I'm so glad you brought this up! What a great conversation. I’ve enjoyed everyone’s thoughts so far.
I think a helpful first step in addressing societal reforms that care for the vulnerable is changing how we view caregiving in the American workplace. Currently (and I generalize here, speaking from my own work experience in Career Development and from experiences of family, friends, and former colleagues), being an unpaid caregiver (especially a stay-at-home mom) is viewed from a sympathetic lens at best to a hostile one at worst. If one has taken time out of the paid working world to be a full-time caregiver, it is often recommended to leave the experience off of one's resume entirely. Unfortunately, the underlying message of that recommendation is "the last x amount of years you spent caring for your children/loved one have not contributed to your ability to be a competent or qualified employee,” which, following that thread of thought, translates into: “Investing in your loved one’s care is a waste of your time and talent.”
If within the professional world people began to value these roles, messaging would look very different. People are doing very valuable work as caregivers; they give their time, energy, and love. They develop and hone skills, just as they would in other jobs. When someone has spent time in the Peace Corps, the unpaid work done in a spirit of service for others is highly valued; why should a caregiver’s work be viewed differently? If managers, executives, hiring committees, etc. began to welcome caregivers' experiences on resumes, started to ask further questions about the skills honed in that space, and made a point to value these individuals and their contributions made to those in their communities, I think we would see a few societal shifts over time: 1) more people choosing to be caregivers, knowing they aren’t potentially giving up careers to do so and 2) a change in how we view the vulnerable; they are worthy of that love, of receiving that service. They are not a waste of time.
As a full-time homemaker/housewife, I am not offended by the value of care work being stated in economic terms (although I recognize the poverty of the expression). The truth is, economics is starkly responsible for many family's choices on these matters. They can or cannot afford to give up one parent's income, or they are simply priced out of working if childcare costs in their area become too high. I feel very fortunate that my husband's salary has allowed me to stay home with my children full-time, but economic changes and sacrifices have certainly been involved, particularly when I first stopped working (for instance, we sold the vehicle that I had used to get to work and became a one-car family).
I think that stating care work in economic terms is a useful shorthand for assessing this matrix of decisions and sacrifices, and also highlights the glaring lack of compensation for the very heavy, consuming work of providing full-time care. Frankly I would love it if society saw my role as economically valuable, and recompensed my family in some way for the very real work that I do. So, again- while it's an expression that is lacking, an economic calculus is also a useful and easy-to-understand proxy for demonstrating and explaining the value of care work in our money-centered society.
Another comment not quite so germane to your original question, but I would hope that financial support for family caregiving would also be paired with nudges for men and women to share caregiving more equally. Perhaps something similar to Sweden's approach to parental leave, where two parents are given 480 days to split between them, but each parent must take 90 days of leave in order to get the full allowance.
This article reminded me of a proposal I think I heard Ross Douthat made a number of years ago that people be given Social Security benefits for time they were not employed in order to do care work. I get not wanting all work to be quantified, but people shouldn't be so penalized for choosing to care for their families, either. My mom has been out of the workforce for decades to care for me and my siblings, and she won't have any Social Security benefits unless she gets a job (and who knows when that might be--my youngest brother has special needs and is educationally very time-consuming. plus, she never learned computer skills because she was out of the workforce for so long, so who knows what sort of job she'd even be able to get). When I think about the financial position she's in just because she wanted to take care of us, it makes me furious. If the government decided she had "earned" a certain amount each year of care work and chose to pay her for it, that could change her life. Social Security benefits would at least be a start.
As a writer and a mother, like you, I want to ask this question together: How do we prove that we are creating value when our society isn't prepared to acknowledge what we're doing as valuable? How do we teach others to perceive this value where it isn't presently perceived? Ultimately, this -- the non-acknowledgment, the non-perception, of the value of what we do -- is why all discussions about care work seem to loop back to how we, collectively, can get unpaid work paid for. Getting paid feels more dignified and less frightening than the alternative. And I want to unpack why I think that is.
Besides money, our society does know of exactly one other way to give value to work, namely attention. But the *invisibility* of care work is worth discussing here. We cannot perceive what we do not know how to attend to, and as a society we do not presently know how to attend to care work (except to slough it off, with a minimum of fuss, onto people who show themselves willing and/or prove themselves capable, so that we can get on with what we would rather be doing).
