Sometimes my obsession with one issue causes me to overlook the obvious.
I’ve focused on how women are pushed into care work. We’re indoctrinated to believe we must be mothers (and also successful career women). It’s assumed that certain categories of tasks are our responsibility, by virtue of our reproductive organs. We’re told that we’re simply better at being caring and more family-centered. Sure, when you’re pushed into performing certain types of labor you do tend to become pretty good at it over the course of a lifetime. Practice makes perfect.
Women are cajoled into performing care work.
There’s another side to this that I’ve missed.
Men are denied the opportunity to perform care work.
Those cliches about care work guarantee a zillion likes and shares on social media for a reason.
It’s a cliche to describe care work as ‘the hardest job I ever loved.’
It’s a cliche to say no one on their death bed ever wished they’d spent more time at work.
It’s a cliche to say that family is all that matters.
There’s a lot of data showing that men are tremendously isolated. Women perform the emotional labor of cultivating social relationships and managing the family calendar. Men without women to do this work…don’t.
It’s just assumed that women will do the care work. It’s women’s work to be there day in and day out. It’s women’s work to keep the household together and running smoothly. It’s women’s work to develop the sort of connection with family members where you anticipate their needs and desires. It’s women’s work to have deep, meaningful relationships with people who need care.
Men aren’t expected to have deep, meaningful relationships with anyone. To be a man who wants the right to parent, access a full spectrum of human emotions, and have fulfilling friendships is suspect. It’s a little weird in New York. It’s more than weird in a lot of other places.
In Making Motherhood Work, Caitlyn Collins shows us how parental leave policies shape the experiences of middle-class working moms in Stockholm, Berlin, Rome, and DC.
Of the four cities, Stockholm is the only one where it’s normal for dads to take time off to care for young children. In the other capitals, dads leave moms to do the bulk of the parenting.
It may seem like a personal decision each couple makes, since the government isn’t in our kitchens divvying up our chorse. But those household decisions are shaped by larger forces. We make choices based on the options we’re given and the expectations we’re raised to have.
In DC it would cost more to put the kids in daycare than mom would earn if she went back to work, so she stays home. Rome’s employment system assumes there’s a male breadwinner and tracks moms into mommy jobs. In Germany daycare for kids under three is basically nonexistent and the hours assume moms work part-time. It’s easier to choose from the options you’re encouraged to take, rather than to forge your own path.
Policies that push women out of the workforce and hold men in. Women are compelled to put family first. Men have to prioritize their careers over their families.
The policies a country has regarding childcare tend to correspond with the policies they have for eldercare, because they’re both shaped by and shape expectations for who should provide care work.
In Stockholm, care work is shared somewhat equally by parents, with considerable help from government subsidized local childcare programs. Just as it’s a normal part of life to send kids off to daycare and school, it’s a normal part of life for eldercare to take place both inside and outside the home.
This didn’t just become normal by chance. Community care programs didn’t pop up like mushrooms after a rain. Paternity leave didn’t become commonplace because individual employers started offering it as a benefit and then men started opting to take it. These were policy decisions.
There’s no law that men in America can’t parent like moms are expected to parent. There’s nothing officially stopping them.
But for some reason there are no sociological studies on the experiences of working fathers.
And we call it “babysitting” when a dad is left alone with his kids.
And we joke about Mr. Mom when men prioritize parenting over work.
Sure, there’s no paternity leave in the US, but there’s no maternity leave, either.
Think of the stereotypes of the relationships between parents and their children.
As girls grow up, they go from simply receiving care from their mother to the incredibly deep bond that develops through the giving and receiving of care over the long-term.
What do boys get? The pedestal so many boys enjoy also denies them a depth of relationship. They get care, yet aren’t expected or allowed to give care.
The roles of mother, daughter, and wife are all encompassing.
The roles of father, son, and husband are largely symbolic.
We not only ask little of men, they’re systematically prevented from doing more.
The vast majority of the policies that shape our lives and culture today were crafted by white men. A lot of things have changed since women were granted the right to vote, but it wasn’t really very long ago.
Policy makers have denied other men the right to be actual parents. Policy makers crafted a role for fathers: A disciplinarian. A sports coach. A paycheck.
What role do men get to play in eldercare? They mow the lawn. They pay the bills. They carry the casket.
What does it say about the men who designed our governments that steered men away from taking care of their families?
Male caregivers are more likely to oversee work done by others. It’s assumed that’s because men are better able to afford to pay for care. Is it also because men have been encouraged to outsource caring labor their entire life?
Female family caregivers also complain of not being able to fulfill the roles of mother, daughter, wife. They are too busy on hold with insurance, navigating financial programs, scheduling and rescheduling, driving back and forth, learning to perform complex medical tasks.
All of this labor is not naturally part of care work. It’s the result of choices by policy makers.
In The Nordic Theory of Everything, Anu Partanen explains how:
“In America, after children grew into adults with their own children and responsibilities, the codependent child-parent relationship [prevalent in the US, but not the Nordic countries] seemed to flip 180 degrees. I met middle-aged adults overwhelmed with the enormously time-consuming and expensive burden of micromanaging the lives of their elderly parents. They were strung out by the tasks of coordinating medical care and treatment, and handling the logistics, and often the costs, of bills and insurance, on top of trying to juggle their own careers and parenting their own kids.
In Finland this kind of dependency was unheard of. Of course my Finnish acquaintances back home visited their aging or ailing parents regularly and helped them with small tasks, but being being saddled with the kind of caretaker duties Americans were involved with was, in most cases, unimaginable (Partanen, 2016, 31).”
Caregivers in the US speak so highly of hospice care because it’s so often the first time they’ve been supported enough to be one person with another, rather than a care worker frantically checking items off a list.
“In the Nordic countries, if one or both of your parents are chronically ill, you can rely on your country’s universal health-care system to handle the logistics and medical treatment. The result? You are freed up to do the more rewarding, loving things in the precious time you have left with your ailing parent, which the social workers can’t do: go for a walk, talk, read, just spend time together (Partanan, 2016, 58-59).”
It’s easy to blame technology for our social isolation.
In Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, Kristen Radtke suggests it’s more complicated than that. You don’t need a smartphone or an internet connection to be isolated.
Hearing her rattle off the hall of horrors that is the history of social theory — that era where we decided it was best to not touch orphans in order to control the spread of infectious disease — I wonder what sort of utopias our policy makers have been striving toward all this time.
The Family Caregiver Alliance is having a party on zoom to celebrate National Caregiver Month in the US. It’s today from 11a to 12:25p Pacific Time and you can sign up on Zoom. They promise animals and I’m pretty curious about what that means.
If you’re in the US, caregiving.com will help you calculate your caregiver salary and send your elected officials an invoice.
Tembi Locke put together downloadable resources for caregivers, including a gratitude journal and three episodes of her show.
Leah Libresco Sargeant writes about the ways medical staff depersonalize those believed to be dying.
If you’ve ever struggled to find time to shower (or had a disaster strike when you finally did try to shower) you’ll appreciate this article by Rebekah Curtis.