This article was originally posted on Jay Chaudhary’s Substack, Favorable Thriving Conditions.
The moment I think of as my origin story as a full-fledged parent happened when my son was two. We had spent the whole day together, and when my wife came home, he was excitedly recounting our adventures. In the middle of it, he looked up at me and said, “Right, Daddy?”
That moment, and my accompanying awareness of a unique shared reality with my son that belonged only to the two of us, is burned into my memory. Until then, parenting had felt mostly like a series of tasks: meeting needs, ensuring safety, and dutifully witnessing and celebrating milestones. But in his guileless and loving tone in that moment, I heard something deeper—something evolving and complex and alive. My role as a parent isn’t just to care; it is to build and cultivate something dynamic and reciprocal that grows richer over time.
I reflected on this moment during a seminar I had the privilege of attending called Care in America: Historical Perspectives, Future Visions. The discussion was expertly co-moderated by Elissa Strauss and Elliot Haspel, writers and thinkers who have both, quite literally, written the book on care. One key theme that emerged from the rich conversations was how care is often framed within false binaries. Is care the government’s responsibility or solely the family’s? Should we prioritize external care or in-home care? Does caring for others take away from caring for yourself?
Perhaps the most illuminating false binary is the idea that care is either pure altruism or purely utilitarian, either a selfless act of giving or a service that fosters productivity. But care is both, and neither.
Simplistic framing means bad policy
This construct has tangible, real-world implications. Care as altruism views care as a personal sacrifice performed or acquired for our family, with any gaps filled by philanthropic and charitable initiatives. This philosophy underlies statements like that of former South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who said,
“The one thing I’m not willing to do is directly subsidize childcare for families. I just don’t think it’s the government’s job to pay or to raise people’s children for them.”
The altruistic lens can also be harmful to caregivers. Consider The Giving Tree: traditionally interpreted as a story of unconditional love, it can also be seen as a cautionary tale about the dangers of self-sacrificing care. The tree gives everything until there is nothing left of itself but a stump. Rather than a model of ideal caregiving, this could be read as a warning: care without boundaries depletes the giver, leaving them diminished and unable to thrive.
The standard policy counterargument to care as altruism is care as a utility: just another service that enables people to work. I’ve sat through countless community meetings reviewing community needs assessments. While some of the details vary, the themes remain the same: child care, housing, and transportation, all framed as necessary to keep people in the workforce.
The workforce framing has undeniable strategic value for advocacy. However, as Elliot pointed out, it often results in “minimum viable care”: a system designed to sustain just enough care from just enough caregivers. As we learned during the pandemic, a just-in-time system that prioritizes maximum efficiency and minimum surplus strips dignity and stability from both labor and consumers.
The seminar, along with the work of our two moderators, provided valuable insights on breaking free from the prison of false binaries. For a deeper understanding, I highly recommend reading their work, as they articulate these ideas far better than I can.
Rethinking Care: Three Alternative Frameworks
1. Care as “Predistribution”
A shift to make arguments for care more politically palatable is to think of care as pre-distributive rather than redistributive, as Elliot explains:
“Predistribution is the idea that social interventions happen on the front end: They are investments in infrastructure (in this case, related to education) and conditions (for example labor laws and minimum wages) that help level the playing field prior to outcomes becoming clear. Redistribution is when the intervention comes on the back end, after income has been earned, leveling the playing field through ‘taxes and transfers’—basically, subsidies or other direct payments such as SNAP benefits or tax credits.”
Even people who are skeptical of government interventions tend to support pre-distributive goods like public safety, road maintenance, and schools. Positioning care within this framework could make it more politically viable by shifting public opinion to favor stronger investments in caregiving infrastructure.
2. Care as a Public Good
Another valuable shift is viewing care as a public good. As a seminar participant pointed out, the mere fact of our existence is ironclad proof that people have always cared for children. Every person needs care at some point, making it part of the commons, a shared responsibility and benefit that all institutions and infrastructure must support.
3. Care as a Shared Inheritance
Elissa explores the idea of care as a shared inheritance of values and norms in The Atlantic:
“By removing care from the realm of selflessness, I felt relieved of a certain variety of mom guilt—the kind that grows from the cultural pressure to suppress my needs while trying to meet the needs of my kids. Such pressure obscures one of the highest aims of good care, which is to model for children how to listen carefully to themselves and other people.”
As Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens, the ability to have a shared story and pass it on to our children is the skeleton key to sustaining civilizations. Recognizing compassionate and attentive caregiving as part of our shared story is essential, not just for care recipients but for the survival of civilization itself.
The Path Forward: A New Way to Think About Care
Taken together, these three insights—care as predistribution, care as a public good, and care as a shared inheritance—offer concrete ideas that should shape policy.
Moving beyond the redistributive concept means investing in the infrastructure and conditions that support care from the outset, ensuring that it is not just a safety net for select, “deserving” people but an indispensable part of thriving communities.
Recognizing care as a public good reframes it as a collective responsibility, necessitating policies that treat child care, elder care, and other caregiving labor as essential rather than optional.
Treating care as a shared inheritance normalizes both talking about care—openly discussing its challenges and joys—and caring about care, making it a social norm that should be reinforced and scaled through policy.
That moment with my son transformed my understanding of parenting, like a black-and-white television show bursting into technicolor. My takeaway from the seminar is that we need a similar shift in how we think about care policy. Care is a vibrant, evolving, complex relationship that requires attention, investment, and shared responsibility. Our challenge is to change institutions and policies to reflect the idea that care is not a chore, privilege, or means to an end, but a foundational part of what it means to be human.
Jay Chaudhary is a Senior Fellow for Mental Health & Community Wellbeing at the Sagamore Institute and was formerly the Director of the state of Indiana’s Division of Mental Health and Addiction.