[00:00:01.880] – Speaker 2
Well, hey, I’m Chris Tompkins, and welcome to the Shaping Our World podcast.
[00:00:16.450] – Speaker 1
If you’ve been tracking over the last four seasons, you know my goal in this podcast is to invite you into a conversation that will leave you more confident in understanding and inspiring the young people in your life. We know that the world is rapidly changing around our young people, and it’s a world, if we’re honest, sometimes can feel overwhelming, and we need the tools and insights to help us not only navigate it ourselves, but come alongside the young people we care about. Each episode, we talk with leading experts and offer relevant resources to dive deeper into that world, the world of our youth today. Today, we have Elissa Strauss on the show. Elissa is a writer, essayist, and cultural critic whose work appears in places like The Atlantic, Slate, CNN, and the New York Times. She writes about kids and parenting, among other topics. And her book, When You Care, The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, came out in the spring of 2024. In it, she explores what would happen if we started to appreciate dependency and the deep meaning of one person caring for another. It asked the question, what would happen if we started to care about care?
[00:01:32.470] – Speaker 1
It’s a fascinating conversation on a very specific topic, and I’m excited for you to hear it. So let’s dive into the interview with Elissa right now. Before we meet our guest, a quick word about an opportunity at Muskoka Woods. Starting as a staff member here, I found it to be more than just a job. I discovered a pathway to personal and professional growth. We are committed to intentional staff development, providing training, and building a network that can propel your career forward. Imagine working where you’re nurtured to grow with access to amazing facilities and staff care events. If you’re seeking a role that prepares you for what’s next, visit jobs.muskokawoods.com for more details. Now, let’s get into the heart of our show. Elissa Strauss, thanks for coming.
[00:02:28.550] – Speaker 2
So glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s great.
[00:02:30.910] – Speaker 1
Looking forward to this conversation. As we get into it, let’s get a snapshot of who you are beyond the intro bio. What shaped your world when you were growing up? What were the big influences for you as a teen?
[00:02:43.090] – Speaker 2
I think I felt like an outsider in the homogenous suburban community I was raised in, a suburb of Los Angeles. I think that’s stayed with me as a thinker and a journalist, this sense of outsider-ness, even though I’ve, by now, thank goodness, at age 44, found communities and no longer feel like an outsider. Having that be the main emotional context for my teenage years helped me become a good question asker, which I think has served me well, and seek authenticity in my adult years, which I think has ultimately served me well, even if high school wasn’t the best time for me.
[00:03:21.720] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s a hit and miss for people, whether those years are… Well, they’re always formative, right? It’s just what that means. It’s interesting how you can already connect back to how it’s shaping you today. Give us a little sense about what’s shaping your world today. Help us get to know you a little bit better.
[00:03:40.790] – Speaker 2
Yeah. I think the personal is the political is the professional for me, considering the work I do. Caring for my kids is absolutely shaping me as a person. It’s something I dive in a lot into in my book, just the philosophical, psychological, and spiritual challenges and epiphanies and transcendent moments that come with parenthood. I found it much more exciting to lean into it instead of worrying about how parenthood is ruining my identity or stripping me of a sense of self, of how it’s actually expanding different parts of me. I think one of the most surprising parts is really deep in my faith. I’m Jewish and I have a much more rich religious life now than I did before I had kids. I think part of it, that’s common, right? You have your kids go to a religious preschool, you enter communities, you seek support. There’s good sociological reasons for that, but I think we often neglect to talk about the fact that there are rich theological reasons for that as well because kids bring us so close to the miracle and fragility of life. I think that’s the other surprising thing I wouldn’t have seen coming in my life if you had asked me at age 25, what do you think will happen to you?
[00:04:57.920] – Speaker 1
Well, it is interesting, right? As we think about what it means to raise kids and care for them, it taps into different parts of who we are. It’s interesting that that’s been part of your journey, and a lot of our listeners would affirm that from a spiritual perspective, how that shapes how they view the world and how they look at what it means to come alongside kids and young people that they care about. It’s great to hear that. Tell us a little bit more about your professional work and how all of these shaping things things in your life have evolved into what you do professionally.