Then again, maybe invisibility could be viewed as a professional perk of caregiving. Maybe the thought of giving attention to care work feels fraught for a handful of very good reasons. For one thing, much of care work is tedious in the extreme, so that in order to attend to it at all one has to have profound discipline of attention. This discipline may be easier for some kinds of people than for others. I have heard, and can give textual proof here, intelligent and otherwise respectable men claim that they just cannot possibly be expected to pay attention to these mundane details because their soaring intellects and higher concerns just carry them so far above the common realm (please, spare me! Also, thank God my husband is not like this: he is both smarter than I am [this is part of why I married him] and also much, much more patient with the process of drilling down to the details of every day [also part of the picture]. I, on the other hand, am totally like this, and I don't recommend it as a way to be. I constantly think my intellect should exempt me from having to live in a body, but I wake up every morning and guess what? still embodied. And I consider my own embodiment an inconvenience far more often than I'm able to perceive it as a gift).
So this version of the problem of attention -- how do we put up with being the kind of creature that we are? -- is to be overcome no matter who you are, male, female, whatever. The only thing that really enables anyone to overcome it is love, and frankly, for people of some temperaments, care work is so boring that human love may not bridge the gap. Grace is required. And this is its own can of worms.
But once you sort the problem of private attention, there remains the problem of public attention. How do you narrate and present care work to a populace that, as David Foster Wallace ("surfer of the waves of boredom") observes, is wildly diverse in its noble and high interests and similar mainly in its vulgar and shallow interests? How do we make this boring thing interesting, especially given concerns of audience? To the extent that we *do* presently give attention as a society to care work, this largely takes the form of human-interest narrative among traditional and social media "influencers," who lift up people who are instantiating truly extraordinary above-and-beyond excellences in the course of their care work, who are making care work into an art. (I think for example of the dad who is a costume designer and who makes his daughters feel special by crafting exquisite princess costumes for them: not exactly a commonly accessible standard of care. Or the many mothers who spend hours creating perfect bento boxes for consumption mainly by Instagram viewers: I wonder how many of their children actually eat those radish roses and carrot spirals.) This makes the rest of us ordinary mortals, who are doing the requisite Good Enough job of care work while we also attend to whatever other interests and talents nature and nature's God have given us, feel like schlubs.
There’s lots more to say about the problem of attention in our culture, but here’s one more relevant way it influences our ideas of care work: Whatever we give attention to, we evaluate, we judge. And women have been judging and evaluating each other's care work ever since there were humans, talking talking talking about each other's childcare and each other's eldercare and each other's housekeeping. In the process it is largely women who develop and establish community standards of care. These standards are a help if women really care about each other and help each other attain what is needed in a spirit of giving priority to the needs of the vulnerable. These standards become an oppression if women insist on competing with each other, grading and ranking each other and themselves, and valuing appearances over genuine human flourishing.
Giving money instead of attention (and praise, honor, acknowledgments of virtue, even the incredibly reductive ancient Roman encomium "She stayed home and spun the wool," are all ultimately judgments, even if they can be pictured as positive judgments) -- paying instead of praising, I say, is a way of *not doing that,* not judging the work on an abstract (whether rational or emotive) basis, while also acknowledging that the laborer is worthy of her hire. It's making a quantitative rather than a qualitative judgment, anyway. Whether the fact that the quantitative judgment is often so low in this field, even for incredibly talented true professionals, says something about the truth of our qualitative judgment about the worth of care work, is also worth discussing. I’ll only add that the emotional reality of being subject to these narratives can be so harsh that it’s no wonder to me that lots of women would prefer to surgically and chemically alter their bodies, and sacrifice their wishes to nurture children and thereby influence the future for the better, rather than enter into that subjection. And -- now that I think of it -- emotional realities related to the problems of attention and of human flourishing, questions like Who deserves what kind of care, and how are we going to see that that care is given? Who needs what in order to flourish? Who deserves to flourish? When we don't have enough resources for everyone to flourish, how do we decide who gets to flourish and who doesn't?, are exactly what's at stake here.
When calling for governmental support for caregiving, I wonder if one approach might be to pair a call for wages for family caregivers with a call for other supports which signal value for their work. An example of a different support might be respite care for family caregivers, emotional support groups for caregivers, senior centers, etc. This would hopefully signal that society values not only the monetary value of caregiving work, but also well-being of caregivers. I'd be curious about what other commenters think of supports to pair with wages for caregivers that show that society values them.
