The Social Science of Caregiving

Almost all of human infants’ experience and learning takes place in the context of caregiving relationships. This essay considers how infants understand the care they receive. We begin by outlining plausible features of an “intuitive theory” of care. In this intuitive theory, caregiving has both a distinctive foundational structure and distinctive features that differentiate it from other social relationships. We then review methods and findings from research on infants’ understanding of people and social relationships. We propose that even before infants can use language, they may understand caregiving as an abstract intuitive theory with some features in common with how adults think about caregiving. In particular, infants understand care relationships as intimate, altruistic, and asymmetric. We review work that starts to shed light on this proposal, including the findings that infants distinguish between intimate relationships and merely positive ones and that they have asymmetric expectations of responses to distress in intimate relationships between large and small individuals. The proposal that infants can make these inferences has societal and political implications for how we structure caregiving in early life.

There are numerous popular books, magazines, blogs, and websites that provide advice or anecdotes about how best to care for children. These sources of information can drown out conclusions based on scientific consensus, negatively influencing the behavior of parents and other caregivers and impacting societal action and policies implemented to support children and families. Scientific research in child development, psychology, and neuroscience provides valuable insights into key aspects of caring for children that not only can enhance the likelihood of positive outcomes for children but can also empower parents, childcare providers, and communities with the knowledge and confidence needed to make informed decisions about their children’s upbringing. These data can also inform public policies that can increase access and reduce barriers to quality environments for all children. Here, we highlight reliable findings about biobehavioral development that can bear upon policies and practices for supporting healthy child development.

From public policy to the social sciences, parenting in low-resource contexts is often viewed through a lens of deficit: there is a focus on what parents should be doing differently. We challenge this idea, highlighting the deliberate and rational choices parents with low socioeconomic status often make to navigate their circumstances and give their children the best lives possible under significant constraints. These parenting decisions may go beyond simply ensuring children’s survival in harsh contexts. In some cases, they might give children the best shot at upward mobility. This view broadens our scientific understanding of good care, and implies that children may be best served when resources are spent on meeting families’ needs, rather than instructing parents on how to care.

What can we—as educators, parents, researchers, community members—learn from independent Black institutions about expansive ways to support the well-being of children and their families? And why and how ought we look back to look forward, regarding caregiving that is culturally relevant and sustaining? Here, we explore independent Black institutions as educational contexts in and through which Identity, Purpose, and Direction were cultivated with intention to support robust learning opportunities. We begin to unpack these rich, historic sites of caregiving with attention to data and messaging around how to nurture children as affirmed and agentive learners, and with respect to the role and value of nested communities that include biological family and invested educators.

The health and well-being of society are sustained by a combination of paid and unpaid care work. Yet caregiving roles and occupations are overwhelmingly occupied by women. We outline evidence for five key sociocultural barriers to men’s engagement in the care economy. These include prevalent cultural stereotypes that men are inherently less caring, despite little evidence for gender differences in caregiving abilities. Rather, men are socialized from a young age to devalue care as an activity at odds with being a man. These gendered beliefs about care have been getting wider over time and are especially entrenched in wealthy, individualistic societies. Without a collective understanding of these sociocultural barriers, people are unmotivated to change them. Given the myriad benefits of promoting a more gender-balanced care economy, elucidating the reasons women care more than men can motivate society to overcome these obstacles in new ways. 

The exponential increase in life expectancy in the twentieth century, coupled with a significant drop in fertility in the twenty-first century, demands rethinking family-based care for older people who require assistance with activities of daily living. We argue that age diversity in the population and a trend toward urbanization represent two emerging resources on which new care models can be built. By distributing care among age-diverse groups of kin and non-kin who live in close geographical proximity, demands on individuals can be minimized and social exchanges across generations can build social bonds. In this essay, we discuss features of cities and social infrastructures that can contribute to distributed models of community-based care and provide examples of ongoing efforts that can be scaled nationally and internationally. 

The United States, like many countries, faces a contradiction: a growing number of older adults need care, yet the workforce on which this care depends is underpaid, marginalized, and relegated to the bottom ranks of the health care system. In response, technology presents an appealing potential solution for worried families hoping to remotely monitor “aging in place,” for care homes facing labor shortages, and for the technology companies that stand to profit. But the affordances of these technologies, the visions embedded within them, and their implications for workers, families, and older adults need specification. Drawing on the social scientific and medical literature on care, aging, and technology, this essay investigates several questions. Who is providing care, both paid and unpaid, and how does the introduction of technology into care provision affect each of the participants in the care network? What are the different types of technology that can aid care? What challenges and concerns do these technologies raise? And finally, how might we address these challenges moving forward?

