Eight Myths About Care that Drive Two Care Experts Crazy

Elliot Haspel and Elissa Strauss point out the biggest misunderstandings

Thanks for reading and subscribing to “Made With Care,” a deep dive into the cultural roots of the care crisis. I really care about care and so glad you do too. For more on the subject, check out my new book “When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others.”

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*Note, this post is going out from both

Elliot Haspel

’s

The Family Frontier

(on Thursday, 2/13) and

Elissa Strauss

’s

Made with Care

today.

One of the biggest reasons the care crisis feels so intractable is that we do not, and have not, talked about care enough.

There is a care-shaped hole in nearly every major academic discipline, and our political and popular culture hasn’t done much better. The reality of human dependency, and the needs of people who care for other people, have historically been ignored by the broader culture. As such, we lack a shared vocabulary and collective understanding of what care entails, what kind of support parents and caregivers need, and what good care could, and should, look like outside of outdated, mid-century patriarchal norms.

Care doesn’t fit easily into our ideas about a functioning society, which are based on the idea that we should all be free to pursue our own goals. Nor does it fit easily into our narratives about personal growth, which mostly hinge on self-exploration on our own, away from the noise of family life.

Long story short, there is a lot of work to be done when it comes to meaningfully understanding the value of care and visioning a world that acknowledges and supports parents and caregivers.

We believe such work requires deep, intimate conversation, a digging down to the roots, and a shedding of easy political binaries in favor of a deeper wrestling and openness to new ideas and approaches.

The good news? We will be doing exactly this at “Care in America: Historical Perspectives, Future Visions,” in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, March 11-13. It’s a three day seminar organized by Capita, with the two of us as hosts.

Here’s the description from Capita:

Rooted in the tradition of the Socratic seminar and our shared commitment to interdisciplinary, cross-ideological dialogue, this event will explore the history and possible futures of care and caregiving in America.

This seminar will provide a unique space for participants to explore critical issues and contribute to envisioning a more stable and flourishing future for families and communities.

Together, we’ll engage with historical and contemporary texts that add depth to the ongoing public conversations around child care, family life, work, parenthood, and societal well-being.

Details:

• Date: March 11, 2025 - March 13, 2025 (kicking off the afternoon of the 11th).

• Location: Rizzo Conference Center, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

• Cost: $1,750

Please note that participation in this seminar is strictly limited to 15 people to ensure a rich and interactive experience. You can find more information and sign up here. I hope someone from your team will be able to join us.

To prepare for this seminar, we have put together a list of the eight care myths that we most want to dispel. We look forward to discussing these myths and more next month.

ONE: Care is a fairy tale. (Care is a horror story.)

For a long time, we diminished care through shallow sentimentalization. In this worldview care is simple, easy, always fulfilling—and something women are naturally inclined to. There was no mention of the burdens of care, or how care can hold parents and caregivers back from economic security and pursuing other interests and needs.

With the correction of this worldview came a sometimes overcorrection. Some second wave feminists, and many who followed them, focused more on getting women access to the freedom and economic security men enjoyed, while also prioritizing male definitions of success and living “a good life” in the process. This brought important benefits—personally, I am so glad to have a bank account, a job, and birth control— but it also fed into a popular conception of care as a miserable, unproductive and imprisoning experience.

Ultimately, both narratives diminish and demean care. Care is a human relationship, with many dimensions, possibilities, and plenty of friction. It’s also one that brings many people meaning and joy. When we get rid of the fairy tale/ horror story paradigm we begin to see that this friction can be productive and illuminating and shape us in profound ways. We also get a clearer picture of what kind of support parents and caregivers need to be present in the care relationship and grow from it.

TWO: Good care requires pure self-sacrifice.

Maurice Hamington, a philosopher who focuses on care, once told me that “care isn’t altruism.” I love this saying so much because it so succinctly captures what I have learned from studying the work of care ethicists.

For so long the definition of good care was tangled up with endless giving and depletion of the self on behalf of the caregiver. But we can’t offer those we care for true receptivity, attunement and compassion if we don’t also give ourselves that. For one, we will be exhausted; our tank will be empty. Also, we won’t be able to engage with their needs adequately if we aren’t in touch and meeting our own. And not just practically, but emotionally, psychologically and even spiritually, too.

Care, and this bears repeating, is a relationship between two people. You need to be a person, to care well.

THREE: It ruins care to talk about it in an economic context.

I understand the hesitation to reduce care to the language of markets and economics. The care I give my sons, and our connection, definitely far transcends the transactional and cold nature of money. Personally, I never felt at ease with the concept creep that happened with the phrase “emotional labor” which went from something used to describe the big smile worn by flight attendants, to me lying in bed with one of my kids and talking through a bad day. The former has clear transactional qualities. The latter can be profound and transcendent and leave me thinking “This! This is real life! A good life!” (Quick footnote: In Elissa’s book, she wrote about a big meta-analysis of workers whose job includes some “emotional labor” and it turned out that they found their jobs more satisfying than those who don’t. This surprised the study’s authors. When conditions are right, human connection can, and always has been, a beautiful thing.)

And yet, even with my relative unease of using market language in conversations about care, I can’t turn away from the fact that both of my grandmothers died in relative poverty because they spent their lives caring.

