Most Americans do not view a caregiving career as a path to personal fulfillment, according to a report from the nonprofit think tank FrameWorks Institute.
The researchers behind “Public Thinking About Care Work: Encouraging Trends, Critical Challenges Findings from Year Two of the Culture Change Project” found that respondents spoke of direct care as the “the bottom of the career ladder, with no promising way to develop or ascend.”
Caring people — compassionate, trustworthy, patient and empathic — make good care workers, most respondents agreed. At the same time, they also expressed the need to weed out bad actors with stronger background checks.
“Some participants were expressing the opinion that low pay and low hiring standards were factors in lowering the ‘quality of the people’ that care work attracts,” the authors noted.
The researchers also found that people tend to think of care work as being outside of the economy.
“Whereas the manufacturing sector was talked about as being essential to the American economy, the care work sectors were discussed more in terms of providing essential services to people who need it, rather than being a key part of the economy per se,” the authors wrote. “In peer discourse sessions about the economy, care work was seen as a poor career option, and it was absent from how participants seemed to model economic health and strength.”
‘Essential,’ ‘frontline’ fading from lexicon
The report also found that, although the public still sees direct care workers as necessary, the labels “essential” and “frontline” are fading from the lexicon now that the pandemic is receding.
The two-year project tracked American mindsets when it comes to direct care workers and found that not much has changed in the past two years. “But it is a shift in language that could be a double-edged sword for advocates,” the authors wrote.
“On the one hand, these terms have helped boost people’s understanding and appreciation of the critical role of care work in society, so there is a danger that over time this salience will fade as the terms drop out of use,” they said. “On the other hand, using these terms alongside a military metaphor can be problematic, which means there is an opportunity to build better and more productive frames in their stead.”
