How to value and re-elevate caregiving

We've gradually forgotten that caring for others can be a transcendent experience

Elissa Strauss, left, and her new book. Credit: Elissa Strauss

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Last week, I had a Q&A go up at the Institute for Family Studies blog in which I interviewed journalist, author, and mom Elissa Strauss. She just wrote a new book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, which I described in the Q&A as part personal journey and part journalistic investigation, with the goal of finding ways to value and re-elevate caregiver roles. Those roles include parents, but also people taking care of elderly family members, the disabled, etc. In her book, Strauss described the experience of becoming a caregiver as “wild and transcendent.”

Strauss’ commentary during our conversation was genuinely moving (someone I know cried while reading a draft of the piece). For instance, here’s the last line of the IFS Q&A: “When we make the world more hospitable for anyone who is dependent — and that could be a child or someone with a disability or someone who is old — we make the world more hospitable for the people caring for them.”

Other parts of the interview deal with recovering an older version of feminism, the term “homemaker,” and how parenting forces people to question their priorities and accept uncertainty. It’s also worth mentioning that I especially liked the book because I could see a bit of my own journey in the way it chronicles the devaluation of caregiving and pathways ways back, and because it’s not trafficking in culture war fodder. Anyway, it was a fun Q&A to do, so here’s the link again.

But as is often the case with interesting discussions, our call ran long and not everything fit in the IFS piece. So I wanted to revisit the conversation here and share a few more comments. So, without further ado, here’s are more of Strauss’ comments on how to value caregiving¹:

On what people can do to re-elevate caregiving and make it more manageable in their lives:

“I feel like a lot of the well-worn advice is just absolutely true. You shouldn't do this alone.

I think when we keep care small and when we don't see how big it is, we get very unrealistic ideas of what it looks like — namely, that it's something we can or should do on our own. It's not. You need to be in a community, you need support. It’s a fantasy that has kept the narrative around care so small that you would ever be able to do this on your own.

I think the other thing that happens when we keep care small is we get these narrow minded ideas of what success looks like. So we get stuck on, for example, how exactly did breastfeeding go? Or, and these things keep going through early childhood, is your baby sleeping? Not that those aren't real concerns. But there's often this extra pressure around them where it's like, you've succeeded or failed.

We don't see that there's this big, ongoing transformation. It's a very, very long game and we get stuck in these minor moments of success or failure. I've seen it again and again. They weigh new parents down so much. Like if someone else's kid is potty trained six months before the other, you feel like it's a failure. And to me, that's a world that views care as small and forgets that it's a relationship between two unique individuals and not some cookie cutter experience.

I think for those caring for someone like a parent, for men particularly, I'd say call yourself a caregiver. It’s like a coming out that's very important because once you name it, you see yourself in that context. I think it's particular to men that they kind of resist that label, or they don't feel like they deserve it. And they do. They should own it. And then they should inhabit the world as someone who is living a life where they're not only responsible for themselves, but for others and all that that entails.

And then we just need to keep saying it again and again, you do need these bigger networks. Ask people for help. When you ask people for help, you not only give them that nice dopamine boost that people get when they help others, but also you open up the possibility for them to ask you for help.

So much of how I've survived parenting is because I have a collective of families where it's kind of always like if you're home, and someone needs to take their kid to your place, as long as that's possible it’s just kind of always okay. So again, it's a myth that it's something that we could do on our own.”

On how we ended up devaluing caregiving in the first place:

“I feel like we went from care as a fairy tale. You can see this a lot in religious traditions, whether it's the Virgin Mary or, I’m Jewish, the Woman of Valor, which is a song praising a very idealized maternal figure that is sung around the Friday night Shabbat table. So we had this fairy tale version of care where it wasn't really a narrative that was actually created by caregivers themselves. It was created by others idealizing care.

We needed to correct the fairy tale narrative. Nothing that's actually good and meaningful in life is either all good or all bad. That's not how life works.

But I think we're in a place of overcorrection at this point, where it's actually uncomfortable for moms to say they like motherhood in certain circles. I've witnessed this. Somehow it became the taboo to say you like it.

That shouldn't erase that a lot of people struggle with parenting for all different types of reasons, both internal and external. But the fact that that's the strange thing to say now is something I think we really need to pay attention to. So I think we got into a stage of overcorrection. And all the while we didn't actually have deep curiosity about what the experience of care is.”

On how to find the middle ground between idealizing care and over-complaining:

“I think it really starts with curiosity about our experiences as caregivers.

There's a man. I met him, he came to my book reading event in New York, who cared for his wife with Parkinson's for 25 years. And you know, the heartbreak is all there. But also, it gave his life deep meaning and purpose. Those stories strike us as strange, they're kind of new to the ear. People are like, wait, what? You accept this as your life? So I feel like it starts with curiosity.

I also think we need to think about care maybe using the hero's journey framework. Or the Hollywood trailer. There’s the music, the crescendo, and then it gets kind of slow and the strings are humming. It has all those dynamics. If we could see our care stories as these bigger, more epic experiences that make us matter in the world and bring our lives meaning, I think that can help us get away from these two totally flattened ways of just talking about care, which is the fairy tale or the nightmare.”

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1. I’m not framing this as a straightforward Q&A because the first part of the conversation is in the IFS piece, and because I’m jumping around a bit to different parts of the conversation.