Hard to care? It might be because you don’t get enough care yourself.
A conversation with care correspondent Lynn Berger
We are two journalists writing about family and caregiving from a feminist perspective. Research, interviews and personal stories connecting systemic issues and family life; also, 40+ mom humor. You can read past issues here. Follow us on Instagram here.
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I’ve been on a break from regularly scheduled publishing, mostly because the summer has started off with ear infections, inflamed adenoids and two bouts of COVID. Woo hoo, summertime!
But today I’m excited to bring you a conversation I had with the Dutch journalist, Lynn Berger. She covers care and care work for the Dutch news outlet, De Correspondent. Her first book, printed in Dutch and English, is called Second Thoughts: On Having and Being a Second Child. Her latest book, about the crisis in caregiving, is just out in Dutch.
“Much of it is about care as a form of invisible labor,” she told me. “And how care is a big part of what it means to be human.”
It was a great conversation, but before we dig in, I wanted to highlight one action folks can take, if you – like me – are still enraged by the nationwide assault on reproductive rights and abortion access.
I recommend Jessica Valenti’s full-throated commitment to highlighting the most egregious impacts, and the work of The 19th as they track abortion access state-by-state.
But if you want to just give money to abortion funds, one of my favorite art websites is having a fundraiser for the National Network of Abortion Funds. All proceeds from this print by the artist Martha Rich will go toward NNAF, and why not give a prime spot in your home to a feeling so many of us share? In dazzling pink, no less!
But now, here’s the conversation with Lynn!
When you and I first talked a few weeks ago, you said that the care crisis is similar to the climate crisis: The issue is so big that the parts could be seen as separate incidents.
So what binds those different parts together? With all of the pieces of the care crisis, what's the thing that actually connects them?
Care — whether it's the care parents give to their children, or that people give to their elderly parents, or care professionals give to their patients — it's all grounded in the same biological and psychological mechanisms.
In order to care for someone, you need empathy. You need to be able to regulate your own behavior, so that you can fulfill the needs of others.
In order to do that, you need time, you need support, and you don't need stress, because stress makes it harder to be empathetic.
It makes it harder to control yourself, and it makes it harder to help others.
That would be the connecting thread: As a species, we're not giving ourselves and each other what we need in order to be able to care for each other.
You said this wonderful thing in an article for the Dutch daily paper de Volkskrant. Please blame Google Translate for what I get wrong here, but you wrote:
“Something that is everywhere is difficult to see. And you can't appreciate what you don't see well. You can't take care of what you don't see well. And what you don't take good care of will break.
It seems to me that that's at the heart of what this book is. You're trying to shine light on this invisible thing that we all participate in – care work – but we often don't see. How did that become your mission?
Becoming a parent definitely made me see how much work it is to take care of a child and how impossible it is to do that on your own, or even just within a nuclear family.
Then a couple of years ago, I got a cut on my foot and it got infected, and I ended up in the hospital. While I was there, the staff were demonstrating for a pay raise. And it was just so odd to me that the people who were literally saving my life were not being paid enough to do that.
I just started wondering, What is this? Why don't we see care? Why don’t we appreciate care for what it is?
I was in bed. I couldn't do anything. All I could do was watch. I was just looking at the nurses, and so many of the things reminded me of myself, when I was taking care of my children. They're doing things that are medical, but then they were also doing things that seemed more like a ritual to me.
When I got out of the hospital, I just had this sense that there was this really important activity of our species that I didn't understand. And that was due to the fact that society didn't seem to understand it well enough. So that's when I wanted to better understand care better, to try to see it better.
Then, a few months later, the coronavirus pandemic started. For a short moment in time, it was very clear to everyone just how crucial care is to the functioning of the rest of society. The pandemic really served as a magnifying glass, showing just how undervalued care always was and how unequally distributed care labor was between men and women, and between citizens and the state.
You know, I have to say that as an American based in the U.S., I am sort of shocked when I hear a European talk about a crisis of care, because the U.S. is just so, so appalling and I always assume you folks have it more under control. What’s the specific Dutch experience that was magnified because of the pandemic?
It is, in many ways, better than in the U.S., in the sense that we still have a semblance of a welfare state.