This is a really interesting conversation! On the Wages for Housework movement, I think it should be noted that many of its original thinkers (many of whom were Marxists) were interested in using it to ultimately *challenge*, rather than reinforce, the wage framework. They wanted to say: see, wages are not an objective measure of value, for women get no wages at all! Of course, critics disagreed. But with this context I see the movement less as trying to fit itself into the mould of waged work and more trying to sort of...do away with the mould all together.
This is a great question, and thank you for raising it! I am struggling to think of non-economic means of support, because it seems like any other measure would be hard to quantify and allocate. Even some sort of tax break for either the elderly or for supportive families would be an economic means. That being said, this question reminded me of the tensions outlined in this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/05/technology/parents-time-off-backlash.html. If parents are recognized for working more than one "job," it seems that a great many of these tensions could be quieted (and family life even encouraged).
I like Elizabeth's suggestion about social security benefits for those who choose "unpaid" care work. 'Like it a lot. And, it's also about economic reward. Leah's question made me think about non-monetary rewards.
Here are a few thought starters/continuers:
- Some kind of "Seal of Earned Respect" for one's window
- Official Carer's Day celebrations
- Podcast series of stories of caregivers
- Caregivers' Balls with awards and other celebrations for those who care and those who give respite to those who care
- "Graduation Ceremonies" for caregivers who come to a new chapter, beyond the care
- Certification programs in caring that invite "guest" lecturers from the local community and paid caregivers to teach and, then use the stories of their "graduates" in advertising
- Fictional stories & books about carers meeting up in the hereafter with those for whom they cared
Late to this very thoughtful discussion, but I did want to mention our recent SJC nomination hearings in this context. One of the criticisms I saw floating around about Barrett was that she gets unpaid labor from her husband's aunt, who lives with the family. As an acquaintance put it, she was riding to success on basically failing to value this older woman's contribution, but that seemed to me to repeat the error discussed in the original post--it would essentially treat commercial arrangements like day care as preferable to care by a relative. What's odd is that I often see that argument coming from people who in other contexts are singing the praises of extended families. Yet that person felt it was exploitative and perhaps a bit classist.
I disagree. Part of how the whole extended family thing works is precisely through providing that kind of support to each other. My grandmother moved in with my family when I was a baby. She worked, but also provided help to our growing family with cooking, cleaning, child care, drives, and kid activities. Then my great grandmother moved in for a decade before needing a nursing home. When I brought up the criticism of Barrett to my mom, she pointed out that my great grandmother's family had taken them in when my grandmother divorced, and then my grandmother had done the same for my aging great grandmother, and now in her 80s herself, she's approaching the time when she'll need more help herself, which my parents will give. Are these basically just trades where we could sub in an unrelated person for pay, because A cared for B, then B for A, next C for B, and so on? Or it is a cycle of reciprocity and love? I don't have any illusions that wealthy western countries are doing a good job of facilitating the latter, but I think that should be our vision and preference anyway, for at least what can be done by actual loved ones, and then we should find ways to support it without treating it as something which has value because you'd have to pay an unrelated person.
I tend to think of recognizing the "economic value" of carework as necessary, but not sufficient, for a broadly just society. I think that recognition can come in multiple forms (JP2 mentions a "family wage" or "other social measures" in Laborem Exercens, and I think UBI, a child stipend, or enacting the Family Fun Pack would all be great starts).
Beyond that, I think it is good to recognize that work/earning money is not a human's final end - often social sciences and government programs place women's participation in the labor force or women's earnings (or men's earnings, for that matter) as numbers to be maximized, and this seems like a particularly impoverished view of human life. I recently learned about the Bread and Roses Party in Maryland and found this line in their platform particularly striking: "We seek a socioeconomic framework that makes it easier to pursue an Alternative American Dream, one of modest consumption, solid economic security, and abundant leisure, sufficient to do the things in life that matter most." It's not a perfect framing, but this idea of "abundant leisure" seems like a good jumping off point for talking about the purpose of work and our economic system.
Thanks for giving me something new to think about. Fascinating topic! Wondering if this would lessen the stigma of being a caregiver but not being seen as “working.”
