Alison Gopnik and Anne-Marie Slaughter on Why We’re Not Paying Enough Attention to Caregiving
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Alison Gopnik is a cognitive scientist, developmental psychologist, and philosopher. She's devoted her career to understanding, in her words, how young children come to know about the world around them.

But children don't grow up alone. They're embedded in caregiving networks. And now Gopnik is leading a multidisciplinary project to understand the social science of caregiving. And not just for children, but for everyone who needs care. We'll talk with her and New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter about what they hope to learn about better supporting caregiving in our society. That's all coming up next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Caregiving is essential human labor. All children need caregivers, and most people need caregivers at some point in their lives. Nothing could be more important, literally, for the continuation of our families and even the species. And yet, caregiving remains wildly undervalued and understudied.

The reason for this is almost too obvious to state. For decades, most academic researchers were men and most of them weren't doing the caregiving.

Now, in a new effort based at Stanford, Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor and philosopher at UC Berkeley, is leading a new multidisciplinary effort to study caregiving with all the tools of the academy. She recently edited a special issue of the journal Daedalus on the social science of caregiving. Welcome back to Forum, Alison. Well, so glad to be here. Yeah.

We are also joined by one of Gopnik's collaborators on the project. That would be Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of the New America Foundation, also the author of many books, including Unfinished Business, Women, Men, Work, Family. Welcome, Anne-Marie. Thanks. It's great to be here.

So I wanted to start, I think, with this sense that, Alison, you're a scientist, developmental psychologist. You kind of really have expanded the terrain of cognitive science in children. So what got you interested in extending your lens to the caregivers?

Well, I've long been interested in something that biologists call life history, which is something about the way that human beings develop. And one of the most striking things about humans is that we have so much investment in taking care of each other, so much. We have such a long, helpless childhood.

And we also have this long period of elderhood, a long period of postmenopausal grandmothers, for instance. And we always have, even in forager cultures as soon as we evolved. And that makes us quite different from some of our closest primate relatives. So a question is, why?

Why did this happen? Why is it so important to us? Why is it such a deep part of who human beings are? And I think the picture is the very fact that we have this period of childhood that's the thing that lets us adapt to new environments depends on caregiving. And caregiving is the thing that lets us cooperate, lets us have a lot of our distinctive human capacities.

You know, I could perhaps buy a simple – I mean, this isn't my argument I'm making, but I could buy a simple argument that evolution explains why people care for their kids, right? Their genes are in there, so they got to – but how would that explain elder care in a community, for example, right? So where do you think these impulses kind of come from? Well, this is the interesting thing. If you look at, you know, even all mammals, you'll see this impulse to care for –

You'll see this impulse to care for the young. But I think there's a good argument that part of what happens with humans, part of our success is that we can take that impulse and apply it to lots of people. We can apply it even to the non-human world. We can apply it to animals. We can apply it to the planet. In religious thinking, we can think about

trying to apply it to all sentient beings. But I think that's rooted in these very close relationships between people who see each other and know each other. And there's a kind of abstract way, there's a way you could think about it, which is the remarkable thing about caregiving is, you know, most of the time we're thinking about...

exchanges between people, you know, so you sort of say, okay, I'll do this for you because you'll do that for me. Sometimes we think about power. So we say, you're going to do this for me because I have more resources than you. But the amazing thing about caregiving is you see someone who's needy, you see someone who doesn't have the resources that you have,

And the result is that you feel this very strong impulse to help. You feel this very strong impulse to share your resources with them. And that makes caregiving really different from other kinds of social and economic relationships. And yet...

very profound and I think people feel that it's really profound if you ask people what are the hardest moral decisions you've had to have or what's the thing that makes your life worthwhile or what really is meaningful very often they talk about these the way that they take care of of the people they love and the way that loving people leads you to take care of them and yet

This very fundamental human capacity has been sort of almost invisible in economics and politics and philosophy and psychology. Deeply under-theorized across everything, all these fields. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we've been doing this at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences with Margaret Levy, who's a political scientist, has been my collaborator in all of this, and we

We had a bit of a joke about every time we would look at a new academic field and we'd say, gee, look at this. Here's four different economic relations and here's five different principles of moral philosophy and caregiving just doesn't show up at all. What could it be that all the people who are doing this have in common? And we finally decided, well, maybe it's because they're tall.

