Caregiving Crisis: Ceci n'est pas political
Caregiving is infrastructure! Media delve into the how and why of the argument (which shouldn't even be an argument), plus unpacking Biden's next caregiving plan
Hey everyone,
Kicking off this week’s issue with another caregiver reader story, talking about experiences of caregiving and blended families in the pandemic. Writer, grade school friend and mom and step-mom Alison Roth talks about her experience in her own words, as part of our effort to share more stories to inform and shift the conversation. Take it away, Alison:
“In good times and in bad…in sickness and in health…and even during a global pandemic when your kids go to their birth parent’s house and their step-siblings expose them to COVID…I promise to love and honor you all the days of my life."
If my husband and I would’ve had a crystal ball at the courthouse in 2018, we might have written something like that into our wedding vows. Blended families like ours — we each have a child from a previous marriage — face a wealth of challenges during a non-pandemic year. But never did we anticipate the unique caregiving tribulations that would arise in 2020 and beyond.
When it comes to our status as caregivers, we are relatively privileged. My husband and I can do our jobs from home. Our children, 16 and almost 12, are old enough to Zoom for remote school self-sufficiently. We can even leave them home alone for a while, although that doesn’t guarantee that at least one of them won’t eat hot Cheetos for breakfast.
But, like many other blended and nontraditional families, our situation complicates quickly.
Our “bubble” doesn’t just include our household and a vaccinated grandparent or two. It’s technically four households: ours, my stepdaughter’s mother’s house, my kid’s father’s house, and my ex-husband’s stepdaughter’s father’s home, which includes two stepsisters and a half-sister. Oh, wait. Now that I think about it, two of those children spend half their time at their father’s house, which brings the total to five households that are exposed to each other in any given week. (Confused yet?1)
Thankfully, we all get along — most of the time. There are no deniers, anti-maskers or anti-vaxxers in the mix. But I’m not going to lie — I really hope nobody else gets married or divorced this year.
As a caregiver, I’ve learned that every decision I make has ripple effects far beyond my immediate family. When one kid wakes up with a runny nose, those germs span five homes, a 35-mile radius, and at least 14 days. There are several essential workers and immunocompromised individuals in the mix, too.
Most of this was theoretical until last December, when my husband’s parents caught COVID and were both hospitalized. He had taken them for testing earlier in the week, which meant all of us were at risk. For so many reasons, this led to a scary few weeks. None of us slept much and we got to know all the wonderful people at the drive-through testing center.
Obviously, the most awful part of this was waiting for calls from the hospital, which had a strict no-visitor policy. But there were many additional layers of stress. Everyone was worried. Our kids didn’t get to see their other parents or siblings until tests came back clear and quarantines had expired.
Thankfully, my in-laws recovered, and they are both doing well now. But it was hard for everyone, even those not directly affected, and just one example of how complicated being a parent in a blended family can be.
I love my family, and I can’t tell you how thankful I am to have had their support and good humor over the past year. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t had a lot of heartburn. This year has taught me about the importance of giving up control, learning to trust others, and attending therapy over Zoom. I’m not very good at any of those things yet — but I’m working on it.
Oh, and one more thing. If we ever renew our wedding vows, they’ll absolutely include something about PPE.
— Signed, Alison Roth (aka the Evil Stepmother)
Emily again. 👋 Thank you to Alison for taking us inside blended families during this time. If you like her writing and want more tales of pandemic experiences from a variety of authors, check out her newly self-published (free) ebook “We Have It Totally Under Control.”2 Have a caregiving story or know someone who does? Please message me — we want to tell stories of caregivers, raise awareness and push for change. Caregivers of all kinds are banding together to push for change, the 19th reports. Join us, hang in there and see you soon.
What To Know About the Caregiving Crisis This Week
NEWS WATCH: WEEKLY ROUNDUP — Keeping tabs on legislation, regulation and conversation:
Biden’s first speech to Congress as president lays out the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan to expand paid family leave, child care, health care, preschool and college education. (We’ll expand3 on this below.) The proposals accompany the earlier American Jobs Plan (worth $2 trillion over a decade), which focuses on building roads, bridges, but also expands access to home care. This week’s proposals could share the childcare burden with society, not just families. (Huge.)
“It is so amazing that what has been a secretly whispered stress campaign for so many parents for so long is finally seeing prime-time attention,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., told the NYT.
But the New York Times calls the pairing of both infrastructure plans a "risky gamble that a country deeply polarized along ideological and cultural lines is ready for a more activist government and the sort of redistribution of wealth long sought by progressives." Big tax hikes are proposed to pay for it all. Amie Parnes, a senior correspondent at The Hill, said last week in a MamaDen session she thinks Biden has a good chance of passing these plans but expects many difficulties along partisan lines. Julianna Goldman, a former journalist and founder of the MamaDen togetherness space for women, summed it up: “If you’re not going to get paid leave passed after this, then what the hell will it take?”
