Self care and community care - how do we care? how do we fail?

Two years ago I drove to a neighboring state with a teacher friend to attend a professional development night hosted in a Reggio Emilia inspired school. As the director gave us a tour of the classroom walls lined with photos and quotes of children engaged in emergent projects, she explained how the preschool teachers had worked on the documentation on their own time. She admitted to us that she expected this kind of reflective work at her school, but she hadn't figured out how to schedule coverage or pay for preparation and documentation time for her teaching team. When she made this admission, my mind froze. I couldn't pay attention to anything else for the rest of the evening. I was stuck in a downward spiral of thought that went something like this, "No way! This is abusive. Reggio Emilia educators would never endorse this kind of treatment of early childhood teachers. A central purpose of reflection and documentation is to professionalize our work, and to show the intelligence of the children and teachers collaborators. How do well intentioned people get so off track?"  My heart was heavy and filled with righteous indignation. I thought of my many colleagues who have told me similar stories of teaching and caring in beautiful private progressive schools where they work with no health care and make half, at best, the salary of public school teachers. I thought of a young teacher I met at a child care council training a few days earlier who told me she worked a 9 hour shift daily because her director gave her a hour unpaid lunch break so she could stretch her shift to cover both the opening and closing hours, in the name of providing children consistency.  I thought of the job posting I had recently seen at a well known, well endowed, college seeking someone with a degree in early childhood development to work for  $13 an hour in an infant toddler center.  

As much as we each have a responsibility to ourselves to make a firm commitment to self care, the whole notion of self care is hollow if we don't exist in communities where it is possible. If we rely upon the ethics of care to guide our work as teachers and caregivers, we always come back to our dependency upon one another. It takes a community of care to find the ground where we can practice true balanced healthy self care.  Self care starts with self respect, and if we work in institutions and systems that neglect to operate with care as a core value, and refuse basic rights of care workers, we are all doomed to abuse ourselves, mistreat one another, and diminish care itself. 

In the spring when we were at the beginning of COVID, a viral facebook post by community organizer, Nakita Valerio, urged people to rethink self care when she said, "Shouting 'self care' at people who actually need community care is how we fail people." Although Nakita was responding to the horrific New Zealand attack, her messages struck a chord with child care teachers and all the care workers across our nation who were being called heroes while simultaneously being asked to show up as essential workers with low wages, and with minimal to no protections, through the pandemic. This moment in our history has illuminated the way our nation really treats care and how disrespectfully it responds to those people at the center of the caring hub that holds the world together. 

Now is the time to re-imagine care. I believe it must start from the inside out, from caring for ourselves and from treating care as an honorable profession, but we can't do this alone - we need a community of care around us.

If you want to think about this more deeply with me, check out this article, Beyond Self Care: Understanding Community Care and Why It's Important, and join me next week when I will discuss the history of the labor movement and the link between child care and servitude and slavery and when I ask, "How does the care movement become a social justice movement?

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