I have a visceral recoil at the idea of being paid for my care work. It's demeaning, turning an act of love into an act of commerce. Furthermore, it deepens the roots of individualism and materialism into our culture's value system.
I find it ironic that advocates for care wages are most likely to come from avowed anti-capitalists. It's like, as much as they supposedly hate the system, they can't imagine a way of valuing something that doesn't involve money. Plus, once the logic of capitalism extends beyond its appropriate sphere, it begins to distort whatever it touches.
There are also innumerable problems with trying to calculate the value of care. Are we focusing on the visible, quick return items like chores? Does it matter how well one folds the laundry or how quickly the dishes get washed? Or do we base it on how well loved the recipients of said care are, how much they flourish and grow? And how do care wages work when the carer is injured or depressed, in need of more support but less able to provide their usual level of care?
The way to esteem care is to provide care for the caregivers, and once again, that is best provided from love and not pay. Extended family, neighbors, churches, friends. My children are 11 and under, and I already tell them to stay close to home if possible when they grow up, so I can support them, and they can support each other. When my daughters say they want to be stay at home moms like me, I take it as a compliment.
This is in contrast to the advice I internalized growing up, that if I wanted to make a difference, I needed to be willing to go, that my intelligence would take me far. Partly those messages took root because my family of origin moved so much, and we were so far from extended family all the time. But stories of people who moved to the big city and made a difference or had success were praised and repeated often in school and church. It felt normal for family to be merely nuclear and to move for the career or mission of the main breadwinner.
So it was a revelation after starting a family in Chicago, without a good support network, when we moved closer to my parents and they got involved in our lives, and us in theirs. I was immediately converted to the wisdom of staying close to home.
Anyway, that is how I'm teaching my children to value care. I don't know how to generalize it. But hopefully it resonates with this community.
I share the experience of growing up learning to move for the job, and hopefully teaching my children differently. Joke's on me - my only child (of four) who wants children is moving 1000 miles away next year b/c that's where her serious boyfriend lives (he used to live here, but he moved for a job!) I keep thinking, well, they'll be back when they have babies - that's what I did, anyway.
Families should be builders and transmitters of wealth, not as their highest purpose but as a proximate and practical purpose of living in the world. Teach your children the way you make your living, so at least they know one way to make a living. Homes should be centers of production, not just palace residencies. Piecework, cottage industry, remote work, subsistence farming, multi-family living, mixed-use zoning, taxation in kind rather than in cash, ancestral family land, and of course the commons all make life more human and more sustainable.
I'm not full-on saying there must be a repudiation of the industrial revolution! Medical care relies on much of what came out of that. But we can't have an atomized, lonely society and make sense of happy family life, which both makes life liveable and presents to us very core images of what God (and the INHERITANCE he promises us) is like.
Live on less stuff, and with more people. Is that a moral principle? An eschatological principle? Or just good economic sense?
My husband's trade (teaching) is easier to model at home than my current one (policy wonkery). Like a lot of people, I have more of a bundle of skills than a trade or career and I've held a lot of fairly different jobs where the skills seemed suited.
Which seems to me a great case for homeschooling, obviously only if possible! There are a lot of factors that make it not possible. Those skills can pretty easily be built into a curriculum while also double dipping into state standards. My wife has a lot of skills, but as a baker doubling a recipe is a great way to learn math, especially fractions, and then you get cookies at the end.
I am reminded of a time in my early 20's, newly married and living 2000 miles from home. When I visited my parents, my dad gave me $20 to give the friend who was picking me up from the airport, as a thank-you. I gave it to her and she essentially threw it back at me in disgust, informing me that she was my friend, not my chauffeur. Cheryl has now passed on, and I'm so grateful for the lesson.
"...the work you do for and with your family..." This work is nothing more or less than work I do for myself. What I derive from this work is inseparable from what my family derives - we are me and they is us...!
Actually a really good point. I hear the antinatalists saying having children is "inherently selfish." You could make a case for it if you're taking all of human history into account, I suppose, but these days, nah. The increasing number of estranged families probably plays into this too. (I don't know the statistics, but I feel like I see a lot of articles about it - more children cutting off their parents, what it means, etc).
I wonder how the politics of this topic would shift if it was more widely understood that you get more of what you pay for, whether as a wage or a subsidy, and so more people engaging in caregiving will lead to a lower work force participation rate, especially for women. Maybe not for the creatives and the doctors and the lawyers, but the customer service representatives, restaurant assistant managers, and day care workers? I imagine they would love to stay home with their kids rather than work a job that few people notice or respect and wears you out too much to give your family the care you want to give.