[00:05:33.370] – Speaker 2
I have been writing for a long time about the intersection of women’s rights, motherhood, culture. I spent a long time writing about policy and broader cultural responses to motherhood. Then at some point, I got a little bit tired of that and felt like I wanted to dig in to what I refer to as the care crisis, which is not just a lack of support for parenting and caregiving more broadly in our societies, which is particularly real in the United States. You guys have a much better in Canada. But more than that, I think there’s something so much bigger going on, which is a fundamental lack of curiosity about the experience of giving care, that it’s not just something that changes the care recipient, it’s something that profoundly changes the caregiver. Sometimes, not for the better, sometimes care just depletes us. That’s very real, too. I don’t want to deny that. But I think the point isn’t that it’s always… It’s not the fairytale, it’s not the 1950s sitcom version of motherhood, but it’s still even… It’s something much more messy and profound than that. But even with that, I think it’s one of the most rich transformative experiences of our lives.
[00:06:51.350] – Speaker 2
That’s really the subject of this book I have out that came out two months ago, When You Carry the Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others. It’s something I’m still living and doing right now through my journalism and through lots of conversations I get to have with people about the book. I love when people share their care stories with me. That’s my favorite thing right now To first of all tell them like, Yeah, you have something, and it’s called a care story. They’re like, What? I was like, It’s probably interesting. They’re like, Really? I was like, Yes. That’s where I am right now, professionally, is listening to a lot of care stories and loving it.
[00:07:31.130] – Speaker 1
Most of our interview today and how we came across you was around this topic. I think for those listening, we do a summer camp, and one of the things that we train our young staff in is how to care for kids that aren’t your own throughout the course of a week to create the camp environment as being a home and all the things that would go into caring for kids. So it’s really interesting. But you write a lot about kids, and interesting Interestingly, your topics aren’t the topics typically discussed when we talk about kids. On our show, screen time or social media comes up. In one article from Greater Good magazine, for instance, you ask if parenting can make you a better person. And in Another from The Atlantic, you explain why our children should be more demanding, not less. And both of these articles tie into your interest in caregiving, which is the subject of your book, as you remember. But I wonder, as a writer, cultural critic, what do you see as What are the biggest issues facing our kids today? I know you live in the United States. You mentioned this earlier about parental leave almost being nonexistent and emblematic of a larger lack of government support when it comes to parenting and being a kid.
[00:08:44.190] – Speaker 1
The shortcoming on behalf of the government is a thread that runs through a lot of your writing. Is that an issue that you would say is impacting kids? What are some other things that have you a bit of a cause concern for the younger generation today?
[00:08:57.040] – Speaker 2
Yeah. I think absolutely the policy stuff is big. If you dig in to evolutionary history, humans really were not designed to care alone. It’s only when we see care as small and simple that we can get sucked into the fiction that that’s possible. Care is definitely a collective, very collective act. I think that my children, they don’t just go to school for childcare, they don’t just go to school for education, they go to school for care. I actually see the educators at their school as partners in care. They create the collective of care that make my children who they are. We had a medical crisis with the family this year, and I absolutely credit the care they receive at school as being a reason why my children weathered it pretty well. I really think some of the big issues we have right now is having a siloed attitude towards care, that parents feel guilty for not being able to do it alone, even though, in In fact, Charles Darwin himself did not see us as inherently competitive only, but also inherently sympathetic and collaborative, and so many other great thinkers since then. I think we have this siloed approach to care.
[00:10:14.000] – Speaker 2
We feel guilty when we’re not able to meet our kids’ care needs all on our own. Instead of seeing it as actually both what nature intended in a beautiful part of being in a tapestry of humanity and life. I think the other The way that kids are struggling that’s connected to care, in my opinion, is that we often see care these days in really instrumental terms. It’s a means to an end, and we’re forgetting the relationship piece of it. It’s really important. Listen, there’s a lot of checklist part of parenting. That’s my other name for instrumental parenting. There’s things that have to be done. There’s goals that have to be met. Of course, it’s not like we all dream of our kids necessarily being Nobel Prize winners. Maybe some of us do, and that’s beautiful. But it’s not necessarily the cliché of the parent who needs their kid to be the superachiever. In fact, I don’t know a single parent like that. But even when parents aren’t aiming so high. There’s still so much checklist parenting in our lives today. In many ways, it’s overwhelmed relationship parenting, which is really putting your relationship with your child at the center, letting surprise enter Enter, letting wonder enter, letting your children’s messy beings enter.
