Can We Change the Narrative Around Care?

A Q&A with journalist and author Elissa Strauss.

I’m super excited today to be running an interview with the journalist Elissa Strauss, the author of When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, which came out in April. It’s an incredibly thoughtful and nuanced book about the transformative power of care — as well as why our relationships with it are often so fraught and our expectations surrounding it so gendered.

We dug into some gnarly issues in this Q&A, including why care has historically been so denigrated (yes, the patriarchy — but other reasons, too); whether women who lean into care really have much of a choice in the matter; and how we can embrace and value care in the context of parenting while also setting healthy boundaries around it. (It was especially fun to interview Elissa about her book, because years ago, she interviewed me about mine!)

I hope you enjoy the interview and I highly recommend that you dig into the book in its entirety, too. Don’t forget that When You Care is one of the two books included in my June book giveaway for paid subscribers, along with Ruth Whippman’s BoyMom! Don’t forget to enter!

Elissa, what inspired you to write When You Care? How did the book come to be?

The book was born of a double-edged epiphany. 

Number one: I had spent years writing about how our country fails parents and caregivers to old, ill and disabled people. HOW don’t we have universal paid leave? HOW is childcare so expensive and impossible and eldercare even more so? WHY don’t we get some kind of universal basic income or tax credit for the time we spent caring? One day I read an article in the New York Times digging into the problems with maternity care and I read an identical quote from an identical source I had quoted years before in Slate. That itself didn’t bother me; sadly the care justice movement needs to keep repeating their messages. What happened at that moment is I realized that our lack of support for parents and all caregivers isn’t just a policy problem. It is a cultural problem, too — and I wanted to pull this blindspot to the needs of parents and caregivers up by its roots.

Number two: I went into motherhood feeling like I had to protect myself from it. I wasn’t ambivalent about having a kid and I wasn’t — after the dark and narrow tunnel that was, for me, the first four months of parenthood — ambivalent about my love for my son. But, I was extremely wary of motherhood taking over my identity and becoming less creative, intellectual or relevant because I had a kid. It felt like every book published and celebrated by smart, cool moms was one in which motherhood was presented as something that holds one back; like motherhood and selfhood were a zero sum game.

But as, Augie, my first, got older, I started finding that while motherhood didn’t take over my identity, it did challenge me in very rich and provocative ways — philosophically, spiritually, creatively and more. 

I eventually realized that I was mad at the world for not being curious about care or valuing care… all the while I wasn’t either! I had seen motherhood as the parking of the car after a long journey. It’s been anything but!

The structure of When You Care is built on these dual-epiphanes. I have all this bigger picture stuff, and dig into why care has been so diminished and devalued in our culture, as well as why it should be front-and-center in philosophy class, the counting of the GDP, my Rabbi’s sermons, and so on and so on. 

And then I also look at how caring for others changes us by way of my story of learning a lot about myself and life overall through mothering, as well as many other parents’ and caregivers’ stories. There is the buddhist caregiving son who finally, really understood impermanence, the convicted felon dad who finally learned that it is okay to have needs and express feelings, the mom who finally saw herself as worthy of love because she believed her imperfect kids are also worthy of love, and many more including my story about how I loosened my grip on certainty and other care-induced revelations.

Why does our society denigrate care to the degree that it does? I've often assumed it's largely because care has been considered "women's work," and anything stereotypically feminine has been undervalued in order to keep women in their place. Is it more complicated than that? 

There is no doubt that care has been denigrated, devalued, diminished — everything — because it has been women’s work. But let’s interrogate that a bit more, and dig into what “women” stands for in this equation. Because, this isn’t just a power play in which men find ways to deny women agency outside the home or keep them from pursuing other passions and competing with men, even if it is very much that, too.

Women, and care, are associated with things we really don’t like to think about in our culture. These include dependency, or the fact we aren’t independent individuals but enmeshed in a web of care. We actually can’t make it on our own. We don’t self-actualize, we co-actualize. These are not things our individualistic society likes to acknowledge.

Another truth we prefer to avoid: we are vulnerable and fragile. We need and we bleed. And yet, mainstream culture doesn’t want to admit this. Think about all these mega-rich folks who are spending their money trying to live forever. Talk about the logical conclusion of this fantasy that fragility is an option, rather than a fact of life. When we acknowledge care we also are forced to reckon the fact that not only do we have to give care, we also need care. Yuck!

