Unfinished Business (11 page)

The story of care and the single person has several strands. First is the resentment that many singles or members of childless couples feel at being ignored or talked over in work-family debates, an omission that often translates into the implicit assumption that care is only for parents. We love and care for many different people in our lives, in our nuclear, extended, and constructed families. Taking time to spend with a friend living through or dying of cancer, for instance, should rank certainly as high or higher on the care meter as watching a child's soccer game.

A second strand is the assumption that people who do not have family members to go home to have no reason to want to
go home. Even viewed purely from the performance standpoint as competitors, they will perform far better if they rest and recharge. Care also has many faces. Caring for members of your community—your church, temple, mosque, YMCA, local food bank, Little League, Big Brothers and Sisters organization, and so many more—occupies a different but no less important part of the care spectrum as family responsibilities.

The third and final strand, perhaps least well understood, is the importance of self-care. The millennials who are now insisting, well before they have families, that they “want a life” are smart enough to know that caring for themselves, for their bodies through regular exercise and for their minds and souls through activities that stretch and sustain them beyond their work, is essential to their health and happiness over a lifetime. They may have been forced into this discovery due to the sharply limited work options they have confronted since the Great Recession, but they appear to have made a virtue of necessity. They are investing in themselves more intelligently than their older colleagues who stay chained to their desks in response to the outmoded and inefficient dictates of a twentieth-century workplace.

T
HE EASIEST WAY TO MEASURE
the value we place on care is to see how little we are willing to pay for it. Caregivers are among the lowest-paid American workers. Moreover, “
low-income African American and immigrant women are heavily overrepresented in the most poorly paid care jobs.” That's the trifecta of low value: woman, color, and care.

A remarkable young Chinese American woman named Ai-jen
Poo has fought an important and courageous campaign to improve the incomes and living conditions of paid careworkers.
She has been organizing immigrant women workers for almost two decades;
her work led to the Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights in New York, which gives nannies and housekeepers the right to overtime pay, a day of rest for every seven days worked, three paid days off each year, and explicit protection under New York State human rights laws. Writing about that campaign in her book
The Age of Dignity
, she describes a “
winning coalition that crossed lines of race, class, gender, and age”: union members, farmworkers, “racial justice groups, immigrant groups, women's organizations, faith-based groups, students, celebrities.” She also links the importance of the work these women do to the “elder boom” in America, which is already upon us as the baby boomers age, pointing out that in care work, the boss cannot be the enemy. The employers of home-care workers are often the very people they care for, or those people's parents or children.

The point here is that the economic, social, and human dimensions of care intersect so many lives in ways that cannot be captured by traditional economic, social, and political divides. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and a writer who describes his experiences with elder patients and his own father in his book
Being Mortal
, reminds us that even if we are not giving care ourselves now, we cannot avoid needing it later. “
Your chances of avoiding the nursing home,” he writes, “are directly related to the number of children you have, and, according to what little research has been done, having at least one daughter seems to be crucial to the amount of help you will receive.” All of us, then, have a stake in ensuring that when we get to that stage of life, our children or other younger relatives have the ability to help care for us. Valuing care now is in our own self-interest.

C
ARE IS THE CRUCIBLE THAT
can help reforge the sisterhood of the early feminist movement and expand and shape it into a much broader human coalition. Care can unite women up and down the income scale and across races and ethnicities. It can unite the experiences of heterosexual and same-sex couples, older generations and younger ones. It can provide a common metric for the quality of single and married life, for couples and communities of different kinds.

Valuing care also offers a compass to a new set of workplace and national policies. Challenging employers, politicians, and ordinary citizens to explain why, exactly, it is more important and valuable to compete with one another than to care for one another forces a hard and searching look at what we say but do not do, what we assume but won't admit.

During the course of writing this book, I gave a lecture called “Having a Life” to Princeton's graduating seniors in which I argued that they should value breadwinning and caregiving equally over the course of their lifetimes. I asked a number of my volunteer student researchers to canvass their male friends in particular for their reactions, and one young man, an economics major, offered a careful response. From his perspective, the problem is “
that people internalize the judgments of the market on caregivers and breadwinners.” It's much easier to value the contribution of breadwinners, because their performance is compensated in the common metric of money. Moreover, consider the laws of supply and demand. “There is a more limited supply of able breadwinners than there is of caregivers. This means that socially, the worth of caregivers is ‘priced' lower than that of breadwinners.” To illustrate the point more fully, he outlined a thought experiment.

Suppose we decide that the value of janitors and computer scientists to our society is the same. We clearly need both for our society to function the way we want it to. However, it's
unlikely a janitor will get as much social respect as a computer scientist, because many people can be janitors (just as many people can be good caregivers), but few can be good computer scientists (as relatively few can be successful breadwinners). So, while it is perfectly valid for us to argue that breadwinners and caregivers should be valued equally in theory, it will be nearly as difficult to achieve social equality for breadwinners and caregivers in reality as it will be for janitors and computer scientists.