[00:11:37.500] – Speaker 2
Again, I don’t blame parents for this. I don’t want anyone ever to walk away feeling guilty from anything I said. I think just so much of our society and our productivity culture and our sense of fragility economically or otherwise, and that sense of fragility runs through the classes these days, is pushing us to really be in this instrumental mental state. When you dig into the care, when you dig into the theologian’s writing about care and the philosopher’s writing about care, you realize that this relationship part of care is so much where it’s at and it’s so much of how parents are going to enjoy parenting more. When parents enjoy parenting more, kids feel better and so on and so forth.
[00:12:22.570] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s fascinating. I love the word wonder, as you were saying that. That just tweaks for us our theme at Miskoka Woods for 2024 was Wonder Awaits. Oh, nice. Thinking about summer camp and what that means for kids and getting away. And I think that’s really great and really important. I love how you’re approaching those topics. I was really intrigued by an article that you wrote about chill parenting and the hard work of that. And we’ve had a lot of people talk to us on the show about just the mounting pressure for kids to be in everything and to have the stacked resume for college admissions and all that stuff. And one thing I think we realize is as parents or people that care about kids that subconsciously or maybe even consciously, we’re pushing our kids to do more and more and just keep running and running around. And we’ve talked about that before, but I love your approach about a chill parent. So can you talk to us a little bit about that? How important is it to adopt a chill parent attitude so that your has more free time? What are the advantages of that?
[00:13:32.570] – Speaker 1
How can we do it without working against the pressure around us to follow what everyone else is doing in that area?
[00:13:39.490] – Speaker 2
Yeah. I want to start by saying that you ask my 11-year-old, I don’t think he thinks of us as a chill. He sees his schedule as a bit stacked. Part of it is his after-school Jewish education, which he would prefer to skip, but it’s twice a week. Yeah. Right. Listen, it’s hard I mean, we’re both working parents, and then our kids, any enrichment they want or exercise they want us to happen after 5:00. Then it’s dinner and it’s this and it’s that. I’m like, My kids don’t have enough chores, but at the end of the day, what are they going to do the chores during the… I’m not winning at it, but I think for me, it’s constantly not letting the schedule or the sense of what we should do overwhelm or override the constant checking in, the constant like, Oh, maybe this doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe we could take a pause. In fact, just yesterday, my 11-year-old was like, Maybe I don’t have to do mandolin during the summer. It seems a little weird to during the summer. I’m like, You know what? You’re right. We can stop. It’s fine. I think it’s what I always go back to, and I just love the word relationship.
[00:14:49.990] – Speaker 2
It’s my favorite, favorite word in thinking about parenting, because I don’t think there’s one… What a chill parenting is for one family is totally different than what it is another family. We live in different family structures. We have different employment statuses among parents, and we have kids with different temperments. My little one, he loves to be busy. He would do 50 extra… It truly serves him. He can’t do enough. It’s like he would love to go from cooking to coding to his cello. He just loves it. It’s his temperament. My older one likes to lay around and read and imagine. What’s chill parenting for Levi versus chill parenting for Auggie? I can’t even I can tell you that in my own family. What I can tell you is that always put that relationship, I’m not going to say is the only thing that matters, but is the big thing that matters most of the time. Again, those outside expectations, a sense of, right, our children don’t always know what they want, don’t always know what’s good for them. It’s absolutely our jobs to help shape them. But at the same time, keep checking in. Keep thinking about, I am in a relationship with one other human This is my only relationship with my child.
[00:16:03.090] – Speaker 2
Am I going to let these external expectations determine what our life looks like together? Am I just going to keep going back to this one and only human before me and think about what serves my family right now and what serves this child right now? So it’s not a simple formula, but it’s just remembering it’s okay to let it be about the relationship between the two of you two.
[00:16:24.750] – Speaker 1
I wonder, like you were saying, you mentioned, relationships isn’t the only thing, but I wonder if it’s just all the other things lead toward deeper and greater relationship. It’s the preeminent and foundational part, and you fit everything else in around it, or work towards it, not the relationship being a byproduct of everything else that we’re doing.
[00:16:49.010] – Speaker 2
Exactly.
[00:16:50.000] – Speaker 1
It’s like carton horse, right?