Young women are less likely to be in school or working, and (duh) experts say caregiving is to blame. New research says the number of "disconnected" young women (ages 16-24 who are either not in school or working) has been rising in the pandemic due to caregiving, and it disproportionately hurts women of color, the New York Times reports. Unemployment rates for young women may look like they're improving from a peak of 30% in April 2020. But that's because if you stop looking for work, you're not included in unemployment numbers.4 Some 18% of the 1.9 million women who left the workforce completely in the pandemic were 16-24. A new report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research shows how this "disconnection" has risen and is disproportionately hurting Black, Latina and Native American women.
All women are still lagging behind in terms of workforce participation (as we all know). A WSJ headline this week: Nearly 1.5 Million Mothers Are Still Missing From the Workforce, based on a new analysis of Census numbers. Mothers with school-aged children have been slow to return to work, the story says.
Women lost at least $800 billion in income last year — more than the combined gross domestic products of 98 countries. A new report from Oxfam says the figure — which is more than the U.S.' defense budget (aka the world's largest) last year — is likely a conservative estimate, CNN reports. It doesn't account for wages lost by millions of women in the 'informal economy' (domestic workers, market vendors, garment workers). Oxfam estimates women accounted for over 64 million jobs lost worldwide last year. That's 5% of the jobs held by women, vs. a loss of 3.9% of jobs held by men. Caregiving responsibilities and women being overrepresented in low-paid industries (retail, tourism, food services) likely explain the disparities.
"A fair and sustainable economic recovery is one that supports women's employment and unpaid care work through strong social safety nets and vibrant care infrastructures," said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International. "Recovery from Covid-19 is impossible without women recovering."
Bottom line: Policies are coming out, now we’ll see what can get passed. Also, it’s so powerful seeing women and caregiving rising in prominence in political discourse, especially when we — and our children — now have images like this.
EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT THE CAREGIVING INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN(S) — Biden unveiled the second (or third, depending on how you're counting) infrastructure plan to a joint session of Congress this week.
“I can report to the nation: America is on the move again,” he said. “Turning peril into possibility. Crisis into opportunity. Setback into strength.”
The American Families Plan largely aims to help working women (the 19th), and includes $1 trillion in new spending and $800 billion in tax credits, much of it for expanding access to child care and education. The administration says the goal is to invest "in an inclusive economy that would help millions of Americans gain the skills and the work flexibility they need to build a middle-class lifestyle." (NYT) Briefing documents explain the package seeks to help close racial and gender opportunity gaps.
A look at proposal highlights, all subject to passage in a narrowly divided Congress:
Paid Leave: Providing 12 weeks of paid family leave for all Americans, $225 billion to fund partial wage replacement for people taking leave because they are sick or to take care of a sick family member, welcoming a new child, or dealing with sexual assault or domestic violence. The plan calls for providing up to $4,000 a month (and up to 80% of full wages for the lowest earners) during the 12-week period. Policy experts say this is the first time a president has formally called for paid family and medical leave legislation to cover all Americans, The Hill reports.
Education: Adding four years to free education, two years in preschool and two at community college, Education Week says. Provide $200 billion for "universal, high quality" preschool to all 3- and 4-year-olds, in partnership with states that would pay employees at least $15 an hour and develop appropriate curriculum. Provide $109 billion to pay for two years of free community college for all Americans, including undocumented immigrant students protected through the DREAM act. Pell Grants for low-income college students would also rise. Other provisions would expand nutrition programs and pay for training, equipping and diversifying American teachers.
Child tax credits: The proposal aims to make permanent many of the temporary efforts from the American Rescue Plan passed in March, notably the “groundbreaking child allowance” — aka direct payments — that are expected to halve child poverty rates this year. But the monthly payments of at least $250 to parents per child were slated to last just one year (something we worried about in the last CC.) Biden’s latest plan extends the payments to 2025, but some Democrats were already pushing earlier this week for a longer extension. A group has introduced a plan to make the tax credit, worth some $3,000 a year, permanent, CNBC says. And the NYT has a great read on how the universality of this plan is what makes it so controversial, asking the question “Which mothers should work?”
How to pay for it? Tax hikes. The 19th says the administration estimates the investments will be fully paid for in 15 years. Tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans will pay for the Families Plan, and that includes a proposal to raise the highest tax rate for the top 1 percent of earners to 39.6 percent from 37 percent, erasing the tax cut by Trump in 2017.