Now, it should be said, you know, back in the 70s and in general, feminists have pointed this out, right, have pointed out that this is something that has been sort of neglected. But aside from pointing it out, we haven't really been very successful in trying to make a kind of technical...

Take all the different kind of people. Take the policy people. Take the psychologists. Take the philosophers. Take the biologists. And try and put them together to try and understand more about how this process works. And very importantly, to use that understanding to actually make it work better. Mm-hmm.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, perfect time to bring you in. I mean, you wrote an era-defining piece, really, Why Women Still Can't Have It All in 2012, followed up with a book and policy work at New America, of course. What do you think we still need to know about caregiving and the way that it's embedded in our sort of social and market relationships? So I came to New

studying and writing about care by a very different route, although ended up very much in the same place as Alison and Margaret and the participants in this project. You know, when I wrote my article in 2012, it was really about how

women were the primary caregivers, but the workplace still did not make real allowance for that, much less our conception of careers. We were still defining careers as you enter at 22 or 25 and you

head straight up the ladder until your 50s and 60s and you don't take time out and that we needed to do that if we were going to really get to gender equality. But by 2015, I had really changed my views fundamentally. I realized that if we're going to get to gender equality, then we have to value traditional women's work as much as traditional men's work. In other words, my father was a lawyer, my generation of feminists

grew up thinking we want to have careers. We wanted to be like our fathers for the most part, certainly in sort of white, more privileged feminism. And we kind of disdained the stay-at-home mom, the work that our mothers did. That was the work we were leaving behind. But the

But that just won't work mathematically. You can't have women doing all the work that men traditionally did and all the women women traditionally did. You have to raise the value of the work women traditionally did so that men also do it. And we are so far from that. So I started looking at care and why we don't value care. I agree with Allison. It's not a great mystery as to why care is not part of

and thinking, I mean, who's doing those studies and who's doing the care work? But I think what this social scientific approach has done has been to understand, as Alison said, just how necessary care is

for the survival of species, but also for the flourishing of the species. That when we give care, the caregiver benefits as well as the care recipient. It's not a reciprocal, I get this, you get that. That's not the motive for it. But it's not just we're going to care for the young people and they're going to continue evolutionarily. It is really a relationship that helps us

It helps us flourish. And we know this when we look at things like the epidemic of loneliness and isolation, and particularly when we look at men, the absence of caring relationships, of deep relationships in their lives that involve care is really impoverishing. So to me, there's a whole terrain there where you will, I hope,

get to a far better appreciation of all human work, traditional men's work and traditional women's work, but that we'll also understand something fundamental about human nature that I think our models of economic and social policy do not allow for.

Go ahead, Alison. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And part of it is that a lot of the models of how we do policy, for example, you know, the basic ways we think about doing policy are markets and states, right? And neither of those is a good...

a very good description of how we do care, even though both of them contribute. So if you think about markets from a market perspective, even though obviously there's market forces involved in care, care is either both a very expensive luxury for consumers and a very poorly paid profession for the people who are doing it.

Instead of a naturally broken market.

That doesn't seem to capture the way that care works either because it's so rooted in these close relationships. That's not all that's involved in it, but that kind of local closeness is certainly a very important part of what's going on in care. Yeah, it seems like it's necessary. That's a necessary component of care. If your teacher doesn't care for the kids...

Right. It doesn't feel quite right as a relationship. And it's interesting that if you think about things like teaching, the two good examples are teaching and medicine. Those are both examples that we tend to think about as if, okay, you're just providing another, you know, you're providing another service that you're getting paid for. Educational widget. Yeah. But in fact,

Those are really relationships of care. And that's an important part for teachers and for therapists and for the medical profession is that they're involved in caring. And we need to think about how do we support that. And I think Anne-Marie would agree, there are some policies that we could have. We talk about some of them in this special issue of Daedalus that could

could serve this function of providing resources and support without necessarily doing it through the familiar mechanisms of the market or the state. We're talking about caregiving, studying it, understanding it, supporting it. We're joined by Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at Berkeley.

