The Caregiving Trap: How Society Exploits Mothers and Calls It Love

If caregivers vanished tomorrow, the world would collapse. So why don’t we value them?

Motherhood isn’t anything like I thought it would be. When I was in my early twenties, I had a fantasy that it would be homemade meals and children frolicking with joy to be each others’ siblings. Far off in that fantasy, I probably held whatever career made sense, and I had a partner who did 50% of the household management. Motherhood hasn’t turned out to be any of those things. While I would never trade my kid for anything, I would trade the way we treat caregivers for the fall of patriarchy.

Five months before I started organizing for child care, I wrote about child care. The time was May 2020, and it was in response to a podcast interview I did with a then-organizer of one of my favorite non-profits, Family Foward Oregon/Action. In that post, I shared a little about my story as a mom of a young person, the complications of being a mother, and how the system is set up to make us feel isolated, like we’re failing, and make it really hard for us to make ends meet.

I found myself in the role of default parent. I stated this before, but my husband doesn’t read this. I want to name he feels he’s pulling his weight. I feel like a lot of women do about the fathers of their children, that he is not. Zawn Villines talks about feminism and motherhood in her Substack, Liberating Motherhood. She created a “Dad Checklist”. The checklist is everything he can ignore because the other partner, the Mother, will take care of the things. I scored it for my husband. I scored ninety-eight. That suggests my husband is unaware of the mental load I take care of. Or the physical load. He would argue that he has been the breadwinner for much of our marriage. He would argue that he fixes the vehicles. He would argue that he does the yard work. I suppose he thinks that’s half, especially earning the money money portion.

Now, five years after writing about the complicated lives of mothers. Five years after talking to parents and providers from all over our nation. Five years after studying how we genuinely change child care, specifically why the system is set up the way it is, I tell this story another way. Motherhood and child care (caregiving broadly) largely takes advantage of the generosity of women, especially Black and Brown women. These systems of care that we need, that our society deserves… the way they are set up are rooted strictly in sexism and racism. The idea that women and people who are not white are worth less. These systems are rooted in our late-state-capitalistic social contract that says we must put a price tag on every single thing, except for women’s work.

We need women’s work to survive. The work that involves making the meals, cleaning the house, and managing the rest of the household. The work that tends to the children ensuring they grow up to be great, well-rounded citizens. All of this work is essential to our family units, towns, country, and world. And yet, it remains undervalued or not valued at all. At the time of this writing, I can still access the Bureau of Labor and Statistics web page. For 2023, the average wage of a childcare worker was around $15/hour. While higher than minimum wage, it’s still less than what Target, Starbucks, or Costco offer as starting wages. And it’s a far cry from what most people need to live, let alone thrive, in most places in our country.

A formula for thriving is 50% of your gross income goes to all your living expenses, 30% to fun/leisure, and 20% to savings. The Living Wage calculator only assesses the 50% you need for all your living expenses. So, the Living Wage calculator calculates half the salary needed to thrive.

Upwards of 3 million women left work during COVID-19. They interrupted career ladders and retirement funds. They lost access to their own money and economic security. Mothers sacrificed security for the necessary care their families needed.

Motherhood is complicated. There is a push and pull between wanting to stay home and care for our babies, nurture our families, create a loving, kind home, and elevating or creating our careers and having economic security. It’s a social construct that we suffer in this way. We could build a new social contract where care work is revered or just even valued at all. That’s the world I want to build. I want a world where mothers have all the support they need prior to being pregnant, during pregnancy, and especially afterward. I was on Little Red Note /Xiaohongshu, and a creator explained that China invests so much into postpartum care for women because childbirth is dangerous and hard on a woman’s body. I want a world where all countries invest in that care.

The childcare workers I talk to love taking care of children. Ultimately, they all believe that if children are cared for as an extension of the love and care their families provide, we will create a more stable foundation for our world. Whether that caregiver is a stay-at-home mom or an early childhood educator, imagine a world where caregivers are valued for their work as much as they value their work in creating great citizens for our world.

I bet you, if we moved towards that world, mothers’ lives would be much less complicated.

Resources

• The Complicated Lives of Mothers and Children, https://michellelasley.com/2020/05/motherhood-is-complicated/ and re-published here (Substack version)

• Valuing tender care, an interview with Tiffany Chapman, https://michellelasley.com/2020/06/valuing-tender-care-an-interview-with-tiffany-chapman/

• Family Forward Oregon, https://familyforwardoregon.org

  • The Sister c4 Arm, Family Foward Action, https://www.familyforwardaction.org

• “The Dad Privilege Checklist,”https://zawn.substack.com/p/the-dad-privilege-checklist

• Liberating Motherhood, https://zawn.substack.com

• Bureau of Labor and Statistics, Childcare workers, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes399011.htm

• MIT Living Wage Calculator, https://livingwage.mit.edu

• “Nearly 3 million U.S. women have dropped out of the labor force in the past year,” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-crisis-3-million-women-labor-force/

• “Nearly 2 Million Fewer Women in Labor Force,”https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/inclusion-diversity/nearly-2-million-fewer-women-labor-force

• “These 5 charts show the pandemic’s devastating effect on working women,” https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/17/economy/job-losses-women-pandemic/index.html

• Paid Leave Stats, https://nationalpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/state-paid-family-leave-laws.pdf