One more fiction that feeds into our care blindspots: starting around the time of the Industrial Revolution, Western cultures began dividing the domestic and the public into separate spheres. The domestic is the place of softness, nurture and the public is the place of order and power and the two should be kept totally apart. This is total B.S. and it is hurting parents. The policies from the public sphere, i.e. paid family leave, absolutely impact our domestic lives. Also, when we raise our kids we are raising future citizens, future employees, future neighbors, future parents and caregivers — this is a MASSIVE contribution to the public sphere.

In my book I talk about how feminists have worked on breaking glass ceilings so that women can achieve more power and money —both good things — but the struggle shouldn’t end there. We should also break something I call “glass doors,” or the invisible barriers that trick us into believing our domestic lives don’t deserve any public support, or that the skills and wisdom we gain through parenting aren’t relevant outside the home. They are!

You make the point in your book that our lack of respect for care can actually fuel domestic labor inequality, too — that if we took caregiving and domestic labor more seriously, men would probably do more of it. Can you unpack that a bit? 

Let’s imagine we are all at a dinner party. There is a guy there who just got a new promotion, another who hiked Mt. Everest, and a third who published a well-regarded book. And then there is a guy there who is in between jobs, it’s summer break, and he has spent more time caring for his children. Can you imagine a world in which the guy who is caring is considered truly interesting or worthy of admiration to everyone else? That his life would be as worthy of discussion as the other mens’ lives? Sure, he might get a few words in about his “Mr. Mom” stint, or maybe we’d tolerate a few well-earned complaints about how this is so much harder than he thought, and he is so exhausted and all the moms would laugh and sigh in recognition. But would he walk away feeling like he mattered as much as those other men? That his efforts and role in life were just as important, just as worthy of respect and curiosity? Highly unlikely.

We humans crave the approval of our peers. We want to be seen as important, relevant and interesting. And men are still far more likely to be seen as all those things through their professional achievements, and not their contributions to care. 

How did we get here? I think it goes all the way back to how all of our meaning-making systems, including philosophy, theology and psychology, held little curiosity for care. Imagine if Plato had a famous lecture on caring for children and the philosophical epiphanies that could produce. Imagine if care was held that high. I think if this was a part of the Philosophy 101 curriculum way more men would be doing a lot more care.

The good news is, and I dig into this a lot in my book, is that there is a new generation of feminist economists, philosophers, theologians and more who are trying to correct for this and place care into the center of the human story where it belongs. Should we all listen, I think men will be inspired to do a lot more care!

How can we both embrace and value care and also set healthy boundaries around it? I'm thinking right now about the intensive parenting movement, in which parents (especially mothers) are expected to put ever-increasing amounts of their time, energy, and financial resources into child rearing. It's not necessarily good for kids, nor parents... how can we identify the difference between beneficial caregiving and, for lack of a better phrase, detrimental caregiving that's fueled less by true need than by external pressures?

Because we have lived in a world that for soooo long didn’t really see care, or have curiosity about care, we have this complete and utter misunderstanding about what care entails. Care is vast and hard! It is not the job for one person! Humans, evolutionarily speaking, would not have made it if only one person cared for a baby. We had alloparents, or other adults who supported us in our care.

When we actually really see care, it makes all the sense in the world that we need help and breaks. Frankly, I have way less mom guilt after writing this book because now I see how BIG care is and it’s just like, of course I need time away. Of course I like it when I get to sit at my desk at work and not have to tend to anyone. No one can sustain what it takes to be a good caregiver without real breaks and rest.

As for intensive parenting, I think a lot comes down to: is the care I am giving to my sons in service of fostering a connection between us and a healthy sense of self within them? Or, is my care an instrumental act intended to achieve a particular outcome that will help increase the odds that my children are successful in the future? Listen, we all do some of the latter as parents. We have to — it is part of the job. But when the instrumental piece outweighs the connection piece, it is a one-way ticket to burnout and overwhelm. And it often isn’t good for the relationship!