Things are hardly better today when the financial burden of care is making life everything from unbearable to impossible for parents and caregivers—and getting in the way of them having meaningful care experiences and providing good care.

When we talk about care and money we don’t strip care of its sacred qualities, but make such sacredness possible. Like so much with care, what we need is more discussion, not less. The problem isn’t talking about care and economic metrics like the GDP—the problem is when we only talk about care that way.

FOUR: Men are less capable of care compared to women.

Men can care, are caring, and value caring. Are they doing their fair share of care yet? Nope. But they are doing more than they have in generations—arguably since the industrial revolution separated the home and the workplace—and they increasingly report caring for their loved ones as an important part of their identity. In fact, one out of five stay-at-home parents is now a father.

Additionally, recent neuroscience research suggests that men are no less “wired to care” than women. They too have a caring instinct that gets turned on through caring for others. They just need more opportunities to care, willingness to care, and a culture that sees and supports them as parents and caregivers.

And for a zeitgeist check, consider these two dad commercials. In 2012, Huggies ran a commercial testing their diapers against the ne plus ultra of caregiving incompetence: dads, “alone with their babies.” This month, we got a Super Bowl commercial featuring a deeply engaged dad who believes his whole self, including his professional self, has been shaped for the better by caring for his daughter.

FIVE: Care and education of children are severable concepts.

Humans do not have separate channels in our brains called “care” and “learning.” At the most basic level, no one is learning anything if they don’t feel cared for—when a parent or teacher screams at you, are you primed to learn how to add fractions? Of course not. You’re shut down.

Care is the enabling foundation of all learning, in both an emotional and neurological sense. Warm, stable relationships promote healthy growth of executive functioning skills like concentration, as well as healthy memory-forming sleep patterns—pretty important for education! In fact, as infants, care is quite literally the channel through which learning occurs. To be sure, the act of teaching how to add fractions and the act of helping a child navigate emotional distress aren’t identical. But it’s child development, not turtles, all the way down.

At the same time, there is an awful lot of “academics” happening in child care settings, even if it looks like play and not like a classroom of children at desks. Not only does the care environment itself serve as a rich tapestry for learning, research shows that providers in over 90% of formal care settings, and nearly 70% of informal settings, conduct reading activities every day (and that was from an early-2000s data set!). As educator Erika Christakas says, “schooling and learning are often two different things.”

And all of this doesn’t even touch on the ways in which educational institutions like schools serve a very practical child care function!

SIX: Care is, and always has been, solely the responsibility of a nuclear family.

The 1950s Ozzie-and-Harriet style family is actually the historical anomaly, not the need for non-kin forms of child care. This makes sense when one thinks about the demands made on adults through human history from hunter-gatherer tribes to subsistence farmers. Instead, humanity is marked by the presence of “alloparents”; as a group of researchers has explained: “Alloparenting, defined as care provided by individuals other than parents, is a universal behavior among humans that has shaped our evolutionary history and remains important in contemporary society.”

Moreover, the idea that there is a separate sphere of domestic life that is outside of the public concern was pushed very intentionally by conservative forces in the 1960s and 1970s. As Maxine Eichner writes in The Free-Market Family, “the widespread recognition at the beginning of the twentieth century that market pressures could be destructive to families, and that it was government's role to buffer families from these forces, was turned on its head. Government action was increasingly associated with damage to families. Meanwhile, government leaving families to fend for themselves against market forces was seen as healthy and normal.”

SEVEN: The need for external child care is purely an artifact of modern times.

To quote from Elliot’s upcoming book, Raising a Nation: “Would it surprise you to learn there was a movement to provide care and education for children between 18 months and four years of age in the late 1820s? As in, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson? When the must-have toy for children was a wooden cup-and-ball known as a bilboquet?”

The “infant school movement” in New England was a series of proto-child care centers, intended (tell us if this sounds familiar) to help mothers work and also provide a measure of child development to the little ones. Fun fact: Louisa May Alcott’s father, Bronson, was a well-known infant school teacher.

Similarly, you may know the story of the World War II Lanham Act child care centers. There were also child care centers put up during the Civil War; the first federally-funded child care program in America was established in Philadelphia in 1863 to support women working in clothing factories and hospitals.

In short, America has a far longer history of society supporting parents than conventional wisdom suggests.

EIGHT: A strong care ethic stands against “bootstrap” American individualism.

As the above examples show, leaning into care is extremely American. While we are certainly a nation that tends toward individualism, waving away care as collectivist reflects a caricature of individualism rather than our complex, nuanced, tension-filled culture. In fact, the author Alissa Quart notes that “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” started as an absurdist and mocking phrase, as getting on boots in the era when the phrase originated required human or mechanical assistance.

Instead, there is a crying need to make the invisible visible. As Elissa writes about the ideas of care philosopher Eva Feder Kittay, “Our society and institutions were built around the idea of ensuring our equality and protecting our independence. Both are noble values, even if they have yet to be delivered to all. But as a culture, we fail to acknowledge those times we aren’t equal, like when we are young, old, or impaired in some fashion. Nor do we do much to acknowledge the times when we aren’t independent, the norm for the many of us who spend the beginning and end of our lives depending on another, and much of the middle being depended on.”

American individualism has room for care; in fact, care is there already. We just need to bring it into the light.