Eight Great Gifts For Caregivers

(These aren't what you might think!)

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Just a little change in childcare policy, some higher wages, and better insurance, please. Photo by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash

Every year for the past eight years, all I’ve wanted for the holidays are super-fancy skin care products and easier access to better child care. I want it to be just a little bit less of a hassle and a whole lot less expensive to find some place for my kid to be between the hours of 3 and 6. 

So part of my holiday present to myself was the gift of reading A Playbook to Transform How America Cares, a report from Katherine Goldstein and the New America foundation.

The Playbook is a set of eight tactics that policymakers, activists, politicians and the rest of us can use for getting better, more inclusive programs and services for parents, children, home care workers, teachers and anyone else who is or will be in need of caregiving, which is….everyone.

(Katherine writes about the Playbook here in her newsletter, too)

Katherine is the creator of the Double Shift community, which includes a podcast (I often think about the episode on the 24-hour child care center in Las Vegas), a newsletter and a vibrant online discussion. She has been calling out the need for adequate parental leave, child care and other care policies for years. 

“Icon!” I exclaimed when she appeared on my Zoom screen.

If talking about a Playbook around caregiving tactics strikes you as a little wonky for the holiday season, or perhaps appears to overlook some of the catastrophes unfolding in other parts of the world that are funded in large part by our tax dollars, well, this is something I’ve been thinking about too. 

What I love about reading the Playbook is seeing so many examples of how change is possible, right here in the U.S. 

There are in fact places where communities have voted to fund universal pre-K. Washington State has found a way to improve prospects for long term care, for people getting older (aka, all of us). 

What I wanted in this sad, hard holiday time were some solutions, and the Playbook provides these.

Eight tactics for making things better here, right now: from union organizing, to raising more money, to better messaging.

And to me, it goes without saying that our political leaders’ commitment to constant war,  and their reflexive doubling-down on militarism is directly related to ignoring the care crisis. If we stopped spending on war, we could start spending on care. 

Now, to the conversation with Goldstein (which has been edited for length and clarity)

I only really started thinking about the need for better caregiving policies around when I became a parent at 42. And then when my dad died two years later, and suddenly I had both experiences of caregiving for a baby and caregiving for an elder. So I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't have a bigger social understanding around this, prior to having a personal connection. 

I like to say every time every time a woman says motherhood radicalizes her an angel gets its wings.

Very few things radicalize anyone more than personal experience. So I think that it's good that people are allowing their personal experiences to connect to the systemic. 

Another thing I find really encouraging is that younger people are interested in these issues who are not living them. People who are interested in paid leave who don't have children, or younger people who are taking care of parents with dementia, who are under 30 themselves. So that's exciting to me.

I've had so many conversations where I'll say, “We write about care work and the care economy,” and people sort of seem….confused by that. But if I say, we're talking about paid family leave, or we're talking about universal pre-K, then their eyes come back into focus. So I'm curious how you think about care as a way to organize politically and in terms of fighting for care-focused policies? 

When I say I'm working on a playbook about care, a lot of times people think I'm talking about health care. And so immediately I'm, like, “No, it's everything else. It's all the ways we care for people.” 

And I actually think we should not just talk about policy names. If you say “universal pre-K” that’s a policy, and people may or may not know the details, the ins-and-outs of that.

 But if you say “how we care for children,” basically everyone can understand. 

“How we care for children” is an idea that is worth fighting for. Then, there are specific policies that we push for. 

I recently did a poll and asked, “How many of you identify as a caregiver?” And some people are like, “Well, some days more than others.” I'm like, “If you identify any day as a caregiver, I think you are a caregiver.”

That can really help people understand that it can be very inclusive. We think of it as early child care or early child rearing.  But what about doing insurance paperwork for your elderly parents from across the country? Making sure your sibling’s medications are lined up for the week?  That is caregiving. 

I talked to some researchers a while back about who people think of when they think of a “caregiver.”  People think of low-wage workers who don’t have specialized skills. And because caregiving is “low skill” and that some people are just “naturally good” at caregiving, that it’s harder to organize around this kind of work: like demanding higher wages or better workplace conditions. Does that dovetail with what you found? 

The idea that we think women and women of color should do caregiving work for free or low wages is steeped in our history: American history and also global history. It starts with slavery and includes indentured servitude, and includes immigrant women coming over to be domestic workers to escape potato famine.

All of that dovetails into who we think should be doing it, and what we believe they should be paid for it. 

But the idea that women are naturally better at care work –  I think that especially younger parents, especially millennial men, are really interested and open to challenging that idea. There's more and more awareness that caregiving is not inherently gendered.