I'm so glad you brought this up! What a great conversation. I’ve enjoyed everyone’s thoughts so far.
I think a helpful first step in addressing societal reforms that care for the vulnerable is changing how we view caregiving in the American workplace. Currently (and I generalize here, speaking from my own work experience in Career Development and from experiences of family, friends, and former colleagues), being an unpaid caregiver (especially a stay-at-home mom) is viewed from a sympathetic lens at best to a hostile one at worst. If one has taken time out of the paid working world to be a full-time caregiver, it is often recommended to leave the experience off of one's resume entirely. Unfortunately, the underlying message of that recommendation is "the last x amount of years you spent caring for your children/loved one have not contributed to your ability to be a competent or qualified employee,” which, following that thread of thought, translates into: “Investing in your loved one’s care is a waste of your time and talent.”
If within the professional world people began to value these roles, messaging would look very different. People are doing very valuable work as caregivers; they give their time, energy, and love. They develop and hone skills, just as they would in other jobs. When someone has spent time in the Peace Corps, the unpaid work done in a spirit of service for others is highly valued; why should a caregiver’s work be viewed differently? If managers, executives, hiring committees, etc. began to welcome caregivers' experiences on resumes, started to ask further questions about the skills honed in that space, and made a point to value these individuals and their contributions made to those in their communities, I think we would see a few societal shifts over time: 1) more people choosing to be caregivers, knowing they aren’t potentially giving up careers to do so and 2) a change in how we view the vulnerable; they are worthy of that love, of receiving that service. They are not a waste of time.
As a full-time homemaker/housewife, I am not offended by the value of care work being stated in economic terms (although I recognize the poverty of the expression). The truth is, economics is starkly responsible for many family's choices on these matters. They can or cannot afford to give up one parent's income, or they are simply priced out of working if childcare costs in their area become too high. I feel very fortunate that my husband's salary has allowed me to stay home with my children full-time, but economic changes and sacrifices have certainly been involved, particularly when I first stopped working (for instance, we sold the vehicle that I had used to get to work and became a one-car family).
I think that stating care work in economic terms is a useful shorthand for assessing this matrix of decisions and sacrifices, and also highlights the glaring lack of compensation for the very heavy, consuming work of providing full-time care. Frankly I would love it if society saw my role as economically valuable, and recompensed my family in some way for the very real work that I do. So, again- while it's an expression that is lacking, an economic calculus is also a useful and easy-to-understand proxy for demonstrating and explaining the value of care work in our money-centered society.
Another comment not quite so germane to your original question, but I would hope that financial support for family caregiving would also be paired with nudges for men and women to share caregiving more equally. Perhaps something similar to Sweden's approach to parental leave, where two parents are given 480 days to split between them, but each parent must take 90 days of leave in order to get the full allowance.
This article reminded me of a proposal I think I heard Ross Douthat made a number of years ago that people be given Social Security benefits for time they were not employed in order to do care work. I get not wanting all work to be quantified, but people shouldn't be so penalized for choosing to care for their families, either. My mom has been out of the workforce for decades to care for me and my siblings, and she won't have any Social Security benefits unless she gets a job (and who knows when that might be--my youngest brother has special needs and is educationally very time-consuming. plus, she never learned computer skills because she was out of the workforce for so long, so who knows what sort of job she'd even be able to get). When I think about the financial position she's in just because she wanted to take care of us, it makes me furious. If the government decided she had "earned" a certain amount each year of care work and chose to pay her for it, that could change her life. Social Security benefits would at least be a start.
As a writer and a mother, like you, I want to ask this question together: How do we prove that we are creating value when our society isn't prepared to acknowledge what we're doing as valuable? How do we teach others to perceive this value where it isn't presently perceived? Ultimately, this -- the non-acknowledgment, the non-perception, of the value of what we do -- is why all discussions about care work seem to loop back to how we, collectively, can get unpaid work paid for. Getting paid feels more dignified and less frightening than the alternative. And I want to unpack why I think that is.
Besides money, our society does know of exactly one other way to give value to work, namely attention. But the *invisibility* of care work is worth discussing here. We cannot perceive what we do not know how to attend to, and as a society we do not presently know how to attend to care work (except to slough it off, with a minimum of fuss, onto people who show themselves willing and/or prove themselves capable, so that we can get on with what we would rather be doing).
