Caregiver Rights

One thing I have been active in in the years I've been a stay at home mom is the arena of caregiver rights.  Our culture does not recognize that care is work.  It treats the parent who undertakes for the purpose of providing care to a child or dependent elder either the diminishment of a paid career or the complete surrender of such as if they were taking a vacation.  This leads to profound economic vulnerability and a high probability of poverty later on in the caregiver's life. 

The work of caring is invisible; completely unrecognized in our economy.  In the GDP, it's invisible. In the Social Security system, invisible. To the IRS and the Bureau of Labor statistics, invisible. We are a country in which paid work is valued above all else, and since it is mothers who do the overwhelming majority of unpaid caregiving work, it is mothers who are paying the price. Mothers face a wage gap far greater than the wage gap for women without children. Mothers spend an average of 11.5 years out of the workforce caring for others, decimating their retirement savings and increasing their risk of poverty. The scarcity of and exploitation of part-time workers speaks volumes about how much society cares about mothers' ability to both maintain their economic security and fulfill their responsibilities as caregivers.

Over time women have won access to the paid workplace but mothers have not yet won social change that truly acknowledges the contributions of our unpaid care work to both the economy and society. Our society cannot hope to address women's needs without addressing mothers' needs. And society will not address mothers' needs until mothers get involved.

Here is a site that goes into the subject in more detail:

http://www.mothersandmore.org/Advocacy/advocacy_and_action.shtml