According to the Golden Rule, you should do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Similarly, people are often exhorted to “imagine themselves in another’s shoes.” A related but contrasting approach to moral expansion traces back to the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi, who urges us to “extend” our concern for those nearby to more distant people. Other approaches to moral expansion involve attending to the good consequences for oneself of caring for others, expanding one’s sense of self, expanding one’s sense of community, attending to others’ morally relevant properties, and learning by doing. About all such approaches, we can ask three questions: To what extent do people in fact (for instance, developmentally) broaden and deepen their care for others by these different methods? To what extent do these different methods differ in ethical merit? And how effectively do these different methods produce appropriate care?

This essay compares Christian and Buddhist narratives of care in conversation with anthropological work on relationships mediated through the divine. Within these traditions, care is a divine activity in which humans participate by engaging in caregiving practices. Gods care, receive care, and elevate care to a sacred action. I argue that the act of caring, as a religious practice, calls for an existential reflection upon the boundaries of the self, and includes not only the giver and receiver of care but also other humans and the divine. Studying care in religious contexts helps us better understand the social science of care, even in secular spaces. I conclude with lessons we can learn from religious institutions to better cultivate expanded networks of care in civil society, such as infrastructure to support relationships between strangers and across generations. 

Humans stand apart from other animals in our care for children and elders. We are most distinctive, however, in our care for the dead. Such care is fraught in a modern episteme marked by disenchantment. Beginning with an analysis of exemplary individual relationships with the dead, we develop a theory of the complex links that bind present to past. Through the traces they leave, the traditions they transmit, and the institutions they build, the dead participate in countless chains of causally linked neural and material representations. These should be viewed as living things sustained by attention, memory, and action. Contemporary politics and cultural economies have disrupted our relations with the dead, seeking to control the past for present ends. We call instead for the relationship cultivated with the dead in the humanities, one that emphasizes our shared limitations, our shared fate, and our shared responsibility to make the world from the possible.

Some of the earliest science-fiction literature to imagine humans’ long-term relationship with machines portrayed technology as a kind of caregiver for humans. The retrofuturist vision of machine care is poised to become reality, as the world of the 2020s is experiencing both incredible advances in AI technology as well as demographic changes that, together, make such systems seem at once possible and necessary. Tracing the key themes from our literary and cultural imagination and framing them against the technical progress in the field of AI alignment reveals insights and lessons for us as we approach the prospect of bringing certain forms of computational care to life. In so doing, they provide not only practical guidance but also give us an opportunity to sharpen our intuitions about the nature of human care itself.

Children receiving better care grow up earning more, paying more in taxes, committing fewer crimes, and needing less help from government. That these and many other benefits of investment in care cannot be captured by private parties is what underlies the powerful case for public investment. Yet many voters resist such investment in the belief that the necessary taxes would require painful sacrifices. This belief, however, rests on a simple cognitive illusion. Since the wealthy already have what anyone might reasonably need, their ostensible concern is whether higher taxes would make it more difficult to buy life’s special extras. But because such things are inherently in short supply, the ability to purchase them depends almost exclusively on relative bidding power, which is completely unaffected by top tax rates.

This essay draws upon scientific insights around care and caregiving, alongside new economic proposals, to distill a worldview of care. This worldview proceeds from an abstraction of human nature and needs that is both individual and relational, departing from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs by putting the need for belonging and connection with others on the same plane as self-actualization. In doing so, we reflect on the ways care is only narrowly valued in our status quo economy and current systems of measurement, and encourage a more holistic understanding of value and wealth, rooted in relational terms. We put forth some ideas for how policymaking processes could draw upon a worldview of care to support economic reforms. 

While much recent writing about care casts it as an intimate and familial activity and commitment, there is a competing tradition that recognizes care as a social activity and commitment. This social concept of care is more suited to building a politics of care in a democracy, where we are committed to the equality of others. Care in its social articulation also requires public infrastructures and commitments to bring it into reality, and conflicts with the extractive imperatives of the market in our neoliberal economy. The history of public health, and insights drawn from social reproduction theory, can help us articulate the need for a new politics of care and identify the many challenges that stand in its way. Concerted social mobilization and a new social science of care will be needed if we are to address the universal need today for not only intimate but also social care.

All of us need or give care—or both—over the course of our lives. Thus, care is a widely shared interest that can become the basis of an expanded and inclusive community of fate in which people take responsibility for those in need, even if they are strangers or unlikely to be able to reciprocate. This essay explores this claim and some of the conditions for creating such an expanded and inclusive community of fate.