If the traditional right really want women to stay home while men go work, they might support it more. And the progressive feminists might be horrified to find that so many women choose not to work, or choose to work less. Meanwhile the economic growth gurus would be deadlocked with the demographic growth wonks.
When two people commit to each other, they become a team and it matters little who does what. There are many things going wrong in today’s society and the family is one thing that needs to be done better.
Firstly the family you create has to supersede the families that you both came from. Secondly, you are a team with one set of values (but two viewpoints on those values, so communication is key). Thirdly, this is one pot of wealth for the family. So be more generous with your spouse than you would yourself (admittedly we both had bouts of extreme poverty before we met so it was easy)
Lastly, have kids or at least a child because being a parent is by far the most important thing you will ever do
Now as for the question of welfare and the cost of living. For decades I have been pro-welfare because it provides economic stability. Unfortunately I ignored the cost to people’s lives. Generational dependency breeds a lack of effort where you have whole families who have never worked and no one can read or write. That is unforgivable. And this problem is growing not shrinking. As for cost of living, we do not need more handouts. We need cheaper outgoings. Our government is too expensive to keep and this has been the death of every civilisation before us, and our energy prices are too high.
Cut these two things and you will see the cost of living plummet.
But to answer the crux of the article, both should contribute towards the household in deeds and money and it should not matter who does what because you are part of a team and your teammate matters as much as you do.
Check out Stan Rogers, "The Idiot." I think it's true that the government dole will kill your soul, but I don't think there are too many welfare queens. Enough time in that kind of environment, and people want to claw out, even though they don't necessarily know how. Then they rely on public assistance, in the form of infrastructure, especially schooling.
It helps me to think about the skill level required to do this work. I remember a time when my 3 children were all under 6 that there were literally 3 people capable of the job-me, my husband, and our nanny. We had young, rambunctious children and leaving them with anyone else was literally not safe and not possible. It helped me psychologically to remember "I am good at this really hard job. There just aren't that many people I could pay to do it for me."
I have a visceral recoil at the idea of being paid for my care work. It's demeaning, turning an act of love into an act of commerce. Furthermore, it deepens the roots of individualism and materialism into our culture's value system.
I find it ironic that advocates for care wages are most likely to come from avowed anti-capitalists. It's like, as much as they supposedly hate the system, they can't imagine a way of valuing something that doesn't involve money. Plus, once the logic of capitalism extends beyond its appropriate sphere, it begins to distort whatever it touches.
There are also innumerable problems with trying to calculate the value of care. Are we focusing on the visible, quick return items like chores? Does it matter how well one folds the laundry or how quickly the dishes get washed? Or do we base it on how well loved the recipients of said care are, how much they flourish and grow? And how do care wages work when the carer is injured or depressed, in need of more support but less able to provide their usual level of care?
The way to esteem care is to provide care for the caregivers, and once again, that is best provided from love and not pay. Extended family, neighbors, churches, friends. My children are 11 and under, and I already tell them to stay close to home if possible when they grow up, so I can support them, and they can support each other. When my daughters say they want to be stay at home moms like me, I take it as a compliment.
This is in contrast to the advice I internalized growing up, that if I wanted to make a difference, I needed to be willing to go, that my intelligence would take me far. Partly those messages took root because my family of origin moved so much, and we were so far from extended family all the time. But stories of people who moved to the big city and made a difference or had success were praised and repeated often in school and church. It felt normal for family to be merely nuclear and to move for the career or mission of the main breadwinner.
So it was a revelation after starting a family in Chicago, without a good support network, when we moved closer to my parents and they got involved in our lives, and us in theirs. I was immediately converted to the wisdom of staying close to home.
Anyway, that is how I'm teaching my children to value care. I don't know how to generalize it. But hopefully it resonates with this community.
I share the experience of growing up learning to move for the job, and hopefully teaching my children differently. Joke's on me - my only child (of four) who wants children is moving 1000 miles away next year b/c that's where her serious boyfriend lives (he used to live here, but he moved for a job!) I keep thinking, well, they'll be back when they have babies - that's what I did, anyway.