I was grateful for his honesty. He was willing to bring out into the open a deep assumption about the nature of caregiving: that it is something many people can do with little training. Although he doesn't quite go this far, to him caregiving is nearly analogous to being a janitor. Janitors clean floors; caregivers bathe children or aging parents. Software developers or, for example, money managers do important work that requires high-level training.

But is managing money really harder than managing kids? This chapter will challenge that assumption head-on. Not by trying to lower our estimation of the difficulty and value of money management, but by raising our estimation of the value and importance of caregiving and the skills we need to do it well. In economic terms, caregiving is investment in human capital, our most precious asset as a society.

It may seem obvious, but let's be clear about the meanings of “breadwinning” and “caregiving.” In any society that has a system of exchange beyond barter, adults have to earn income—to pay the rent or the mortgage; buy food, clothing, and furniture; pay for transportation, heat, electricity, health insurance, and a phone. Breadwinning.

One or both members of a couple must also do the work that turns that income into goods and services necessary for survival
and flourishing: shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing, driving, repairing, organizing, and outsourcing. And that is just the physical dimension of care, the taking care of another human being in the same way that a caretaker looks after a house or property. “Caregiving,” the term we typically use when we mean taking care of other people, includes the additional emotional component of love and nurture, the transformation of an income stream into the lifeblood of human connection.

This broader understanding of caregiving also includes teaching, discipline (holding the line even in the face of tears, threats, and curses), coaching, encouraging, problem solving, character building, and role modeling. Often caregiving is about reliability: simply being there when being there is important to your child, your parent, or your spouse. And it's about support: focusing on someone else's needs and figuring out how to meet them, whether finding a lost sock, book, or cellphone or offering a genuinely attentive ear.

Care is the complement to competition in whatever we do. Good caregivers, including managers and leaders, certainly know how to use competition to sharpen incentives to succeed. But good competitors equally understand the value of care.

I
N
T
HE
P
RICE OF
M
OTHERHOOD
, Ann Crittenden tells a story about being in the home of a family-care provider and watching her serve lunch to a group of kids ranging in age from eighteen months to five years.

When a four-year-old tipped over a glass of milk, she calmly said, “Uh-oh, that's why we have plastic over the table.” She
fetched a cloth and wiped up most of the spill, then handed it to the boy to finish the job. Within a minute he was happy again, unaware of all that had gone into the incident: the preparation of a child-friendly, accident-proof environment; the everyone-makes-mistakes acceptance of a small child's natural clumsiness; the avoidance of blame; the efficient, cando solving of a problem; the child's assumption that he was part of the solution, expected to clean up a mess and presumed to have the competence to do it.

Wow. I certainly never managed to communicate all of that to my kids when they spilled something. Indeed, I flinch a bit as I think back to breakfast time when they were under five and we had to get them out the door to daycare at the same time that Andy and I were trying to read early morning email, prepare for class, or meet some writing deadline, all while trying to get out the door ourselves. As one colleague of mine said about such mornings, “The question was not whether there was yelling, it was just about when the yelling started.” But even with more time and less stress, I don't think I would have figured out how to handle a spill in a way that teaches important life lessons, at least not without a lot of time and reading.

Perhaps, then, we can bump caregiving a couple of notches higher than cleaning. According to Megan Gunnar, a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota who works at the intersection of developmental psychology and neuroscience, a good early-childhood caregiver needs the analytical skills of a physicist, the adaptive abilities of a crisis manager, the emotional insight of a psychologist, and the range of general knowledge of a
Jeopardy!
champion. As she puts it, caring for young children “
requires this capacity to analyze what's happening in the moment, figure out what concept the child could be learning. Which physics concept
should I be teaching here? Which numerical concept is this appropriate for? What language arts can I do? [Responding] in the moment, dynamically, really takes analytic skills, executive function, ordering and sequencing, and knowing a lot of information.”

What difference does that kind of care make? Today we have neuroscientific evidence for the proposition that the kind of care you receive from birth to age five can set you up or keep you down for life. Over a decade ago the National Academy of Sciences published the book
Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development
. The book opens with a simple proposition: “
From the time of conception to the first day of kindergarten, development proceeds at a pace exceeding that of any subsequent stage of life.” Moreover, that development “is shaped by a dynamic and continuous interaction between biology and experience.”

A more recent study tallied the results of a North Carolina social experiment that first began in the early 1970s. The Carolina Abecedarian Project compared two sets of disadvantaged children: one set received high-quality, stimulating care and excellent nutrition eight hours a day from birth to age five; the other set was the control group, which received no external intervention.
Four decades later, the adults who received great care as children were over four times more likely to have a college degree, and
they were also physically healthier than the adults who were in the control group as children. Think about the implications of this study. It means that we are baking in the achievement gap between disadvantaged citizens and their privileged peers in the first five years of life. But it also means that if we want to, we can level the playing field.

