Learning To Care Less
The majority of women are socialized and raised to care more about caring than their male counterparts. They grow up with more cuddles than boys, cook more thereby nurture more, practice baby care with dolls and homemaking with dollhouses. Take a look at advertisements for children’s toys, pop open the first random 10 books you grab from a bookshelf in a children’s room, or take a moment and reflect back on your upbringing. Do you recall baby dolls, stuffed animals, and barbies? Do you remember your body being held and comforted more as in “It’s okay to cry”? Do you recall cooking and time spent with your mom or female relatives in the house in those first 7 years of your life?
Perhaps the next 7 years included rehearsing those molded and imitated behaviors. Girls rehearse practices that strengthen the network, for instance, baking cakes for birthdays, babysitting the neighbor’s kids, write letters to pen pals or journalling to express feelings and care. They also fine-tune the high art of scanning the room for someone else’s needs. This dated article in the Huffington Post on “How to talk to little girls” stuck with me and has made me mindful since then to always add “.. and you are bright!” and “What is your favorite book?”
Perhaps in adolescence and early adulthood, young women explore more male prototypical behaviors — solo travel, frisky sexual exploration, picking up guys, securing a first job or choose a career that only suits themselves and not their environment. Maybe they eat, sleep and live exactly how they want. All this freedom until steady relationships or even family planning/life kick in, unless, of course, family has been requesting care all along.
Glynns MacNicol writes in her refreshing article on being 40 and not wanting to be a mom: “We enable others’ freedom — as home keepers, child-minders — but are rarely rewarded for having our own.” WOMEN Inc reports that women care twice as much for children than men do in the Netherlands. They thus created a campaign for women to step out for a day to illustrate what that care gap would look and feel like. It’s called “Ik ben er even niet” (I am just not there), which reminded me of a similar subtractive idea in the form of a film “A day without a Mexican” — a satirical look at the consequences of all the Mexicans in the state of California suddenly disappearing. Would it lead to a collapse? Most likely not. Yet it probably stimulates growth in underdeveloped areas and at the very least, makes the intermediate system think and appreciate.
Now let me piece this impossible rapid intro and overview together with my running project “Elevate Everyday Heroines”, where we offer storytelling in the form of photo documentation and interviewing to working moms (and parents). Frustrations often are confuddled with a desire to change and, if fortunate, lead to a moment of reflection and acceptance of ‘what is?’ to properly address ‘what should or could be?’. I hovered in this space of frustration for a bit since my offspring reached Montessori spurred independence, started preferring playgrounds over spending time with me. Reflection ensued and some acceptance of my social DNA was necessary. After all, I was born and raised in the 80s, I realized what kind of motherly parenting I enjoyed and was spoon fed, and now the time has come to craft my happiness with the super skills I’m provided with. I find myself facing also the complicating factors of co-parenting children and co-living with a committed partner — also opportunities that come along with it.
Fast forward or frame my life in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where mothers are both encouraged to work part- or full-time (childcare support is dependent on it) yet also hampered (good luck with job search without that support). How do I best co-create a set up where I apply the amount of care that is healthy and sustainable for me? How do I abstract from that to feed those learnings into my project and my professional services?
Laurie Goldey, marriage and family therapist in California, made me perk up with her note on good boundaries. Boundaries are a concept from structural family therapy, where systems are described to have either good or bad i.e. blurry boundaries. These examples are fodder for comparing them with gender roles. For instance, take the concept of “good boundaries” on the ever evolving healthy behavior as a primary caregiver. How can a primary or equal caretaker not be responsible for others or not anticipate their needs? I am musing.
If you think about untapped resources and trends for the future, I believe that women (and female characteristics) will play an increasingly important role in social and professional life. Here is one example of how closely related design thinking and caretaking can be: Stanford’s prototyping bins and craft bins juxtaposed.
Take a peek at the top 10 skills identified by the World Economic Forum. How many of them overlap or coincide with prototypical female behavior? Handling complex situations? People management and coordinating with others? Emotional Intelligence (including empathy) and cognitive flexibility? If you witnessed a working parent’s daily grind, including their monstrous to-do-list before 9am, as described in Romper’s campaign, perhaps you can think of examples that fit this top 10 list quite well.
For now, I geared up to face the challenge of working both as a selfish and caring mother in an era labeled as the “new work era” affording me more flexibility and therefore loopholes. As for this article, if you disagree and take a second to share concrete examples that propel my argument ideas forward, it will be just enough.