Also joined by Anne-Marie Slotter, CEO of New America and author of Unfinished Business, Women, Men, Work, Family. Of course, we want to hear from you. Are you a caregiver? What makes the job hard? What makes it rewarding? What surprised you about caregiving? Give us a call, 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. Forum at kqed.org. You can find us on all the social media things. We're KQED Forum. We'll be back with more right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about caregiving, joined by Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, a nonprofit think tank, of course, author of Unfinished Business, Women, Men, Work, and Family. Also joined by Alison Gopnik, a cognitive scientist, a developmental psychologist, philosopher at UC Berkeley. They're working together on an academic project on the social science of caregiving, which is centered...

at CASP at Stanford. Are you a caregiver? What makes that job hard? What makes it rewarding? You know, in your circles, is caregiving distributed evenly among genders? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. The email address is forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, of course, as well, or join the discussion over on the Discord page.

You know, Alison, I just wanted to ask you about your own experiences of caregiving, of needing caregiving or providing caregiving and how they've informed this for you. Yeah. You know, it started out when I wrote my book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, in 2016, part of

That was about parents and children because I study children and I'm interested in and I wanted to think about the relationship between parents and children. And my own experience as a mother of three children was that that was such a deep, profound, transformative experience and one that people hadn't thought about as much.

But then part of what happened to me is that I became a grandmother. So I now have six grandchildren and two sort of de facto grandchildren. And I also became someone who was taking care of elders because my parents are now in their 90s. And that really changes, that made me think about how much broader this problem of caregiving is. And one of the things that I've noticed as I talk to people about it is

Everyone you talk to, as we were coming in here, one of the people working on the show was saying, oh, let me tell you about this problem I have. I had a phone call about what's happening with my parents. And everyone says, oh, I have this personal problem, which is that I have caregiving responsibilities. I don't know what to do about preschool. And then you realize, wait a minute, everybody says this, right? Everybody has this problem.

Everybody has this issue. And the elder care issue in general, I mean, because of good things, because we're living longer, it means that this has become something that's, you know, if you don't die young, then you get old. And this has become a really general societal problem. And it's hard to kind of make the transfer from, oh, yeah, let me tell you about this.

problem I have about finding childcare or finding elder care. Sorry, I can't come to that, you know, I can't come to that seminar because of this to, no, wait a minute, if everybody is experiencing this, it's a problem across the whole society and we need to think about it that way. Anne-Marie, talk to us about that. Talk to us about your sort of the personal side of it for you and then how you've made that extension into thinking at the societal level. Yeah. So on the personal level,

I totally agree with Alison that we really should start thinking that all human beings will be caregivers at some point in their lives. That can be for biological family members or chosen family members or friends, but it is something that is no longer limited to women. 40% of

40% of unpaid caregivers for elders, for parents, are men. And that's in part because, you know, the sisters and the wives who used to do it are doing other things. But just more generally, my experience of caregiving with my children and like Allison now with my parents,

was one in which I was so aware of what I was gaining as well as what I was giving. Yeah, exactly. And I think of caregiving as investing in the flourishing of another in a way that when that other, you know, succeeds, and you can think of this as a mentee, you know, when that person succeeds, you feel as proud as it and as good as if you had. And that's a

again, that's a very unusual experience. It's very counter to this vision we have of, you know, individuals who go out and achieve and that's the life goal. Instead, this is a vision of human beings who are deeply connected to one another and who benefit when one another benefits. And we've taken that insight at New America and

translated it into policies for families. So all of our economic employment policy is based on individual workers. Do they have jobs? How much do they earn? How does that translate into unemployment rates?

What if you also thought about how do we invest in the ability of people to care for one another? And very specifically, what about families with young children? Because when I turned 65, I got all sorts of benefits. There's Medicare, Social Security, there's discounts just about everywhere. When you are a family with young children, your time goes down and your expenses go up. And for many people, it's very...