And also there's really interesting brain research on the neuroscience of caregiving, and neural pathways that open up when you care for children.

The reality is that all 73 million Baby Boomers are going to be 65 by 2030. 

And our elder care system is basically held together with Scotch tape and twine. It's nowhere ready for this.

In order for our society to function and for us to be able to support this demographic shift, we have to get people in those jobs. In-home health service jobs are going to be one of the fastest-growing job segments in the next 10 years. 

So if you don't think this is a skill, or this is not a valuable job, the market forces are just going to come and snap right back at you on that.

So let’s talk about the playbook. 

The start of the framework was just: “What's happening with the care movement?” We knew that we wanted to showcase things that actually worked, not just policy ideas, because there are a lot of policy ideas. We wanted to showcase real world, case study examples. 

What were some of the tactics for successful care initiatives and the success of certain kinds of groups? You flagged MomsRising and Campaign for Family Friendly Economy for example. 

So ballot initiatives, I believe, are really not a well-known enough lever to get government money for care programs, without the federal government intervening and without getting state legislatures on board. 

When you put care policies, especially around paid leave and child care initiatives, in front of voters, and your objective is clear, and your campaign is well-run, these are wildly popular with voters across the political spectrum. 

It's not like explaining industrial policy or tax policy and how that's going to impact someone. People get that they can't find childcare, or they can't keep a home health aide for their elderly parents. That is very clear to them. So ballot initiatives are super cool. 

I highly recommend people check out the Children's Funding Project, which offers tons and tons of resources about ballot initiatives, specifically around funding for children's services. There is a mechanism in a number of states called voter approved children's funds, which is basically creating dedicated pools of money for children's services, and they currently raise $1.5 billion every year. They're all over the country. The downside is not all states allow ballot initiatives and not all states have voter approved children's funds. I live in North Carolina, we don't have ballot initiatives. Very sad. 

So I'll tell you about two of my favorite ballot initiatives.

Love it. 

“If you could have a favorite ballot initiative…” That’s like the dorkiest thing ever to say.

Honestly, let's give ballot initiatives for the holidays.

So one of my favorite ballot initiatives is in Escambia County, which is in the Florida Panhandle. They passed a ballot initiative for $10 million for children's services for 10 years. They raised their property taxes to do it,  and they got 61% of the vote. This is in 2020, and Donald Trump won that same area with 57% of the vote. So it really showcases that these are not this is not left-right issues, and that this can find exciting momentum at the local and state level across political divides. 

Then I also did a whole case study on this ballot initiative in New Orleans. They got matching funds from the state. It’s a $40 million program, serving two thousand, low income kids. What I love about it is that they tried to pass a much smaller ballot initiative that was just going to be, like, 100 kids and it was going to use library money. There was a huge backlash, and the education people and the library people were pitted against each other. They lost. And people were also like, it's not that many kids. This is not transformational, this is not this isn't going to do much.

Then they regrouped, came up with a much bigger and bolder plan and actually put it on the ballot to raise taxes. They got people to vote to raise their own taxes, to fund a much bigger program and then they won. 

If you present people with a bold, exciting vision of positive change, that's what gets people to the polls, even if they're raising their own taxes, which goes against a lot of conventional wisdom in places like Louisiana and Florida.

I wanted to ask you about the tactic of “naming and shaming corporate greed.” You describe it as a powerful way to counter the opposition. 

I think one of the reasons that Build Back Better did not pass was that there was not an effective, ready, sharp, knives-out strategy against the opposition.

The opposition was some of the most powerful business lobby organizations in the country, who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying a year, who do not want their taxes raised, and they will put anyone down who wants to raise their taxes for any reason. They do not give a fuck.

So the idea, that we're all coming together, like, “Isn't this great for everyone? This is really going to help children”: that is not counting the opposition.

Countering the opposition is: These greedy fucks are why you cannot have what you deserve. 

There wasn't the political muscle and a machine in place to do that. Corporate greed is a wildly popular villain. And these policies are wildly popular.  So we have all the great building blocks for an effective political movement.

There just has to be coalescing, and there has to be a lot more money behind this movement. We're going to take them down the way and get the policies we deserve the same way people did with Big Tobacco. The climate movement has spent decades working on this. The care movement has spent like, three years working on this. But I think it's absolutely possible to do. 

What didn’t I ask about that I should have?

I really think unions are going to be what transforms the care economy.

I think that was one of my biggest surprises. I only had the vaguest understanding of union presence in these issues. I live in an area but basically doesn't have union so. So it’s very regional. 

People who are consumers of care should be very supportive of unions. As a movement, we need to be all in on unions. That is what has the possibility to transform serious elements of our economy and make our economy work better for everyone.