In concert with lengthening life spans, emerging forms of care in later life reflect complex and diverse social changes. Embracing a polysemic understanding of care as simultaneously resource and relational practice, this review works across scales of social life and theoretical approaches to care to highlight connections and fissures between global political-economic transformations and the most intimate aspects of daily life. Arguing for analyses of care that account for the kinds of projects, stakes, and obstacles that emerge as people engage in social reproduction in later life, this review traces the circulation of care across aging bodies, everyday practices, families, and nations. Care in later life never exclusively impacts the lives of the old; it is thus a critical site for understanding the diverse ways that increased longevity is shaping the meanings, experiences, and consequences of life itself.
In paid home care—one of the fastest-growing occupations in the United States—low-wage workers help elderly clients living in their own homes remain independent by embodying and then reproducing the elders’ lifetimes of experience. Exploring the bodily and moral consequences of everyday home care practices in Chicago, I show that in this context, sustaining independent personhood depended on and intensified unequal social relations. To sustain clients’ personhood, workers developed a deeply embodied empathy that enabled them to imagine and re-create the elders’ social and sensory worlds. Home care practices involved unreciprocated circulations of bodily experience that led some workers to feel that the needs and preferences of their clients took priority over their own comfort and well-being. Care workers’ bodily practices thus became one way in which social hierarchies shaped individual subjectivities and came to seem morally legitimate.
By tracing the transformations of troubling exchanges in paid home care, this article examines how differently positioned individuals strive to build caring relations within potentially restrictive regimes of care. In paid home care in Chicago, older adults and their workers regularly participate in exchanges of money, time, and material goods. These gifts play a crucial role in building good care relationships that sustain participants’ moral personhood. Amid widespread concern about vulnerable elders, home care agencies compete in a crowded marketplace by prohibiting these exchanges, even as they depend on them to strengthen relationships. Supervisors thus exercise discretion, sometimes reclassifying gift exchanges as punishable thefts. In this context, the commodification of care did not lead to the actual elimination of gift relations, but rather transformed gift relations into a suspicious and troublesome source of value.
While most mothers initiate breastfeeding, many do not continue for recommended durations. This study aimed to understand the gap between breastfeeding initiation and duration through an in-depth exploration of first-time mothers' breastfeeding experiences. Contextual factors that may facilitate or deter breastfeeding maintenance were explored by identifying common turning points (significant events or periods promoting a change in thoughts/behaviors or facilitating maintenance) described by mothers with varied breastfeeding durations. In semistructured interviews conducted from March to June 2015, twenty-eight first-time mothers in Iowa were asked to describe their breastfeeding experiences from initiation through cessation. Using thematic analysis, seven turning points, consistent across varied durations and experiences were identified: breastfeeding problems, the unknowns, recurring stressors, living new life with baby, reentering social roles, special occasions, and letting go. Turning points were usually associated with stressful situations, and mothers described intrapersonal (e.g., determination) and interpersonal (e.g., social support) coping resources as facilitators of breastfeeding maintenance. These findings highlight contextual factors that may trigger turning points, representing critical intervention periods, and the importance of enhancing support networks. Interventions to facilitate longer breastfeeding durations should consider key turning points and availability of coping resources to determine strategies that best fit the mother at each point.
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