In the Netherlands, everyone has affordable health insurance aided by the state. Health care is generally quite affordable and accessible, although it's become less accessible because there are not enough healthcare workers.
There is support for parents: There is paid maternity leave and there is now partially paid paternity leave. And if you're a parent, there’s something called parental leave that's unpaid, but you can take it and you won't lose your job. So there are definitely mechanisms that make it easier to care and that make the care crisis less extreme than it is in the U.S.
However, the welfare state is crumbling. It's becoming smaller. It has been for decades. We have an aging population, and that means that we have more and more elderly people with more and more care needs, and also less and less young people to provide that care.
In the Netherlands right now, there are almost 50,000 vacancies for professional healthcare workers, and that’s expected to triple this decade.
There will also be fewer informal carers who are able to take care of elderly people in their homes.
The Minister of Health has said, We really need elderly people to stay home for as long as they can, and find help in their informal network. But those informal networks are shrinking, because families are smaller, people are living further away from their families, and people have to work, because life is expensive.
The concept of the welfare state is a problematic concept. The thing I like about it is that it acknowledges the fact that care needs to be supported, that people won't be able to care for themselves or each other, if they're not being helped.
But the idea of the welfare state was always structured around the breadwinner model, where the men in the nuclear family would work for money, and that wage would support the entire family, and the wife would do the unpaid work of caring for children and family members. So the welfare state was grounded in this idea that women should do unpaid care work and therefore be dependent on men who did paid work. So it was never a gender-equal system.
But you’ve retained the idea that the state had some responsibility to care for people from cradle to grave, over the course of their lives.
But it’s important to remember – how does this state care for its people? It does it through taxation, right? So in the end, it's the people caring for the people.
It's not like some benevolent King. Or Bill Gates, or whoever.
Right.
Another thing I really like in your work is how you say how care work itself, if it's done well, is actually invisible. Like, we know things are going wrong when we see a problem. But if things are going well, we don't see it.
My understanding of that grew out of a little obsession that I had a couple of years ago with maintenance. Before I became the care correspondent, I was writing a lot about culture and language. And I was doing these “key words” pieces, where I would take a word from public debate and analyze it. These were words like “impact” and “innovation.” And, like, “changemaking.”
Cool — fun beat.
Yeah, yeah, it was a fun beat. But I started to realize that we're focused on things that actually have very little meaning in our lives.
And we're not focused on things that are incredibly important to our lives, including maintenance. I was reading everything I could about this American artist, Mierle Laderman Ukeles. She's amazing. She's the artist in residence at the New York Sanitation Department.
In the 1960s, she wrote this maintenance manifesto, where she basically said, you know, we're all focused on the new and on the productive, but actually what keeps our lives going is maintenance and reproduction.
She came to that conclusion when she became a mother. She was an artist and she had two children and she no longer had time for her art, because all her time was going to caring for and maintaining the family.
And she did this radical thing, where she said, “Well, I'm just going to make this care work and this maintenance work: this is The Work.”
I thought she was really onto something there. So then I started studying maintenance. The problem with maintenance is that, as long as bridges and tunnels and everything are well maintained, no one cares. So you don't notice it until it stops happening. The same is true for care, right?
And when it comes to caring for children, and also caring for patients, often the goal of this care work is to make the recipients of care feel autonomous and independent.
As a parent, you will do all these things for your child, but you will tell your child, “Oh, how wonderful that you did all of that by yourself!” because that makes them feel confident and happy, and eager to try even more things.
We're making our own contribution invisible. And that's a very caring thing to do. But then it also makes it really hard for anyone really to appreciate how much work goes into it.
I wrote a while ago about how it’s so common in our culture to think that people who do care work must be just naturally good at it, and therefore, they must love it, and therefore they don't need to be paid for it. Can you articulate why that's such a problem?
Equating care work with love is the result of undervaluing women and care work in a capitalist patriarchal society.
You take this very important, very essential work without which society couldn't function, capitalism couldn't function, patriarchy couldn't function, and you say, “Oh, but it's not really work. It's love.”
So on the one hand, it's a symptom of a bigger systemic problem, but then it also becomes the cause of another systemic problem, which is that because care work – and this is also true for teaching – is seen as a vaguely professional outgrowth of something that mostly women would do naturally and happily – that means that you can pay pay less for it.