Then again, maybe invisibility could be viewed as a professional perk of caregiving. Maybe the thought of giving attention to care work feels fraught for a handful of very good reasons. For one thing, much of care work is tedious in the extreme, so that in order to attend to it at all one has to have profound discipline of attention. This discipline may be easier for some kinds of people than for others. I have heard, and can give textual proof here, intelligent and otherwise respectable men claim that they just cannot possibly be expected to pay attention to these mundane details because their soaring intellects and higher concerns just carry them so far above the common realm (please, spare me! Also, thank God my husband is not like this: he is both smarter than I am [this is part of why I married him] and also much, much more patient with the process of drilling down to the details of every day [also part of the picture]. I, on the other hand, am totally like this, and I don't recommend it as a way to be. I constantly think my intellect should exempt me from having to live in a body, but I wake up every morning and guess what? still embodied. And I consider my own embodiment an inconvenience far more often than I'm able to perceive it as a gift).
So this version of the problem of attention -- how do we put up with being the kind of creature that we are? -- is to be overcome no matter who you are, male, female, whatever. The only thing that really enables anyone to overcome it is love, and frankly, for people of some temperaments, care work is so boring that human love may not bridge the gap. Grace is required. And this is its own can of worms.
But once you sort the problem of private attention, there remains the problem of public attention. How do you narrate and present care work to a populace that, as David Foster Wallace ("surfer of the waves of boredom") observes, is wildly diverse in its noble and high interests and similar mainly in its vulgar and shallow interests? How do we make this boring thing interesting, especially given concerns of audience? To the extent that we *do* presently give attention as a society to care work, this largely takes the form of human-interest narrative among traditional and social media "influencers," who lift up people who are instantiating truly extraordinary above-and-beyond excellences in the course of their care work, who are making care work into an art. (I think for example of the dad who is a costume designer and who makes his daughters feel special by crafting exquisite princess costumes for them: not exactly a commonly accessible standard of care. Or the many mothers who spend hours creating perfect bento boxes for consumption mainly by Instagram viewers: I wonder how many of their children actually eat those radish roses and carrot spirals.) This makes the rest of us ordinary mortals, who are doing the requisite Good Enough job of care work while we also attend to whatever other interests and talents nature and nature's God have given us, feel like schlubs.
There’s lots more to say about the problem of attention in our culture, but here’s one more relevant way it influences our ideas of care work: Whatever we give attention to, we evaluate, we judge. And women have been judging and evaluating each other's care work ever since there were humans, talking talking talking about each other's childcare and each other's eldercare and each other's housekeeping. In the process it is largely women who develop and establish community standards of care. These standards are a help if women really care about each other and help each other attain what is needed in a spirit of giving priority to the needs of the vulnerable. These standards become an oppression if women insist on competing with each other, grading and ranking each other and themselves, and valuing appearances over genuine human flourishing.
Giving money instead of attention (and praise, honor, acknowledgments of virtue, even the incredibly reductive ancient Roman encomium "She stayed home and spun the wool," are all ultimately judgments, even if they can be pictured as positive judgments) -- paying instead of praising, I say, is a way of *not doing that,* not judging the work on an abstract (whether rational or emotive) basis, while also acknowledging that the laborer is worthy of her hire. It's making a quantitative rather than a qualitative judgment, anyway. Whether the fact that the quantitative judgment is often so low in this field, even for incredibly talented true professionals, says something about the truth of our qualitative judgment about the worth of care work, is also worth discussing. I’ll only add that the emotional reality of being subject to these narratives can be so harsh that it’s no wonder to me that lots of women would prefer to surgically and chemically alter their bodies, and sacrifice their wishes to nurture children and thereby influence the future for the better, rather than enter into that subjection. And -- now that I think of it -- emotional realities related to the problems of attention and of human flourishing, questions like Who deserves what kind of care, and how are we going to see that that care is given? Who needs what in order to flourish? Who deserves to flourish? When we don't have enough resources for everyone to flourish, how do we decide who gets to flourish and who doesn't?, are exactly what's at stake here.
When calling for governmental support for caregiving, I wonder if one approach might be to pair a call for wages for family caregivers with a call for other supports which signal value for their work. An example of a different support might be respite care for family caregivers, emotional support groups for caregivers, senior centers, etc. This would hopefully signal that society values not only the monetary value of caregiving work, but also well-being of caregivers. I'd be curious about what other commenters think of supports to pair with wages for caregivers that show that society values them.