It's a very vulnerable time, as it used to be for seniors. And yet you get nothing. We have nothing that says, hey, we need to help you. And if we help you care for one another, the results will be better for you, but they'll also be better across society. I'm so curious how you – because I totally agree with this and I –

have heard about some of this work at new America, trying to think about, you know, parents with children under five as, as needing like a great society level intervention, uh, like happened with, with seniors, uh, back then, how in this political moment with all this, like quote unquote pro natalist stuff, trying to get women to have more babies. I mean, there's a, there's a piece of that agenda that seems to track with what you're saying, but it,

For some reason, it feels completely different and not actually as if it's there to support caregiving so much as just trying to, like, quote unquote, increase the birth rate. Well, you know, there's something that something to say about this, which is that this conversation.

concern about families, this concern about care is one of the things that really crosses boundaries. So, you know, it crosses political boundaries. It crosses red-blue state boundaries. It's because it's such a universal part of it's such a universal part of human life. And, you know, you see family values, right? Family values are about trying to support care. You see Republicans, at least some of them who are supporting the idea of a child tax credit, which is

or a family allowance, which is the sort of thing that Anne-Marie was talking about. You know, it's very hard to know at this particular moment, but in principle over the long run, this is, and there's polling that shows that, you know, people really feel strongly across boundaries that this is the right thing to do and an important thing to do. And, you know, some of the,

the sense of it wouldn't be good. It's not good if we have a society where there aren't any children, right? That's a very basic fundamental, that's a very basic fundamental idea. And I think that's one that really, really can bring people together. And in a way that, you know, caregiving itself, one of the things about it that's kind of underrated is that it does bring people together. So, you know, I come from a family of six children and

And we're all taking care of my parents now. And that's really brought together siblings who are scattered all over the world. It is a way of getting a communal feeling. I wanted to say something else about what Anne-Marie was saying, though, which is one of the things that makes caregiving so interesting is that one thing is it's kind of intrinsically altruistic. You're concerned about the welfare of another person.

But another thing is that it's not just that you want that other person to do better. You want them to be freer. You want them to be more autonomous. You want them – you want to give them resources so that they can make decisions. They can thrive themselves. And that's very vivid if you think about both, you know, say teenagers and elders. You don't want to just –

go in and say, okay, here's what you should do because this will make you better off. You want to say, here's resources that will let you have more possibilities, let you decide things for yourself, make your own decisions and make your own way in the world. Think of new ideas. Be out in the world in a new way. And that also makes it, I think, quite profound, quite a profound way of interacting with other people, not just saying,

You know, it's already profound to say, I'm going to think your needs are as important as mine. But it's even more profound to say, and what I want to do is let you have more autonomy, have more liberty, be able to make decisions yourself. And I think that's a really important part of how human beings work. Anne-Marie, do you want to quickly follow on that before we take some phone calls? Yeah.

No, I completely agree with that. And it's actually a great way of also thinking about being a manager, which is also a caring relationship where you are actually trying to empower the person that you're, yes, you're overseeing, but you're helping them. But I'll just say also, Alexis, on your point, I think pro-natalist and pro-care are not the same thing.

You need an infrastructure of care to enable people to have children and have them in ways that are healthy and good for the whole family and then for the society. But an awful lot of the sort of focus just on the birth rate feels a lot like stress.

sending women back out of the workforce. Like you should be at home caring rather than a society that says to men and women, look, you need connection as much as you need competition. You need family as much as you need career. We're going to enable both for all of you. Great. Great point. Thank you for that. Christine in San Francisco. Welcome.

Hi. I have sort of an interesting story. I'm kind of living my life backwards. I did my career as an antitrust lawyer first, got married in my late 30s. We weren't able to have children, and we adopted later. So I was working for a large corporation in San Francisco, and it got sold, and I had a kindergartner and a one-year-old, and I went home. And I came to the conclusion to...

follow up on something one of your guests said. I have come to the firm conclusion that nobody should get to be a CEO unless they've been a housewife. Because the skills, the HR skills, the monetary management skills, the time management skills, the goal setting, the logistics, all of it

really came into play for me much more when I went home. In addition to all the emotional connectedness that you're talking about and the fun, you know, of making Halloween costumes and going on field trips and the rest of it,

I will say, though, that had I stayed home and not gotten to explore, you know, when I was in my early 20s and not gotten to explore some of the world, I don't know if I would have been as satisfied. Yeah.