[00:16:51.340] – Speaker 2
Yes. Such a good way to put it. I think I see parents who struggle. Listen, we wish it weren’t so, but When, and then not always, but often the parent is struggling a lot with parenting, the kids can internalize that. And oftentimes the parents struggles because the parents are really overwhelmed with parenting. And it’s okay to do those resets. They don’t always solve everything. There are, again, many different kids, many different parents. But it’s absolutely okay to do those resets and again, put that relationship first and not put, as you put it, the outside stuff first and let the rest follow because we need to do the other stuff, too.
[00:17:33.000] – Speaker 1
I’ve mentioned this in previous interviews. My wife and I, as we’ve navigated, we have one daughter who’s 18 now. That switched for us where the quality of our relationship with her became the goal at the end of the day. Oh, nice. It just really changed how we parented and what we thought success was at the end of the day, because our job as parents is to raise people that are ready to jump out of the nest and take on the world as adults. And yeah, our role is never done, but we want to be the people that she calls to ask questions down the road or to come pop in to say hi because she misses us in her life. And like that, that’s the end goal. Having her thrive and know all the things to do and say, that’s important. But we’re always going to be there to help her with that stuff. That’s not necessarily the end goal at the end of the day. So, man, it seems like a subtle switch, but it really helped us rethink about. When you’re coming in hot on some topics and you’re ready to just correct and change and fix, and you’re like, Man, how’s this going to go in terms of relationship down the road?
[00:18:51.760] – Speaker 1
What will she remember about how we tackled this topic with her? Anyway, I’m not going to digress into my parenting stuff, But I just love that idea.
[00:19:02.160] – Speaker 2
No, I love everything you said. I was really glad to hear it. Yeah, and it does. It’s liberating, too, right? Yeah. It just takes the edge off us as parents, too. It’s like, All right, actually, maybe everything I’m trying to do here isn’t as important as the simpler thing that we could be doing here, which is just really trying to connect with our kids.
[00:19:25.080] – Speaker 1
Well, I can tell in your other writing and what you’ve talked about, this idea of care has really evolved into… It sounds a bit like your life’s mission right now. In your book, When You Care, the Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, as you mentioned earlier, it’s come out in the spring of this year, 2024. Can you talk a little bit, we’re going to get into the details of it, but what prompted you to write a book about caregiving in the first place? Was it something building over time where there are a few catalysts along the way that prompted you to say, I need to write about this?
[00:19:57.720] – Speaker 2
Yeah, it was a double double-edged epiphany that led me to writing this book. On one hand, I’d been writing about the lack of policy for parents and caregivers for a long time. At some point, I felt like, I can’t write one more article about why we don’t have paid leave in the United States. We need it. People still need to be writing about it. I just felt like there’s something deeper going on here. This is a culture that has some strange blind spots to the power and value of care. I want to dig into that piece. I want to dig into the cultural roots of this crisis. On the other hand, when I became a mom, I felt very much that motherhood would be a threat to my identity. I knew I wanted to have kids, and I was lucky to I didn’t act with my kids, relative ease. I didn’t have a postpartum depression or anything like that. So it wasn’t like I was ambivalent about wanting to be a mother, and it wasn’t like I was ambivalent about my love for my kids. It did take four months for me to really get over the shock of new parent.
[00:21:02.870] – Speaker 2
I want to clarify about and feel that deep love. It wasn’t the love at first sight for me, but I got there relatively quickly. What I was deeply ambivalent about was motherhood making me less smart, less cool, less relevant, and hip literary scenes in Brooklyn, New York, where I lived at the time. I wasn’t crazy. Every single book about motherhood published by a really cool, respected female writer was It’s deeply ambivalent about motherhood. They presented motherhood and selfhood as a zero-sum game. I really internalized that. Eventually, I realized that, in fact, The Caring for Auggie, my first. It really took till he was talking. It wasn’t something it took. Actually, again, this is maybe why I’m so obsessed with that relationship piece, because to me, that’s such a different… It’s obviously a relationship of sorts before the verbal, but once they start talking and their full self emerges, the relationship piece really reaches new heights. For me, being in relation to my son, seeing myself through my care for him, He became almost a mirror to myself, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. That was like, wow. I was like, Oh, this is who I am.