Families should be builders and transmitters of wealth, not as their highest purpose but as a proximate and practical purpose of living in the world. Teach your children the way you make your living, so at least they know one way to make a living. Homes should be centers of production, not just palace residencies. Piecework, cottage industry, remote work, subsistence farming, multi-family living, mixed-use zoning, taxation in kind rather than in cash, ancestral family land, and of course the commons all make life more human and more sustainable.
I'm not full-on saying there must be a repudiation of the industrial revolution! Medical care relies on much of what came out of that. But we can't have an atomized, lonely society and make sense of happy family life, which both makes life liveable and presents to us very core images of what God (and the INHERITANCE he promises us) is like.
Live on less stuff, and with more people. Is that a moral principle? An eschatological principle? Or just good economic sense?
My husband's trade (teaching) is easier to model at home than my current one (policy wonkery). Like a lot of people, I have more of a bundle of skills than a trade or career and I've held a lot of fairly different jobs where the skills seemed suited.
Which seems to me a great case for homeschooling, obviously only if possible! There are a lot of factors that make it not possible. Those skills can pretty easily be built into a curriculum while also double dipping into state standards. My wife has a lot of skills, but as a baker doubling a recipe is a great way to learn math, especially fractions, and then you get cookies at the end.
I am reminded of a time in my early 20's, newly married and living 2000 miles from home. When I visited my parents, my dad gave me $20 to give the friend who was picking me up from the airport, as a thank-you. I gave it to her and she essentially threw it back at me in disgust, informing me that she was my friend, not my chauffeur. Cheryl has now passed on, and I'm so grateful for the lesson.
"...the work you do for and with your family..." This work is nothing more or less than work I do for myself. What I derive from this work is inseparable from what my family derives - we are me and they is us...!
Actually a really good point. I hear the antinatalists saying having children is "inherently selfish." You could make a case for it if you're taking all of human history into account, I suppose, but these days, nah. The increasing number of estranged families probably plays into this too. (I don't know the statistics, but I feel like I see a lot of articles about it - more children cutting off their parents, what it means, etc).
I wonder how the politics of this topic would shift if it was more widely understood that you get more of what you pay for, whether as a wage or a subsidy, and so more people engaging in caregiving will lead to a lower work force participation rate, especially for women. Maybe not for the creatives and the doctors and the lawyers, but the customer service representatives, restaurant assistant managers, and day care workers? I imagine they would love to stay home with their kids rather than work a job that few people notice or respect and wears you out too much to give your family the care you want to give.
If the traditional right really want women to stay home while men go work, they might support it more. And the progressive feminists might be horrified to find that so many women choose not to work, or choose to work less. Meanwhile the economic growth gurus would be deadlocked with the demographic growth wonks.
Just funny to think about.
When two people commit to each other, they become a team and it matters little who does what. There are many things going wrong in today’s society and the family is one thing that needs to be done better.
Firstly the family you create has to supersede the families that you both came from. Secondly, you are a team with one set of values (but two viewpoints on those values, so communication is key). Thirdly, this is one pot of wealth for the family. So be more generous with your spouse than you would yourself (admittedly we both had bouts of extreme poverty before we met so it was easy)
Lastly, have kids or at least a child because being a parent is by far the most important thing you will ever do
Now as for the question of welfare and the cost of living. For decades I have been pro-welfare because it provides economic stability. Unfortunately I ignored the cost to people’s lives. Generational dependency breeds a lack of effort where you have whole families who have never worked and no one can read or write. That is unforgivable. And this problem is growing not shrinking. As for cost of living, we do not need more handouts. We need cheaper outgoings. Our government is too expensive to keep and this has been the death of every civilisation before us, and our energy prices are too high.
Cut these two things and you will see the cost of living plummet.
But to answer the crux of the article, both should contribute towards the household in deeds and money and it should not matter who does what because you are part of a team and your teammate matters as much as you do.
Check out Stan Rogers, "The Idiot." I think it's true that the government dole will kill your soul, but I don't think there are too many welfare queens. Enough time in that kind of environment, and people want to claw out, even though they don't necessarily know how. Then they rely on public assistance, in the form of infrastructure, especially schooling.
It helps me to think about the skill level required to do this work. I remember a time when my 3 children were all under 6 that there were literally 3 people capable of the job-me, my husband, and our nanny. We had young, rambunctious children and leaving them with anyone else was literally not safe and not possible. It helped me psychologically to remember "I am good at this really hard job. There just aren't that many people I could pay to do it for me."