Not that you can't do it another way. I mean, I sure didn't pick this, but it's what happens. Just the path. You know, it just has a different path. But everything you're saying totally resonates with me. And I was very lucky to be able to be able to afford some child care when the kids were very young. But even then, you're still wondering, even

Even with very good child care, what's going on when I'm not there? And I have been known to take conference calls, work conference calls, at the pediatrician's office waiting for the doctor to come in. So it's a very interesting phenomenon to me. Yeah, thank you so much, Christine. Just highlighting both the commonalities there.

in a lot of experience, but also that the components of caregiving and work and life can be patched together in a bunch of different ways. Let's go straight to Ellen in San Francisco. Welcome, Ellen.

Hi, thank you. Thank you very much for doing this topic. And I wanted to ask your guests, I'm a nurse, and I think much of this thinking philosophy and theory of care has been explained.

Florida nursing, and I'm curious if you've looked at that and thought about it. Nursing is, I think, interesting because for so long it was almost, well, still is primarily a women's profession, although more and more men are entering it. And I think there are concepts and ideas coming from that that, you know,

are interesting to consider. Yeah. Ellen, thanks so much. Alison, do you want to? Yeah, it's really interesting because you can see people have thought about care in a whole lot of different places that haven't talked to each other very much. So, you know, nursing is an example of a caring profession and that's a, that's a big, uh,

That's a big part of it. As I mentioned, teaching is an example. So, you know, even if you're an academic professor the way I am, your relationship to your graduate students, for instance, is very much a relationship of I want to give them resources so they can do things that are different from the things that I did. And I want to help them even when what they're doing isn't necessarily what I think is best.

So I think this very – even people think about it as, okay, here's elders, here's children, here's patients, here's students, here's the specific economic problems that come up in labor economics. But people haven't quite –

And people thought about it in the context of religion as well. But people haven't thought about it as a sort of unified problem that has some really important common features. And nursing, I think, is like a wonderful example where we tend to, when you think about it economically, that it tends to be treated as if it's instrumental. But it really is an example of it.

a profession that's deeply involved in care. And I wanted to speak to the other caller. I think a really important idea is this idea that part of why care is so important is because we change our lives as we develop as human beings. So, you know, I was just talking to someone about it who was saying, oh, well, it's based in inequality. That's not so good. And I was saying, look, we all have times when we're needy. We all have, just because we're human, we have childhood, we have

where we're able to go out and do a bunch of work and other periods when we're taking care of other people and yet other periods when we're being taken care of. And it's that balance. It's trying to figure out how that works across a lifespan that's really characteristic of care. And again, something that's sort of invisible in your usual pictures of economics or politics. Anne-Marie Slaughter, how,

How can policy support that idea that, you know, there's this contemporary dimension where we'll both be caregivers and also cared for at other times in life? So policy can again assume

kind of what I think of as whole human beings rather than just the human beings who are out in the workforce, the paid workforce who have traditionally been men, and assume that humans will be people who are connected to others, who need to be connected to others, and exactly as the first caller said, need to have a path or an ability for self-actualization. And if we put that at

at the heart of our economic models and our social models when we're thinking about policy, then we start to think not, oh, yes, well, you know, there's women's work, because on the nurse's side, that, you know, the doctor was the man and the woman was the nurse. And instead, we thought about caring professions and also all the areas in which human beings are...

vulnerable and needy, but also in their sort of in their prime and built that in, we would start thinking about essentially cradle to grave policy, not working life policy, which is what most of our economic policy anyway is based on. Yeah, I mean, I want to

emphasize that, and again, we have some of this in the volume, there's some pretty practical things that we could do that would make things different. One thing is the built environment. So one reason why we have trouble with care is because people are literally separated from one another and having things like support for intergenerational housing. One of the things that came out of COVID was a lot of people moved in with parents and grandparents and realized, oh no, this is really

satisfying. The grandparents love being with the kids. It gives us a different kind of structure. So that's one thing that we could really do, change the way the built environment works so we aren't separating people, we're bringing them together. Another thing that we could do is we could take some policies like

the family allowance policies and extend them to elders. So not just have someone who's not just have the idea that you should get some resources to help you take care of your child. But if you're taking care of an elder, maybe you get resources and responsibility for doing that. And you could imagine having like a designated friend. It doesn't necessarily have to be kin. It could be that you both as a...

a way I think of it sometimes is sort of think of it as extending marriage, you know. We're talking and thinking about caregiving with Alison Gopnik and Anne-Marie Slaughter. We'll be back with more right after the break.

