their technology. It was fun to get teams to tell me the story of each projects and come up with the best way to capture their excitement and pride.
But then I ruined it. On a vacation I decided to quietly arrange to stay in one of the university dormitories my buddies had designed. Then I took a course in another building designed by a client. Let’s just say the buildings I experienced were nothing like the ones I’d been told about.
These engineering teams had met with their clients to learn about the problem. They thought they’d devised brilliant solutions. I thought they had, too. Until I actually checked out the finished products, something the engineering teams hadn’t bothered to do.
The people I’ve met working in sustainable building engineering and addressing caregiver burnout are all smart enough to realize that the simple solutions they’ve envisioned aren’t going to cut it. If they pay attention.
Let’s hope they stick around long enough to notice how their brilliant solutions fare in the real world. Or they grow into people with a greater tolerance for complexity, even if their capacity for introspection lags behind.
For me, it’s a big red flag when I hear someone say they don’t know any caregivers. These people are most likely to reach out to me because they think they need my help. They have a great solution; they just don’t know caregivers to test their great new tool.
It’s no less a red flag when it’s coming from a caregiver saying they don’t know any other caregivers.
That’s someone who’s socially isolated. Either they have no relationships at all or they have shallow relationships. With the rates of chronic illness, disability, frailty among elders, and terminal illness, it’s really quite a feat.
In order for them to participate in a peer support group they face a steep learning curve. Not only are they new to the group, they’re figuring out the ropes of how to connect with other people beyond the surface.
Does it matter if people are out there thinking they’ve solved problems they know little about? Often it doesn’t. Those resources are unlikely to otherwise be channeled to more useful projects.
Sometimes it does matter.
“The “reductive seduction” is not malicious, but it can be reckless. For two reasons. First, it’s dangerous for the people whose problems you’ve mistakenly diagnosed as easily solvable. There is real fallout when well-intentioned people attempt to solve problems without acknowledging the underlying complexity.” (Courtney Martin)
You probably haven’t developed an app or designed building systems. You’re probably guilty of reductive seduction, though. In fact, most of us are. It’s why we so often get — and give — inappropriate advice.
The other day I took part in Misha Glouberman’s Conversation Lab. We weren’t talking about apps or American kids thinking they can solve problems in the global south. We were discussing how to encourage your mom to accept the outside caregiving help she so obviously needed. But the way to do better is the same.
The big takeaway for a lot of participants was that if you go into a conversation trying to convince someone you know how to solve their problems, you’re setting yourself up for trouble.
David McRaney pointed out that you can win a debate by refusing to be open to anyone else’s ideas. That’s not a very good tactic for connecting with people you care about.
When we think we know what’s best for someone else, we’re misguided. No matter how well we know them. Maybe we can coerce someone we love into taking our advice. More often pushing our agenda — and weaponizing our concern for them by turning it into guilt and shame — harms our relationship and pushes us farther away from an agreement.
How do we acknowledge things we disagree about in a way that strengthens connections? By letting go of thinking we already know everything we need to know. By being genuinely curious about the other person’s experience. By being transparent about how we feel and what we’re hoping for. By working towards a collaborative solution…and letting that happen over time, not forcing it into a single conversation.
How do you know you’re on the right track? When you listen to them deeply enough that you end up changing your mind.
Some of you know I’ve been debating PhD programs for a while now. I applied to a program before the pandemic and I’m glad I wasn’t accepted, for several reasons.
It’s hard to imagine applying again, because of the way most academic research is structured. You make a hypothesis. Then you test it in an artificial setting. Technically any result is fine, as long as you have a well designed study. More often, you’re rewarded for results that support your hypothesis.
I originally thought I could do “real” research, better research, if I was affiliated with a university.
If I was affiliated with a university, I’d need to get the IRB to approve my questions ahead of time. Which assumes I know enough about what I don’t know to know what to ask.
Over and over, the most interesting things I learn about caregiving don’t come from the interviews I carefully schedule. They come from conversations with people I didn’t know were caregivers. They happen at the dog park. They happen while we’re cleaning up after dinner. They’re off script. They’re about things I never would have known to ask about. They come out of nowhere or they come after weeks of circling around the topic. They don’t come up in a survey.
Caregiving is tough to talk about. When you’re asking a stranger questions about their life they give you the sort of answers we all give at border crossings: the version of the truth that’s most likely to be an acceptable answer.
The real answer is a tangle of contradictions. The real answer is something they don’t want to be true. The real answer takes some time and comes out as they’re driving me to the airport. Or it comes out with the anonymity of being a stranger on the bus.
