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All of that seems to argue pretty strongly in favor of calling it "emotional labor" - caretaking involves a serious trade-off where the caretaker is expending a
by ewjordan 9y ago
All of that seems to argue pretty strongly in favor of calling it "emotional labor" - caretaking involves a serious trade-off where the caretaker is expending a lot of emotional energy to do work for someone else. Much like physical labor involves expending a lot of physical energy to get stuff done.
I don't see anything either overly demeaning or glamorous about that descriptive term, it seems to describe exactly the value proposition that is on the table with that sort of work.
- Mz 9y agoFrom the article: For men and women, paid and unpaid, waking at 3am to care for a crying baby or bathing a distressed Alzheimer’s patient can be gruelling and transcendentally life-affirming all at once. Lots of people take satisfaction in a job well done. This is pretty universally true, regardless of what kind of work you do. The above framing describes cleaning up other people's literal shit in near religious ecstasy type terms. If that isn't overblown, I don't know what is. I did the full time mom thing for a lot of years. I raised and homeschooled two special needs kids and was a military wife. Finding good solutions that supposedly did not exist is something that I feel very proud of. But cleaning up literal shit never felt like some sort of joyous nigh religious thing. It was grueling, yes. Transcendental, big fat nope. I am appalled by this article. You should go look up the recent article called "My Family's Slave."