Top 20 Caregiving Quotes & Sayings

So you're getting squeezed at both sides. You're taking care of your mom and dad and you're still doing caregiving with your kids, which is not easy. But I think overall, there's a level of satisfaction that might be unparalleled.

We're in a culture where everything is either consumption or production, so child care is either a very, very bad-paying form of work or a very expensive luxury that you purchase. There isn't a good place in our picture of the world for what caregiving is about. Even teenage babysitters have sort of disappeared from the scene.

I think there's a contempt for care work and caregiving in this country that seeps into how we think about mothers, professional workers who are mothers.

Caregiving has no second agendas or hidden motives. The care is given from love for the joy of giving without expectation, no strings attached.

As long as women and the "feminine" such as caring and caregiving are devalued, we cannot realistically expect more caring economic policies. Young people have a major role to play in creating a caring economics.

When I started caregiving, I was not on very firm ground. My first marriage had dissolved. I was working at an ice-cream stand in my thirties. I learned that when you don't have anything to give, that's when you really give, and then you get back so much more.

As girls are given dollies and pushchairs while little boys are frowned upon for picking them up; while men are 'congratulated' for occasionally 'babysitting' their own children and women are castigated for daring to combine motherhood and career; while baby changing facilities are provided in women's toilets but rarely in the men's, is it any wonder we tend to take on the roles society stereotypically pushes on us when it comes to caregiving?

Any insistence on equal pay is crucial and any redefinition of work to include caregiving work so that it also has an economic value, at least at replacement level, that's crucial. So change does come from the bottom up, and it will come from girls and women and men who understand that for us all to be human beings instead of being grouped by gender is good for them, too.

Even in these tough economic times, Barack [Obama] has left the VA budget as is so that they're prepared to deal with this influx of men and women who are coming home and dealing with a whole array of issues, not just around mental health but just caregiving and the stresses of reconnecting with families who have been away from each other for a very long time.

Feminism insists on women's right to make choices - about whether to marry, whether to have children, whether to combine work and family or to focus on one over the other. It also urges men and women to share the joys and burdens of family life and calls on society to place a higher priority on supporting caregiving work.

Caregiving requires the intention of love, caretaking requires the intention of fear. Not acting in anger when you are angry requires the intention of love.

Thus, just as animals of many species, including man, are disposed to respond with fear to sudden movement or a marked change in level of sound or light because to do so has a survival value, so are many species, including man, disposed to respond to separation from a potentially caregiving figure and for the same reasons.

The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home. There are many ways of supporting that, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all caregiving and making that amount tax deductible.

In 2009, I served as AARP's Ambassador of Caregiving. With a producer and cameraman, I traveled the country for months, interviewing hundreds of caregivers.

Caregiving often calls us to lean into love we didn't know possible.

Care work produces public goods, and should be supported in families by policies such as paid parental leave and caregiver tax credits, and by investments in good training and wages for caregiving, including early childhood education, in the market.

We need to acknowledge that families come in multiple shapes and sizes, that love is not a finite asset, and that caregiving involves more than a genetic imperative.

I'm sure there are people who can toggle quickly from all-in caregiving to structured socializing, but I can't think of any offhand.

Caregiving is almost always provided by women, and especially Black and brown women. This work has historically been made invisible, which creates opportunities for the exploitation and poverty wages many of our caregivers face without protection or recourse.

Family caregiving has become a predictable crisis. Americans are living longer and longer but dying slower and slower.