Pandemic parenting is impossible. American work culture is a big reason why.
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Highlights
Long before Covid-19 hit, Americans were expected to work like they didn’t have families. Some call it the myth of the “ideal worker” — the idea that the perfect employee is someone “unencumbered by any other problem other than your job,”
care work in America had been devalued long before the men came home from World War II. That history goes back to slavery, when “the original caregivers were enslaved Black women who took care of landowners’ children,”
In essence, child care workers shoulder all the burdens of the ideal worker myth but get none of the benefits.
