Our culture is really doing a ten out of ten job in caring in the worst possible ways. There is no infrastructure to support parents of caregivers, so care makes you poor and exhausts you. (Solution: Pay caregivers! Universal and affordable childcare and eldercare!) Parenting has become more instrumental than it used to be: kids are a project, anot... See more

“Child care is a textbook example of a broken market,” said Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, a mother herself. She pointed out that families spend, on average, 13 percent of their income on child care for young kids, yet day-care workers earn so little they rank in the bottom 2 percent of all professions.

Sometimes I think about all this through the lens of a Virgin Mary portrait, of which we have all seen hundreds if not thousands. In the patriarchal fetishized version of valuing care, she stays there, locked up in a glossy painting, harmonious and unconflicted and silent. In my version of valuing care, we start with asking her if we can carry the ... See more