After years of this, I still have no idea what questions to ask. If I had to identify the best question, that “question” is a very long silence while we’re doing a routine chore together.
It might not be real research, but maybe that’s okay. Doing real research feels less important to me now. The pandemic made it so much harder to find myself doing routine chores with people I hardly know, making me appreciate just how much more powerful that is than any survey I can imagine.
The solution is simple: remember that there are no simple solutions.
“They’re solving problems for people, rather than with, replicating many of the mistakes that the world’s largest development agencies make on a much smaller scale. They drop technology without having a training or maintenance plan in place, or try to shift cultural norms without culturally appropriate educational materials or trusted messengers. Or they’re spending the majority of their days speaking about the work on the conference circuit, rather than actually doing it.” (Courtney Martin)
We can’t solve problems for people, be they our best friend, a community, or a country.
Speaking of the unexotic underclass, Timothy Lee discusses why it used to be typical for middle class families to have live-in housekeepers and nannies and now they struggle to afford any help at all. The “caregiving crisis” is the new “servant problem.”
Barbara Penner digs into the history of home economics and shows that adaptive design is not new.
Kathryn Jezer-Morton discusses the ubiquity of nuclear families among mommybloggers, the invisibility of care work, and hope for escaping the scripts we’ve been handed.
Having been raised on the idea of humanity making continual progress, it was striking to realize the “ugly laws” were a product of the mid-1800s, aka the time when medicine was becoming what it is today, not some vestidial relic of a long-ago time.
In San Francisco, California, in July 1867, Martin Oates, a Civil War veteran, became the first person to be arrested under a new city law banning people with obvious disabilities from appearing in public. Passed earlier that month, Order No. 783 made it an offense for “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself to public view.” Oates had been paralyzed while fighting for the Union, becoming “a perfect wreck” and “half-demented,” according to the San Francisco Call. Despite his military service, Oates was jailed until he could be institutionalized in the young city’s almshouse, which was still under construction.
In many ways, bias against people with disabilities — and the very concept that disabilities are a separate subset of life, rather than a normative experience — is the result of modern scientific medicine.
Vanessa Milne’s article on the struggles of creating a child care system that’s affordable for parents, provides a living wage and acceptable working conditions for employees, and provides adequate care for children are very familiar.
I find it odd that she compares the salary of child care workers to zookeepers, since many zookeepers also earn minimum wage without benefits, despite having advanced degrees (and accompanying debt). They do have better job security and more predictable schedules, at least.
What, you haven’t been reading about the working conditions of zookeepers lately? A high school classmate is now a zookeeper and she shared an article about it a while back, which I couldn’t manage to dig up for you and decided we can all skip that rabbit hole today.
Cori - You know how I feel about all this. We are in total agreement. Re: young people being more interested in hunger in Africa, it's also the celebrities whose efforts for third world countries needs astound me, when they could be devoting their time and money (and voices) to the many horrific needs of this country.
Rosalyn Carter started her caregiver initiative in 1986. If a former first lady doesn't have the connections to bring our problems to the forefront and rally officials to take some action, it's a sad state. The other major caregiving associations don't seem to be making much of a dent either. What does it take to be heard?
Hearing real stories from real people is more important than all the studies that people are doing. Statistics don't seem to matter. When you tell the government that family caregivers save them $450 billion a year, I wonder if they just see that stat as "money in their pockets" that they don't have to underwrite. When they hear that almost a third of the country's population is caring for a family member in some capacity, why don't they see that as a huge and powerful voting block?
There are so many of us and so many of us are silent. I've said it before and I'll say it again, IT'S TIME FOR FAMILY CAREGIVERS TO MAKE SOME NOISE.
Thanks for your post. They're always amazing.
Hi Cori! I have been meaning to get in touch because I wanted to speak with you about your last post but now the matter has become urgent because there is so much more to say about THIS post! My daughter Natalie who is doing her PhD in the history of disability design at UW (Home Ec dept!) is a friend/colleague of Liz Jackson who coined the term "disability dongle" https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/disabled-people-want-disability-design-not-disability-dongles-1.5353131#:~:text=She%20defines%20a%20disability%20dongle,disabilities%20never%20knew%20they%20had.&text=Disability%20dongles%20also%20speak%20to,instead%20of%20participants%20in%20design.. Which of course I was reminded of reading your thoughts on designers who don't know their customers at all. I would love to speak with you about so much of what you are writing about - not least, how some caregivers think other peoples' problems are simple and easy to solve. I'll be in touch - Donna