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Care ethics just might transform the way people think about what they owe their children, Elissa Strauss writes.

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“Care is as much practical work as it is psychological, ethical, and spiritual,” Strauss writes. Yet parenting seems to be missing in a substantial way from the sources—religion, classic novels, economics—many people use to understand their place in the world. In searching for “a body of thought that treated parenting as worthy of serious inquiry and established care as central to our moral concerns,” Strauss found her way to a branch of philosophy known as care ethics.

“Care ethicists spend their days contemplating subjects such as the essence of what it means to care well for another, and how this care intersects with people’s capacity to be ‘good’ or to live what they might call ‘the good life,’” Strauss writes. “Thinkers have instead been preoccupied with defining right or wrong based on interactions between independents, two people who are essentially equals. But humans spend much of their lives in dependency relationships: We start as children dependent on parents, become adults who care for our children, move on to caring for our parents or other adults, and later become older and require care again.”

American society is not yet structured to reflect the ubiquity of dependency. “When a country truly supports parents and caregivers … it doesn’t just offer people relief in the form of rest and financial resources,” Strauss writes. “It also increases and embraces the possibility that people might grow from the experience of caring for others—that they might see care, the giving and receiving of it, as an indispensable part of living ‘the good life.’”
“Our culture tends to see parents as the fixed factor and children as the variable factor. Children get to grow, while parents are expected to be a steady, stabilizing force,” Strauss continues. “Care ethics helped me see myself as a variable factor as well. As a result, I feel not only liberated from a checklist approach to parenthood but also more able to see the challenges of parenting as a fulfilling intellectual and emotional exercise.”

https://theatln.tc/FjQoH89J

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