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Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go! That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together!

Welcome back to Forum. This hour is flying. We're talking about studying, doing, thinking about caregiving. We're joined by Allison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at

Also studies philosophy and cognitive science at UC Berkeley. She's leading an academic study on the social science of caregiving. We're also joined by Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America and author of many books, including Unfinished Business, Women, Men, Work, and

And of course, we're taking your calls and comments. If you can't get through on the phones, try sending us an email. Forum at KQED.org. You can find us on Blue Sky, on Instagram, or over on the Discord.

One thing that I wanted to ask you about, Anne-Marie, before we go back to some more listener discussion, is kind of the role of domestic workers in kind of leading the charge. Really, I think on like the theory of care too, right? Not just doing care in homes. Yes, I think so.

A big part of the care conversation has to be who is doing care now. And again, how do we value them? How do we value them in the paid workforce as well as socially? And when you look at the majority of home caregivers,

They are overwhelmingly women of color. Many of them are immigrant women, and they are often among the lowest paid members of our workforce in some states, but very few. They're unionized in most states.

You know, they're working in the household in very intimate settings. They're often very committed to their patients. And we should say here, it's important not to romanticize the work of care. A lot of it is really hard. It can be unpleasant. It can be very difficult. It can be physically very difficult, particularly caring for elder people.

even as it is also the work of human connection. So Ai-jen Poo, who has been the head of the National Domestic Workers Coalition, I call her the nation's foremost apostle of care. She wrote The Age of Dignity in 2015, really talking about elder care in particular.

And so part of valuing care is unquestionably seeing the care workforce at every level and thinking about what does it take to make those valuable and valued jobs.

A couple comments. We're going to go back to the phones. Melissa over on the Discord writes, love this discussion of caregiving because it is one of the largest barriers that my partner and I discuss as we plan a family. My dad did a lot of my after school care. I would go to his office or sit in during his lectures even when I was a toddler. He normalized this at the university department where he worked.

My mom worked for the same university and brought me to her office some days, too, but very different takes. He was the, quote, good parent, and she didn't have child care that day. Finding work in a kid-friendly environment would be so nice, but it's so hard to find. Mm-hmm.

Another thought here. Susan writes, as a child psychologist, I tried with my own children to help them find joy in caregiving. At the end of the day, we shared not our academic successes, but our opportunities to make someone else's day a little better. Sometimes it was including another, giving up a place in line or offering a genuine compliment. As adults, they still call with stories. Let's go to Michael in Petaluma. Welcome, Michael.

Hey, good morning. I want to make sure that I talk in the second part about some resources that we're fortunate to have in California, but how those fall short, even though it's where we have them. So the first part is we as a society tend to think in terms of common experiences, but what about those of us who have experiences most of them have? So we have kids.

We have adults. What about those of us who have special needs kids, kids with a rare medical disorder? Right. So our son is just one of many camps. And we know and we wonder what's going to happen when we die. Well, we're blessed. So that's a big, big, big, big thing. But there's also a smaller part. So in California, we're blessed to have something called the Lantern Act. Other states, they don't have it.

So we have something where there's certain regional centers that folks that have four specific conditions, that state, for lack of a better word, will help out. We better not leave California. The sunsets in Santa Fe are magnificent. I thought about retiring there. We can't leave Sonoma County. All right. So here's a couple more fine points. The 418, if we die suddenly, nope.

And after 18, he's got to go into one of these group homes because, again, if we die suddenly. So we have resources here, but even those are limited. So the big picture is, you know, you got it.

I appreciate your bringing up all those points. And, you know, one of the things that I have been hearing and I don't know exactly where this is politically, you know, certain cuts to Medicaid that are making life very difficult for people with special needs kids.

Yes. And thank to the caller. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. It is a huge part of the care economy, but also the care, the experience of care. And it is one where the state does need to help, but the state needs to help in ways that enable families and perhaps extended families or chosen families to help because it's

As you said, the vision of a group home, that can be a wonderful place. It can also be a kind of institutionalized setting that is impersonal and exactly what families do not want for loved ones. So this again, I mean, there's a simple amount of resources available. And right now, yes, this is not a time at the federal level where care of any kind is being provided.