If we value human capital as a society, we should value the array of jobs involved in caring for and educating young
children—from birth through age eight—every bit as much as we value money managers or computer scientists. We should be looking for people of intelligence, creativity, education, and experience who see their jobs as cultivating the neural development, discipline, character, independence, curiosity, and creativity in children that will determine their life chances. They are, quite literally, growing the next generation of citizens, ensuring that they have an equal shot at fulfilling their individual potential and that we have the talent, creativity, and resilience we need as a nation.

When I think back to my childhood, so many of my memories are of my parents and grandparents taking me to libraries, museums, and historic sites; of them reading to me and answering my questions once I was old enough to read myself. My Belgian grandfather, Grandpère, had a wonderful collection of small objects on his desk, each with a story that opened the door to a history lesson or a reflection on human nature. I particularly remember a small framed picture showing three scenes of two donkeys tied together by a rope. In the first scene they are pulling at cross-purposes, each straining to get at a separate pile of hay. The second and third scenes show them working together to eat first one pile and then the other. The caption is “Cooperation.” How often, during the many years of my life that I have spent studying conflict and cooperation between states, have I remembered that picture and our discussions of it.

At the other end of life, educated caregivers can expand the length and the quality of life for the generation that is leaving the stage. The central message of Atul Gawande's
Being Mortal
is that we treat elders the way we treat preschoolers, focusing more on their safety than their autonomy. Imagine how difficult it must be to lose your independence at the end of your life—being forced to return to a world in which your mealtimes, bedtimes, and activities
are completely regulated by someone else. Good eldercare-givers, who are trained to understand the physiology and psychology of aging, can make almost as much difference in how we end our lives as childcare-givers make in how we live them.

Keren Brown Wilson, one of the originators of the concept of assisted living, points out that
supporting people to do what they want to do, from dressing themselves to eating to reading, is a lot harder than just doing it for them—as every parent of a toddler knows! Anyone may be able to do the physical work of taking care of people. But again, actually
giving
care, enabling the person being cared for to flourish and make the most of his or her capabilities at a particular stage of life, requires knowledge and experience.

T
HE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS THAT
caregiving is just that,
giving
, an activity about others, while competing is about
winning
, advancing the self. That is a cramped and narrow view, however. In fact, caring is about exploring and developing the side of yourself that flourishes in connection to other human beings, rather than in competition with them. Caring has its own personal rewards, just as competition does, but of a different kind. When you give, you get—in so many ways.

Allison Stevens, a Washington, D.C.–based journalist, wrote a comment on how Betty Friedan experienced the obligations of child rearing as an endless cycle of ennui and mopping and tooth-brushing. In Stevens's experience, however, mothering has included plenty of hard work and boredom, “but
it's also been laughter, sunshine, swing sets and wonder. Some of the best stuff life has to offer.”
The “wonder” part, as Alison Gopnik puts it in
The Philosophical Baby
, is the ability children have “to explore both the actual world and all the possible worlds,” an attribute we also associate with genius.

Even with all the frustrations of trying to haul teenage boys out of bed in the morning, get decent food into them at some point in the day, and convince them to use just a little judgment, seeing my older son go off to college this year left a hard lump in my throat. Hanging out late at night after he convinced me to bring up a milkshake, against all household rules about eating in his bedroom and after he'd already eaten a huge dinner, talking about nothing in particular but then suddenly something important—those are the moments I treasure and know will never come again in quite the same way. Listening to my younger son and my husband argue over piano practice night after night can be tiresome, but then suddenly the piece comes right and I simply marvel at the idea that anyone in the house, much less a child of mine, can make such beautiful music.

Sunday dinners have provided another small but pleasing ritual. Over the past few years, given the boys' teenage schedules and my own commute to Washington, D.C., a couple of days a week, it has been very hard to have a regular dinner schedule. But I usually manage to cook on Sundays and the kids know not to make other plans. I am hardly a domestic goddess; on the contrary, I adamantly refused to learn to cook, sew, or iron growing up. And yet planning and making a nice meal, or organizing a holiday and hosting our extended family, satisfies something deep in my soul.

Equally valuable is the opportunity as a parent to release all your inhibitions. I remember one family dinner years ago when Andy got up to get something out of the refrigerator. He opened the fridge door and then shut it again quickly, with a wide-eyed look on his face. Turning to the boys, who were probably four and
six at the time, he said dramatically, “There's a tiger in there!” much to their delight. That's my hyper-rational professor husband I'm talking about, being wonderfully goofy, showing a side of himself that most of the world never gets to see. Jennifer Senior puts it best: the joys of being crazy with kids “
give us a reprieve from etiquette, let us shelve our inhibitions, make it possible for our self-conscious, rule-observing self to be tucked away. For a few blessed moments, we're streaming, uncorked ids.”