Bottom line: There’s so much to this plan (Vox has a thorough summary and NYT has a great chart), and Congress is so divided. Who knows what will happen. There are also new plans by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Patty Murray that address caregiving. Now is the time to make our voices heard. They can’t fix what they don’t understand. Which brings us to…
IT’S NOT POLITICS! IT’S INFRASTRUCTURE! — It’s a shake-your-head semantics discourse for the ages. Twitter and the media are filling up with conversations about whether or not, and/or how caregiving is part of infrastructure, ever since Biden announced the American Jobs Plan. 🤦♀️ Expect it to get worse after this week’s plan unveiling. The whole conversation is “ridiculous” as a New York Times opinion writer says. Childcare was funded during WWII, but now we’re bickering. In many ways, it’s a relief that we even get to have this discussion, that the White House is referring to childcare in this way, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren told Fox Business News. Still, come on! Some strong articles worth flagging, should you need fuel to engage in the discourse:
Women’s activists did a lot of work to get the new administration and Democrats thinking and talking about caregiving as a vital part of the economic recovery, Mother Jones writes. It paid off — the $400 billion for caregiving in the American Jobs Plan (and more to come as announced this week) marks the first time a president of either party has attempted an economic recovery focused on women workers, Mother Jones says. The article does an excellent job of going through the history (less than 20% of FDR's Works Progress Administration jobs went to women in the 1930s) and the organizing efforts by activists who recognized that “bettering women’s economic conditions would require a large-scale conceptual realignment about what qualifies as ‘stimulus’ or ‘infrastructure’—about the very nature of work.”
It has a spot-on summation of the Catch-22 women have found themselves in for generations, well before "the pandemic inflicted fresh cruelty on already untenable circumstances."
"Women are handing over most or all of their paychecks to other women, who barely earn a living wage, just for the opportunity to enter the workforce — even if the primary purpose of that time in the workforce is to earn money to pay for care. It’s a system that holds women back, financially and professionally, every step of the way."
Kate Washington, author of a new book on caregiving burnout, says the fact that the American Jobs Plan includes $400 billion for "caregiving infrastructure" should "make the U.S. business community sit up and take notice." Connections among people — such as caregiving — are vital for society to function, she writes in a MarketWatch opinion piece, and changing the way we think about care is long overdue. That starts with changing "the powerful strain of individualism in American culture," which has had us rely on ourselves for too long. Companies risk losing talent and if they're serious about diversifying their workforce to include more women and people of color, they must support efforts including paid leave, she writes.
"Most every worker at every job in America has a family with elders, children or someone who is critically ill needing care—and if there’s nobody to care for those vulnerable people, employees can’t go to work and families suffer, " Washington says.
Quebec treats child care as infrastructure and researchers say...it works! The Canadian province’s pioneering model for universal subsidized child care is credited with keeping centers open and people working, according to a new report, Bloomberg CityLab says. The research concludes a "market-based approach does not work well for the child care industry, especially during an economic downturn." The study found the low fee of less than C$9 a day meant centers lost no enrollment and parents could continue to keep paying even during a recession. The Canadian government says it plans to learn from Quebec's model.
Bottom line: This should not be political. Stop talking semantics and start talking policy. We need to fix the system now, before the next crisis (aging baby boomers) really comes into effect. Say it with me:
MY MOM EXPERIENCED REMOTE KINDERGARTEN — This was a week. We’ve been waiting a year for two things to happen: visit and hug grandparents out of town and go to school in-person five days a week. And hooray after all our vaccinations/but sigh, both events ended up taking place the same week. 🤷♀️ My kindergartener missed the first week of five days in-person to hug his vaccinated grandparents. 100% worth it. My mom has been witness to the joy/chaos/constant vigilance of remote school5. “This is why women and caregivers are leaving the workforce!” I kept saying as she was like WTF. So I asked her for a gif6 to describe her reaction. Her take:
Bottom line: My response:
Signing off
Thanks, as always, for reading. Please send feedback, articles, gifs, your stories. If you find value in this newsletter, please spread the word.
Caregiving Crisis is a newsletter written by Emily Fredrix Goodman. We aim to publish every other week but other things may get in the way.
Yes. Couldn’t help but think of this as I did the mental calculations.
Spoiler alert - I’m in it! I write a tale about finding joy in rough times, from my birthday on the day the Challenger exploded to my son’s pandemic half-birthday. Alison is an editor extraordinaire. 🙏
I refuse to say ‘double click’ (to mean ‘expand on’) and wanted to flag it is a terrible business-ism that is popping up in the workplace. Don’t do it!!
There's a lot of criticism that U.S. unemployment rates are misleading because they don’t include people who could be working but aren't. Black Enterprise has a great explainer, including how the calculations were changed under the Clinton administration in 1994 to exclude people who had stopped looking for work.
We were going to do all five days but we took a few days off, at the wonderful suggestion of my husband. My mantra this year: “Kindergarten is not mandatory in the state of New Jersey.” Here’s a full listing of states and whether they require kindergarten attendance, in case you need.
My mom misheard ‘gift’ because online school is loud. This is what she originally sent, after experiencing it for 15 minutes.