[00:22:27.850] – Speaker 2
Oh, this is what life’s I had done so many things that were culturally approved to seek truth and self-knowledge and transcendence, like long road trips and meditation retreats and backpacking and psychedelics and all these things that are supposed to bring you into that space. For me, nothing compared to having this other human depend on me and having to see that person for who they to really give them what they need and also find myself as a mother. That was like, whoa. I was like, wait a minute. Why is everyone writing these books about how motherhood just takes from the self or is a threat to the self? When actually there’s so much there where motherhood expands our possibilities of who we are. I was like, Oh, I’ve been railing on the culture for not valuing care, and that’s why we don’t have paid leave, et cetera. But wait a minute, I don’t think I really valued care. I don’t think I had much curiosity about care. It was from those two expansions that the book was born.
[00:23:41.260] – Speaker 1
A quick pause to tell you about an amazing opportunity for teens at Muskoka Woods. Our CEO Leadership program is more than just four weeks at summer camp. It’s a life-changing experience in one of the most beautiful spots in Ontario, Lake Rosso. Designed for 15 to 17-year-olds, this program empowers you to be the CEO of your own life. With state-of-the-art accommodations and our unique leadership studio, you’ll gain personal skills and leadership abilities unlike anywhere else. Plus, you’ll earn a high school credit or complete community service hours. It’s not much better than that for a summer camp experience. Visit muscokawoods. Com for details. Your book has been called Urgent and Necessary and Essential, and you unpacked a little bit in there, but give us your quick take on why we should pick it up and learn more about care, like rethinking caregiving and what that means. Why is that essential and necessary?
[00:24:48.610] – Speaker 2
Yeah, I think that we, as a culture, have really held some deep blind spots towards care for a long time. I think when we really seek care for all that it is. We’re going to be able to better support caregivers. We’re also individually going to be more invested in our care experiences instead of viewing them as purely a burden, which I think is a lot of the discourse now, unfortunately, among certain circles, at least. I think we’re also going to really, as a society, respect those who give care more and see them as people from whom we can learn things from. I think these blind spots to care have a lot to do with who did care. Women have historically been the primary caregivers, certainly since the industrial revolution, and we stopped functioning as collective units and on a farm, and men left the house to work and women stayed home. For sure, some of our lack of interest in care has been gendered. But there’s also just the fact that care brings us face-to-face with fragility, vulnerability, dependency, death. We don’t really like those things in Western culture. We’re not good about talking about death.
[00:26:03.950] – Speaker 2
We’re not good at talking about vulnerability. Right now, you have all these tech billionaires who are trying to live forever. I mean, that’s the new hot thing if you’re rich. It’s trying to live a really long time. Maybe they’ll figure out how to live forever. There’s just a lot of denial of the things that care brings up. Because we want to view ourselves as independent and strong, care is real ranch, the twist in the plot that we don’t want to think about. I think we just really have not dug in to care in a profound way. I look at it through the lens of economics in the book, but also theology, philosophy. Some of the philosophers I spoke to for the book, no. Western philosophy just didn’t acknowledge relationships until 1980. It was like the All the idea of morality was really just like, ignored human dependency. It was like, what’s the right thing to do between two fully equal humans? And it’s like, actually, we’re not fully equal. So there’s just all these areas, and I found them As a mother, so… I don’t know, it’s the overused word these days, but deeply empowering.
[00:27:21.120] – Speaker 2
It’s like, wow, this is real. Motherhood is this insane philosophical experience. Also, I We talked a little bit earlier about theologically, spiritually, it’s also just this deeply profound spiritual experience. I just really wanted to open it up and get us to a place where we really value care, really value caregivers once and for all.
[00:27:46.570] – Speaker 1
I love how you, in telling a bit about your own journey into this and how you position caregiving, you talk about a way of finding meaning in life. In the Netflix documentary, Blue Zones, One of the longevity hotspots is Okinawa, Japan, where the elders organize it to support groups called Mowi, made up of friends and neighbors. These groups take care of each other, socially, financially, health, not only ensuring that individuals are cared for when they need it. But what’s really interesting is it gives the caregivers a sense of purpose, which is thought to be a major factor in the longevity. By contrast, here in North America, we often hear about caregiver burnout. There’s this, which is a real thing, as you mentioned, but there’s this contrast there between us maybe going, Oh, no, it’s going to exhaust and deplete me, where a group of people have actually said, It actually brings purpose and meaning, which actually helps me live longer. It doesn’t burn me out. Can you talk a little bit about the positive impact caregiving can actually have on the caregiver in your experience and from your perspective?
