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Whenever I come across an article by parenting and culture journalist Elissa Strauss, it goes straight to the front of my reading queue. So I was extremely excited to dig into Strauss’s new book When You Care, which explores the transformative power of caregiving on both the individual and societal level. Because the value of caregiving is chronically overlooked—in the way that the value of most activities marked “female” is overlooked—Strauss’s absorbing deep dive into the intellectual, spiritual, and political potential of caring for others is direly needed. I’m certain that if everyone in the world were to read this book, it would be a far safer and gentler place to live. I’m excited to share my recent interview with Strauss, which I found eye-opening and inspiring. ***** NGL: You share a quotation in your book attributed to Doris Lessing: “There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.” What thoughts come to mind when you—an intelligent woman, a mother, and now an expert on care—read these words? ES: At this point, fury. But it took me a while to get there! When I became a parent I took this as fair warning: do not spend too much time with children because they are boring and will make you boring. To really get into my feelings, we need to do a deep breakdown of the quote: Let’s start with the presence of “endless.” There seems to be a tolerance, maybe even respect, for some time spent with kids. And yet, that small concession feels undermined by the presence of “intelligent.” So, unintelligent women can spend endless amounts of time with small children without feeling bored, but children aren’t intellectually stimulating enough for smart women? This sets us up to believe that feeling bored around kids is a sign of intelligence. Any reader of this quote will want to be on the right side of things, on Team Lessing. They’ll want to be smart and interesting, and that means they will be bored by kids. Almost everything has the capacity to get boring when the dose is “endless”: Tolstoy, walking the streets of Paris, my friends, writing. Boredom is a feature of most things that bring us meaning, things that require long term commitments and endurance. I have a problem with the idea that caring for small children is an act of intellectual deprivation when it’s anything but. My book dives into the psychological, philosophical and spiritual demands caring makes on us, which are rich, deep, textured and abundant. I also dig into how this dimension of care became so easy to ignore in a world in which the authors of the human story largely left out care. NGL: I nearly yelped with recognition when I read this sentence: “Care as an act of charity is celebrated, whereas care as an act of obligation has been belittled and ignored.” It reminded me of a time when my kids were little and I hired a babysitter so I could volunteer to help organize a school PTO lunch. It felt good to be publicly recognized for giving of my time in this caring way, but the absurdity of abandoning my children to do so wasn’t lost on me! What do you think was going on here? ES: Oh gosh, this is so absurd and yet also so relatable and predictable. We have all been there. I’m still there often, thinking my time caring for kids is less important or interesting than time spent doing almost anything else, and I just wrote a whole book arguing against that. Though really, why—considering the way care is systematically ignored and devalued in our culture—would we think otherwise? And for moms, not only is our care devalued, but our decisions regarding care are routinely belittled and mocked. We are “helicopter” parents, “intensive” parents, obsessed with the well-being of our own kids. Yes, some parents take things too far. But I think this narrative of overparenting is also a bit misogynistic and blind to the realities of care, which requires the deep investment of one person in another. And it makes us feel bad for doing our jobs as parents. I think it’s lovely you went to the PTO meeting. You may have had a chance to build community and also get the heck out of the house, which we all need sometimes. But in terms of which one is more valuable—you’re so right that we live in a society that sees giving to others outside our homes as noble, and giving to those in our homes as somehow selfish. This has deep roots in philosophy, politics, economics and religion and is what happens when caregivers don’t make the rules. NGL: Your book pays attention not only to motherhood but to fatherhood, and the ways in which caring for others enables men to nourish aspects of themselves they're rarely encouraged to nourish. What might you say to someone who argued that women are inherently better caregivers than men? ES: Science disagrees! In recent decades there’s been a lot of research on fathers’ brains, and it turns out they too have a primal, lizard-brain instinct to care, just like moms. While moms' caregiving instincts can be set off by pregnancy induced hormones, dads’ can be set off by the act of care. For both, it's ultimately doing the care that makes the bond. As I wrote in my book: We don’t care because we love, we love because we care. When I refer to the “instinct” to care, this doesn’t mean we know what to do the second that baby is put in our arms—only that there is part of us that longs to know how to care for this tiny creature. And even that longing can be more and less strong among different people. For moms, we put the babies in their lap and expect them to know what to do and judge them if they don’t. For dads, we assume they won’t know what to do and therefore fill them with insecurity from the get-go. Knowing the science, I humbly suggest we always put the baby in both moms’ and dads’ laps, and give them both lots of parental leave, and let both of their equally adaptable brains figure out how to care for this one-and-only human in equal measure. NGL: Was there a chapter of the book you particularly enjoyed working on? ES: I enjoyed the philosophy chapter quite a bit. For one, it was where this book started. I had zero interest in philosophy before having kids. In fact, I found philosophy notable for taking the most interesting subjects imaginable and making them unimaginably boring. But when I had kids, I felt like I needed a steadier ground below me to understand what it meant to do right by kids, and people overall. Suddenly relationships felt like this rich moral terrain and so I, someone who once dropped out of an intro to philosophy class after three weeks, dug in. There, I discovered this feminist corner of philosophy called care ethics, the seeds from which the rest of this book grew. I became convinced that care is fertile ground for the kind of moral, aesthetic and intellectual epiphanies we have long sought elsewhere. Side effect of this: I started liking parenting more. Simone Weil called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” Iris Murdoch talked about the importance of “[piercing] the veil of selfish consciousness and [joining] the world as it really is.” When you see caregiving as a place where these things can happen, it is much more compelling. NGL: Your book advocates for a large-scale reframing of the way we think about care work, community, and interdependence. If you close your eyes and imagine a future transformed in such a way, what makes you most excited? ES: First, caregivers need economic security. After that what I want more than anything is for a caregiver—whether a mom, or someone who cares for a parent with dementia, or anyone else--to walk into a party and think, I am one of the most interesting people here. Everyone is going to want to listen to me share my experience caring for a human who is dependent on me, how I’ve grown and what I’ve learned about the human condition. And they do! And she is! Everyone has, at last, real curiosity about care.
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