Although there is some right-left support, I think, for increased childcare, but you're not seeing it right at the moment. But it also needs to be how do you spend those resources and how do you...

again, create ways that people can come together and commit to long-term care. Alison has written about this, like we have a marriage ceremony, can you have a civic ceremony that says, you know, we commit to care for this person, a child, a disabled adult, as well as state resources.

We used to have godparents, you know, godparents sort of served that function of having someone who could say, I'm committed to helping this person. And that could be for an elder. It could be for a friend. And I think that sort of broadening out that idea of committing to care and also supporting and giving resources to that would be one thing that we could do. That's so interesting. Let's bring in...

Denise in San Jose. Hey, welcome, Denise. Hi, thank you for having me on. Yeah, go ahead.

I want to say it was really difficult and has been difficult for me to find joy in caregiving, to be perfectly honest. My parents in the summer of 2020, both of them at the same time, were hit with very significant health issues. My mom with a very rare leukemia. My dad with Parkinson's that has just been declining ever since. It has just been almost five years of just growing intensity and demands. Doctors, emergency rooms, and as time progressed, things

get worse and not better and working against parents who want autonomy and don't want to change to address the challenges of this kind of situation to help us help them and the pandemic was really a blessing for us in a lot of ways because as someone who has two small children and a full-time corporate job that's intense i had a mental health crisis through all of it

Of course. You know, my mother ended up passing away at the very beginning of this year unexpectedly and now needing to take care of my father. So it just doesn't end. Yeah. And...

We really just were not set up to support managing all of these things. And I, you know, I try to feel grateful for being fortunate for what I have that enables me to do it. But, you know, it really takes a toll on someone's mind and spirit. Denise, thank you so much for sharing this story. What's one thing you think would help that could come from the outside?

You know, I just think as much flexibility that we can give people who are experiencing this, who are doing their best and working hard in all aspects. You know, I think there was a comment about, you know, you have to be a CEO. You know, to be a CEO, you have to be able to manage your home. I mean, to really make it work, you need to be flexible and just take what you need and ask for it. Ask for it. Demand it. Right.

We should be demanding the support in our society to enable this because it's only going to get worse. People are living longer. Rare diseases are coming out. We're not set up for elder care. And it's so expensive, honestly.

And then trying to manage how much this is going to cost. The burden falls on us because we are, you know, free elder care for them in a way. So it's there just needs to be a full shift and it will take a lot of time.

Yeah, I think one of the most important things is getting people out of this feeling of isolation, which comes with this. You know, it's my problem. It's my difficulty. When in fact, it's happening to many, many, many people in many contexts. And, you know, when I was just at UC Berkeley, as an example of an employer for many, many years, I worked to do things like get an elder care counselor. So have someone who's part of the

workplace whose job it is to help people who are facing elder care, give them advice, give them resources, tell them where to go. Because a lot of times people are just bewildered. What should I do? How do I start this? Having a child care that's part of the university, having things like

leave policies that say, if you have caregiving responsibilities, you can take a paid leave for some period of time to deal with those. Having flexibility about working at home, that's another example. So there are definitely things that we could do that would make people feel less isolated and more supported. And it also matters who represents us. As I listen to you, I think

you know, often in legislatures, as we've just seen at the federal level, where even among the Republicans, they voted down a proposal to allow proxy voting for new parents. And essentially, the woman representative, you know, who was part of the Freedom Caucus said, look,

Most of my colleagues, it's just never occurred to them that they would have to provide care. Somebody else provides care so that there isn't this notion, as I said, that everybody's going to be a caregiver. It is a social issue. It is a species issue. And we collectively have to make that part of what our government thinks about and what we provide for to have a healthy society.

Because as you said, it's very hard. Even as it can be rewarding and it's critically important, it is also very hard. Denise, thank you so much for sharing that, kind of voicing the frustration and difficulty I think so many caregivers have, you know, squeezed on both sides. You know, another listener writes, this is a sad comment. I'm 81 years old. I took care of my partner as he was dying for many years.