[00:28:53.800] – Speaker 2
Yes. It’s a footnote to that. A lot of what I’ve heard about elder care and AI and robots, that they’re not really sure if robotic care for humans is good. But what actually does seem to be having a more positive effect is when you give older adults a robot to care for, that actually can boost them. It’s paradoxical, right? We think of them needing care, and they do need care. But actually, the giving of care is actually Really what’s really through robotics so far, it actually seems to be more promising. It’s actually giving them responsibilities. Do I wish robotics were involved at all? No, but they are. It’s just a real interesting way to think about how to help people. Right, giving them responsibilities, giving them care is a huge way. In terms of care, psychological benefits, there are many. In deeply burdensome care experiences, hard to experience them because you’re going broke from care, you have no time to sleep. It can just be, especially in the States, it’s just really lack of support for caregivers to old ill and disabled people. It can be hard to achieve these. That said, people do, and I spoke to many of them for my book, and I also found researchers that have dug in.
[00:30:25.950] – Speaker 2
While care can absolutely create stress, it It also creates deep sense, as you mentioned, meaning and purpose for people. We are really wired to be other-directed. Humans would not have made it this long if we were. We get real nice boost of good-feeling hormones when we do things for others. We can think of it as the helper’s high. We can also think of just our instinctional response. I know not everyone’s a dog person. I am. But when you see a puppy and they have that cute little face, you’re like, Oh. And you invite that puppy to live in your home and pee in your carpet and spend all this money on it.
[00:31:04.510] – Speaker 1
Our dog- Chew up your furniture.
[00:31:05.620] – Speaker 2
Sleeps in our bed. Our dog sleeps in our bed. All of it. It’s like, that’s the human caregiving instinct right there. That’s what that is. Like, oh, all I want to do is care for this puppy who’s like, biting me with its milk tooth and peeing on my carpet. So we really are wired to care. And because we live in a society that focuses on the independent system competition, we’ve denied that part of ourselves. But it really brings us It’s deep fulfillment. I think we absolutely see in a lot of the research that, yes, care can lead to more stress, but that stress can come alongside meaning. I think that’s another way we value cares by acting like, Oh, because it’s stressful, it’s not also meaningful. Because it’s challenging, it’s not also profound. We accept that tension in so many other arenas. If someone is an intense athlete, if someone went to war, we have all these spaces that we understand are hard and profound, stressful and meaningful. If we could just broaden the aperture on care and understand care is also one of those experiences, I think we could find our way to the life-affirming parts of it.
[00:32:22.750] – Speaker 1
Why do you think we, as a society, are obsessed with self-sufficiency and independence, as you mentioned? Many different cultures, like the one we just talked about in Japan, they think about caregiving differently. In many, caring for children is communal, for instance. What is it different about our attitudes in North America that are not quite as communal are focused on caregiving. It’s more like taking care of ourselves or working through things on our own.
[00:32:52.380] – Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, it’s this, in North America, probably there’s that bootstraps mentality that we are independent beings. I know for me, so much of that was formed by, really, my 11th grade American literature class. I’m going to bring us to very specific examples, which I think reveal a broader truth. Who did I read? I read Henry David Thoreau, Going to the Woods, to Live Alone, to Suck the Mare of Life, and Because he was worried if he didn’t do this, he would have not really lived and really understood life itself. That was one of my first mental maps of like, how do you find meaning and really find yourself? It’s someone who said he had to leave society, which is beautiful and fine. I don’t want to put that down. I think a lot of people… Solitude is beautiful, but also connection and care is beautiful and equally challenging and equally fraught at times, but also beautiful. I read Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Leaving Home, the home, the domestic space, the space of care and dependency is seen as a threat to the development of self in that book. I read Huck Fin, the first pages.
[00:34:07.010] – Speaker 2
He’s terrified of the widow Douglas keeping him home and civilizing him. It’s so woven into our culture that real meaning, real truth, real experience lies away from the family unit, outside the home, often, frankly, away from woman and away from care. Then I think we also have a work culture that reinforces this. There’s broadly speaking, with this winner-take-all economy and the great income inequality we have in this country. It’s this sense that it’s up to you to figure it out and not a sense that we should be thinking ourselves more economically as a collective. I’m not an economist, and I am not advocating for one way to distribute wealth here. That is outside. I know some people jump to conclusion on that. That’s not my thing. I’m not saying there’s one policy or one way to help make sure everyone feels like they have their needs taken care of and have an equal chance to get ahead. But I know that we accept as a status quo a culture, which that’s not possible. I think these things are so deeply woven in to all of our meaning-making institutions in ways that we can’t even see.