It contributes to a huge inequality between men and women, because it's mostly women who do this work and then they earn less than men. So the pay gap is partly due to this fact.
It's true people often do love their work, but you know, Mark Zuckerberg also loves his work and no one asks him to take a salary cut.
It’s also work that comes with huge risk. If you're an ICU nurse taking care of three patients, there's no way you're going to strike. Because if you do that, your patients die. If you do that, your colleagues who are already overwhelmed will be even more overwhelmed. Same with teachers, it's hard to strike because it means children can't go to school, so they can't learn. So you give people a huge responsibility, and you tell them that the work they do is work, but it's also not really work, and so therefore, you don't have to be paid well, and you make it impossible for them to object to this. So it's just incredibly unjust.
So shall we talk about some of the ways you see a way forward?
I think something like a basic care income or a universal basic income would really help in a future where there will be less and less professional care, but there won't be any less care needs. And so if we want to support the people who give care, that would be a great way to do it.
It's true that this is something that costs money. But I think it's also something that will save money, because it will prevent burnout and people leaving the workforce sooner than they should.
I've talked to a lot of nurses and doctors in the Netherlands, and this is probably true in the U.S. as well. They are all plagued by a lack of time, and a lack of freedom. There are these protocols, there are rules, there's administration, that means that they are very limited in how they can take care of people. And that's problematic, and it's also very stressful for them.
The essence of taking care of someone is that you look at the person and what they need, and then creatively come up with a solution, rather than doing the standard thing.
There are some organizations in the Netherlands which are teams of about eight to 10 nurses, and maybe one or two doctors, who are situated in a neighborhood, and they care for people in their homes, and they decide together how to do it. They decide how much time they want to give to each patient, what kind of treatment they want to give to them. They're not bound by rules, and they don't have to do excessive administration. And it works.
They care for patients and are happier, and there's no turnover. It doesn't cost any more money. And this is funded by all the major health insurance companies.
So that's a good example of when you give the people who are actually doing the care work more autonomy, the care becomes better.
Care work is obviously not equally divided between men and women. So employers and governments can do things to ensure that it gets more equally distributed by ensuring paid maternity leave, but also paid parental leave, and really encouraging fathers to take that leave.
Care is a practice: You become better at it the more you do it. So what if we could teach children, not just the importance of excelling, but also the importance of caring really early on. Show them that this is equally valuable as getting high grades on a test.
You know, I was just thinking, finally, in the United States, it looks like there's possibly some climate legislation that may move forward. But Congress has stripped out the initial proposals of supporting more care workers and caregivers. So we continue to separate infrastructure, climate and care work. You've just laid out such a clear statement about how all of these things are so connected.
I think care can become this abstract term. But it's really also just a very, very practical thing. And as a journalist, that's what you can do, you can go and look at it and write and describe it. That's really something where journalism can add something to the conversation.
Was there one thing that you saw in your reporting that surprised you or that you hadn't seen before?
I had been reading about how people are like open loop systems, and we need other bodies in order to regulate our own bodies. I liked that concept. Then I went and visited a mother who was taking care of her 19-year-old daughter who had this very serious metabolic illness, which basically meant that for years the girl was unable to speak, got her food through a tube, and had seizures. Her mother was caring for her daughter around the clock.The daughter would start to shake or she would be upset. And the mother would sort of fold herself over her daughter and speak to her in this sing-songy way, and the daughter would calm down.
This was a really clear illustration of the fact that our bodies can only be calmed down and sustained by other bodies.
It’s a fundamental experience of being a caregiver – that in regulating our own bodies, we help regulate the people that we are caring for. It’s so mutual, it's so interconnected.
Yeah. So this whole idea of people as independent individuals, it’s just madness, right?
This was such a nuanced and valuable report. The focus on the roots of caregiving underlining the source of being human as well as our survival as a species is most important!!
I found the example about teachers or nurses, who face the dilemna to strike for better wages when they are struggling with needs of students or survival of their patients so poignant. It exposes that women need both, to be able to strike and have autonomy for decision making in their jobs.
Thank you
This gives words to so many things! I’m just constantly appalled by the fact that the labor that keeps the species going is undervalued and underpaid. Thanks for this.