It's clear that we, as a society, undervalue care work, and that we should push back against the notion that when women choose to value or prioritize care, they are somehow failing at feminism. But when women make choices to prioritize care work, I do wonder sometimes what "choice" really means in that context. In her recent newsletter, Lyz Lenz was musing on why so many women choose to quit their jobs and stay home with their kids when they become mothers: "Could it be the wage gap, the lack of affordable childcare, the fact that statistically that woman is doing more housework than her husband even if they both work full-time? Could it be the system is designed to exhaust women in part so they opt out, creating less competition for jobs and resources — helping to ensure that the lion’s share of earning power (and the actual power that accompanies it) remains with men?" There's a difference between choosing and valuing care because we and the rest of society truly value care work, and choosing and valuing care because society has made other choices next to impossible for women and we are all trying to make the best of an unfair situation. How can we distinguish between these two scenarios, and, as a society, come to value care work for the right reasons rather than the "wrong" reasons?

I think back to the Sex and the City episode when Charlotte announced she was going to stop working and said “I choose my choice!” Gosh, we are still there, right? What choices, exactly? What choosing, exactly? Do we have agency? Or not? I don’t know!

There are women who genuinely prefer caring for their kids than working in the paid labor force, and I respect that. (Also, we should be paying them!) There are women, like me, who very much enjoy their work, work full-time, and still very much value care and feel transformed by care — all the while they maintain plenty of other identities that also enrich them. There are women who don’t get much from care, and that is okay too! There are women, yes, who are explicitly or implicitly forced into being primary or full-time moms or caregivers and it holds them back professionally, as well as in more personal, emotional terms. 

I believe all these things are very true, and it is up to us, in this moment, to keep doing the hard work of detangling the patriarchy from care, finding the good in it, and making sure that good is protected by way of supporting parents and caregivers. It is not easy work, but it is necessary. 

Something I've been thinking about lately is the lopsidedness in the types of characteristics we are told to value in our kids. We're supposed to encourage girls to adopt stereotypically masculine traits and interests — to enjoy math and science, to be assertive, to reach for the stars in terms of career aspirations. But we aren't really told to encourage boys to embrace caregiving and other stereotypically feminine characteristics. What are your thoughts on this? If we were to encourage all of our kids to appreciate and value all of these interests, what might that do? 

I think we can absolutely help build the care-aware world we want to live in by way of our kids. I have two sons, so for me this means encouraging boys to do caring things, and applauding them for it. If I had a girl, I would be more careful about mixing encouragement to care with teaching her some guardrails to help her understand when she needs to stop caring for others and start caring for herself — because there is absolutely such a thing as too much care.

For my sons, I always celebrate when they care for one another when they are sick or sad. Maybe they make each other food, tuck each other into blankets, lend the other a favorite stuffed animal, or make one another a card. Or, recently we went to dinner at our friend’s house — they have has infant twins. My kids, out of love and genuine curiosity, sat on the floor with the babies the whole time and entertained them. I treated this like winning the spelling bee, the soccer play-offs and the art fair all at once. I made this a HUGE DEAL. I tried to encode it as something that really MATTERS, and my hope is that they internalized this message all the way down into their subconscious. 

What's a surprising thing you've learned about care that you want parents today to know?

If care were counted in the GDP it would be worth roughly the same amount as the whole retail sector. Talk about mattering! Talk about value! And yet we live in such a care-blind world that we still struggle to acknowledge the way care fuels the economy. One economist from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis who I interviewed for my book found that domestic labor — or, in other words, moms momming — was a big reason we didn’t go into a deeper recession during Covid. And yet, I didn’t see anyone thanking moms! Instead, I saw moms howling in fields because they were so burned out!

How else can we, as a society, address our collective lack of respect for care and transform it? Are there things all of us can be doing to change the narrative around care?

In addition to fighting for paid leave, affordable childcare and eldercare solutions, there is one simple thing I think we can do. I want us to be curious about our own experiences of care and curious about the experiences of others. Let’s think of care as a hero's journey. What are we taking from the experience? What wisdom? What insights? And how might those insights enrich or productively challenge the other parts of ourselves?

I want to honor that for some people care is just hard, and there is little reward. That is very real and nobody should feel bad if this is the case. I never want to deny that truth, but only make room for the full breadth and depth of care experiences. 

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