[00:35:30.990] – Speaker 2
I think it’s what gives us this idea that the care doesn’t matter and the independence and achievement thinking does matter. I could go on and on, but I’ll stop there.
[00:35:44.110] – Speaker 1
Yeah, And in a minute, we’ll let you give some input on how we can start to work against that. But before we do, just a couple of brief questions. So we even mentioned the gender piece, right? Traditionally, it’s seen as females care the kids, husbands, partners who have males, maybe don’t per se. So I’m a guy. What does caregiving look like for me? What are some tenets of it? What are some practical things that I can do that go, Oh, yeah, I’m actually refocused on this relational caregiving part of who I am as a parent, as a friend, as a son? What are some practices and some things I can start to focus on?
[00:36:30.370] – Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, I could start with the most specific, narrow one, which is making sure some of your care involves connecting with your kids without having no particular outcome in mind, nothing instrumental in mind. I think a bit of a mind frame shift. I think it’s really hard for us. A lot of us feel overworked. We live in the age of the hustle. We show up in parenting expect the same efficiency and payoff as we maybe do in our work lives. It’s really important to see that experience as very different. It just does not operate. Your relationship with your kids, your household is not a business. It will not operate with the same efficiency. If you can really get that in your gut to internalize it, it actually, in many ways, makes it easier because you don’t feel like you’re doing something wrong when your kids are not behaving exactly how you hoped they would or the outcome wasn’t what you hoped it would be. That’s it. You’re in the muck. You’re doing it right. You’re letting it be what it is. You’re a winner, not a loser. So I think it’s really just that paradigm shift of letting go.
[00:37:54.190] – Speaker 2
And it’s so liberating when you do in so many ways, when you let go of the predetermined expectations and you go for the ride a little bit in your role as a parent.
[00:38:05.070] – Speaker 1
Caregiving has a huge impact. We talked about the impact it has on the caregiver, but it also has a huge impact on the ones that are receiving care, whether It’s our children, spouse, parent, friend. We’ve touched on this broadly, but I wonder if there are some other specific outcomes you can share with us about how caregiving impacts society as a whole. Or how could it? Because as we talked about, our system doesn’t really make it that easy. If we were able to really do this well, how might our world look a little bit different?
[00:38:37.660] – Speaker 2
I think one very specific thing we could do is find better ways to account for care economically. Economists have been working on this literally since the GDP was created. A female economist went to Africa, a Scottish economist, went to Africa with a couple of men who were in charge. This is after the Great Depression, and they thought, We really need to figure out how to measure our economy so we understand what a dip, how much is it dipping? So let’s create this thing. It’s called the GDP, the Gross Domestic Product. It’ll help us measure the worth of our economy. And literally on the fact soft finding trend for the creation of it. There’s a woman who’s like, I think we’re ignoring some labor here. There’s some domestic labor happening, and we’re not exactly accounting for it. And that conversation continues. We’ve gotten better, but we’re still not there, really, at seeing the full economic might of care. Some economists have found that in the United States, if we counted care, it would be worth roughly as much as the retail sector. And that’s if we just paid all parents and caregivers the minimum wage for the time they spend caregiving.
[00:39:52.660] – Speaker 2
Care makes our society possible economically. Care produces future citizens, future employees. Care is how our little raw balls of id turn into people who can walk into a meeting and listen to others, who can sit and focus and get a job done, who can who do our jobs well enough, who do that work with a sense of humanity, who then raise their own kids with care so then their kids can have a meaningful experience as human beings and contribute to society as well. And care is also how we give each other dignity. We all, I think, have believed by now, this is dignity sounds like it’s been in the human vocabulary forever, But it’s, relatively speaking, a new concept, 20th century concept, really came from the human rights movement. But by now, I think we all agree, right? Every human deserves dignity. I think of care as the bricks from which the great cathedrals of dignity is built. I know we value the dignity politically, but how do we really ensure that each human can actually experience dignity? It’s care. It’s one by one care, one human caring for the other.