This is a really interesting conversation! On the Wages for Housework movement, I think it should be noted that many of its original thinkers (many of whom were Marxists) were interested in using it to ultimately *challenge*, rather than reinforce, the wage framework. They wanted to say: see, wages are not an objective measure of value, for women get no wages at all! Of course, critics disagreed. But with this context I see the movement less as trying to fit itself into the mould of waged work and more trying to sort of...do away with the mould all together.
This is a great question, and thank you for raising it! I am struggling to think of non-economic means of support, because it seems like any other measure would be hard to quantify and allocate. Even some sort of tax break for either the elderly or for supportive families would be an economic means. That being said, this question reminded me of the tensions outlined in this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/05/technology/parents-time-off-backlash.html. If parents are recognized for working more than one "job," it seems that a great many of these tensions could be quieted (and family life even encouraged).
I like Elizabeth's suggestion about social security benefits for those who choose "unpaid" care work. 'Like it a lot. And, it's also about economic reward. Leah's question made me think about non-monetary rewards.
Here are a few thought starters/continuers:
- Some kind of "Seal of Earned Respect" for one's window
- Official Carer's Day celebrations
- Podcast series of stories of caregivers
- Caregivers' Balls with awards and other celebrations for those who care and those who give respite to those who care
- "Graduation Ceremonies" for caregivers who come to a new chapter, beyond the care
- Certification programs in caring that invite "guest" lecturers from the local community and paid caregivers to teach and, then use the stories of their "graduates" in advertising
- Fictional stories & books about carers meeting up in the hereafter with those for whom they cared
Thoughts? More ideas?
Late to this very thoughtful discussion, but I did want to mention our recent SJC nomination hearings in this context. One of the criticisms I saw floating around about Barrett was that she gets unpaid labor from her husband's aunt, who lives with the family. As an acquaintance put it, she was riding to success on basically failing to value this older woman's contribution, but that seemed to me to repeat the error discussed in the original post--it would essentially treat commercial arrangements like day care as preferable to care by a relative. What's odd is that I often see that argument coming from people who in other contexts are singing the praises of extended families. Yet that person felt it was exploitative and perhaps a bit classist.
I disagree. Part of how the whole extended family thing works is precisely through providing that kind of support to each other. My grandmother moved in with my family when I was a baby. She worked, but also provided help to our growing family with cooking, cleaning, child care, drives, and kid activities. Then my great grandmother moved in for a decade before needing a nursing home. When I brought up the criticism of Barrett to my mom, she pointed out that my great grandmother's family had taken them in when my grandmother divorced, and then my grandmother had done the same for my aging great grandmother, and now in her 80s herself, she's approaching the time when she'll need more help herself, which my parents will give. Are these basically just trades where we could sub in an unrelated person for pay, because A cared for B, then B for A, next C for B, and so on? Or it is a cycle of reciprocity and love? I don't have any illusions that wealthy western countries are doing a good job of facilitating the latter, but I think that should be our vision and preference anyway, for at least what can be done by actual loved ones, and then we should find ways to support it without treating it as something which has value because you'd have to pay an unrelated person.
I tend to think of recognizing the "economic value" of carework as necessary, but not sufficient, for a broadly just society. I think that recognition can come in multiple forms (JP2 mentions a "family wage" or "other social measures" in Laborem Exercens, and I think UBI, a child stipend, or enacting the Family Fun Pack would all be great starts).
Beyond that, I think it is good to recognize that work/earning money is not a human's final end - often social sciences and government programs place women's participation in the labor force or women's earnings (or men's earnings, for that matter) as numbers to be maximized, and this seems like a particularly impoverished view of human life. I recently learned about the Bread and Roses Party in Maryland and found this line in their platform particularly striking: "We seek a socioeconomic framework that makes it easier to pursue an Alternative American Dream, one of modest consumption, solid economic security, and abundant leisure, sufficient to do the things in life that matter most." It's not a perfect framing, but this idea of "abundant leisure" seems like a good jumping off point for talking about the purpose of work and our economic system.
Thanks for giving me something new to think about. Fascinating topic! Wondering if this would lessen the stigma of being a caregiver but not being seen as “working.”