That was 20 years ago. I currently have cancer and heart disease and numerous other health issues, but all of my friends and family are dead. I have no one to designate as an emergency contact. What do I do?

I was just thinking, you know, the way Denise ended her, that call, you know, we need a whole reset. Like this listener should not be in this position. Right? I mean, this is, feels like it's a failure of society, not of this person. Yeah. No, I think that's, I think that's right. And if we can get a sense that this is broader than just individual, broader than just individual people having friends and community. And, you know, a lot of the things that people talk about, like the loneliness epidemic,

As I say, caring for other people, jointly caring for people together, those are all really important ways of establishing the kind of connection that Anne-Marie was talking about. And we need to take that seriously as a societal issue. Yeah. Let's bring in Naomi in San Rafael. Welcome.

Hi, thank you for taking my call. One thing I haven't heard is that the difference between caring for children and parents is that caring for your parents comes after a long and, for a lot of people, difficult relationship and struggling with how to...

do the right thing for parents who are depending on you, who were not there for you when you needed them is very difficult. And I,

I do wonder if the 40 percent of men who say they are primary caregivers are writing checks to people actually doing the care. Naomi, appreciate that. I would have to say that, yeah, that number was quite surprising to me. Allison, I think I kind of want to take this one maybe in the research angle, which I am really curious about.

The psychological study of that caretaking of parents after a lifetime of a relationship with them. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really I think that's a really good point. And part of it is it's a little hard to get out of this kind of reciprocal picture, you know, this picture as if it's a contract. And it just clearly isn't.

that's not the way it works. And with kids, of course, we know that because we know that we are committed to whatever this baby is and that the relationship with the baby is going to be very, very asymmetric from the very beginning. We're providing care without thinking that we're receiving it. But I think it's harder to think about that for elders. It's harder to think about that for people in general. And again, especially if you don't have the sense that it's not just me, it's

lots of people who are involved in this care. It's not just about this one personal relationship, even though it's often grounded in the personal relationship. I think that, I think that that's something that, that might help. Yeah.

Annemarie, I wanted to take a question to you here that's just ultra practical political program question, which is if there were just three things that you could do policy wise that would, you know, or that people who are really fired up about these caregiving issues that they could support, what would they be?

So the first one would be to support paid family leave across the board. And note, I say paid family leave. So whatever the caregiving emergency or family emergency is, it's not just parent, it's not just for children, it's for whatever you need. That is hugely important. And it then creates space for families to figure out how they're going to provide care. I think that's

The first place I would start. But then I would push for an infrastructure of care, which means state support for care, but not necessarily state provision of care. I think you need both.

But again, as Allison says, particularly as we focus on the importance of place and many people now are able to work more remotely, that means you may have to be part of a kind of caring community in your town. Mm-hmm.

And you might then get state support, some kind of tax credit, some kind of other support to become a caring community that is extended family. So the three things really are first paid family leave and then looking at how you can create at the state level before the federal level, a kind of infrastructure of care for, again, children and elders are the easiest, but it's got to include the disabled and just...

adults who need care as well. Thank you so much. This has been such a fascinating show. For those who want to learn more, there is this special issue of the journal Daedalus. It's entitled The Social Science of Caregiving. We, of course, have been talking with Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America and author of Unfinished Business. Women, men, work, family, among many other works. Thank you so much for joining us, Anne-Marie.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. I've also been joined by Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology, also a philosopher, a cognitive scientist, and many other things, also at UC Berkeley. She's leading this academic study on the social science of caregiving. Thank you so much for joining us, Alison. Well, thank you so much for having us and discussing this really crucial issue. You should also check out her book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, by the way.

The nine o'clock hour forum is produced by Grace Wan, Blanca Torres, and Cecilia Lay. Our interns are Brian Bowe and Jesse Fisher. Jennifer Ng is our engagement producer. Francesca Fenzi is our digital community producer. Judy Campbell is lead producer. Danny Bringer is our engineer. Katie Springer is the operations manager of KQED Podcasts. Our VP of news is Ethan Tov and Lindsay. And our chief content officer is Holly Kern. And thank you so much to everyone who

called in and commented. We're rooting for you out there, taking all that care. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

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