[00:41:16.720] – Speaker 1
As you’re talking, I’m thinking about competency and character as well. I can teach someone to read, to have the skill to navigate life and to sort things out. But the real heart character, like who we are and how we shape society, not just with what we do, but who we are, that’s really what’s forged in caregiving. Yes, you’re teaching competencies along the way, but you could teach anybody to do something without really touching the character of a person. That’s learned in relationship and not just teaching, but modeling and being with. Man, like you said, how would our world look differently if we really invested in that character piece, who people are as they show up to lead and to make policy and All the other decisions that go into life and functioning as a society. So as you’re saying that, I was thinking of that as well. I can teach my daughter how to tie her shoes, but really helping her learn to be kind to the kids in her class. That comes in that form of caregiving, not in a lecture or a lesson in five minutes, right? Absolutely. It happens over time in those slow things.
[00:42:43.510] – Speaker 1
I love that. As As we’re listening, we’re like, Okay, yes. How can I, you, others listening who are like, Yes, we need to prioritize this, on the micro and the macro level, should we be reaching out to policymakers? What What are some first steps that we can do to change the tide and maybe free up-time for this important work of caregiving?
[00:43:08.070] – Speaker 2
Yeah, so right. I think the policy piece is huge. If you’re going broke caregiving or you’re totally time-strapped caregiving, then you can’t really have rich caregiving experiences. I want us to view caregiving as a right. We deserve the right to give good care and have a good experience giving that It should be just something that’s not up for questioning. It should be like that’s a basic part of being a human. We have the right to vote, whether or not we have the right to health care in different countries. A little tricky, but it’s If we think of it as something that is just a basic part of human functioning, I think it’s an important shift. I think for us, personally, a very simple thing we can do is think of what’s my care story? How did I How has care changed me? How has care enriched me? Challenged me? Woke me up from something I was ignoring? I think just starting there and getting into this headspace that, yeah, maybe we were like, how many different throw? We pursued solitude of nature. And that woke us up, and maybe it involved the traveling, Jack Kerouac.
[00:44:19.220] – Speaker 2
Okay, now we’re doing care. What’s my story there? It’s a small change in many ways, but I think it’s really profound because once open ourselves up and be truly curious about care. We’ll have a ripple effect in society.
[00:44:36.140] – Speaker 1
That’s so good. It’s been so interesting to dive into a really specific topic and really interested in the work you’re doing and the writing, and would encourage everyone to get a copy of your book and to find out the more detail about caregiving. And as we wrap up, I’m wondering if you can leave us with any thoughts, words of encouragement for other parents, moms, moms who are struggling with their role as a caregiver, whether it’s because they’ve had to hire someone else to care for their children, or they’re feeling overwhelmed or exhausted, or they’re just having trouble seeing the value in what they’re doing as a caregiver. Can you give us a few encouraging words and thoughts as we wrap up our conversation?
[00:45:20.740] – Speaker 2
Yeah, I think, listen, I hire people to help care for my kids. I think we have to get out away from this fiction that care is something we can manage on our own. It’s not. I think we really should prioritize in trying to enjoy care. And whenever we have to cross up our list to make that happen, it’s worth it many, many times fold. If no part of the experience is enjoyable, then no one’s winning, and it’s okay. Whether that’s self-care, whether that’s selfish, whether that’s giving, it’s all the above. Then also, so often we’re treated like our struggles with care are small or We’re not scheduling right. We’re too demanding. We’re not demanding enough. We’re too strict. We’re not strict enough. In fact, the struggles with care are because care is challenging. Care is some real stuff. It’s just to be a little bit more at peace that you’re doing hard work. If only the world was applauding you for it more and was curious about it. We’re all psychologists, right? When we’re moms or parents or caregivers, we’re all We’re all philosophers. We’re all theologians. We’re doing some really deep meaning making work.
[00:46:35.810] – Speaker 2
If we could just view those challenges a little bit more in that big, bold light and a little bit less like we’re failing because this is hard, it just all sits a little better.
[00:46:45.820] – Speaker 1
It’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for the insights you shared today and the work that you’re given to. And just a reminder for everyone, When You Care, the unexpected magic of caring for others. Make sure you get a copy of the book. Your time today. Thanks so much for sharing with us.
[00:47:02.940] – Speaker 2
Thank you.
