Concerted Cultivation at the End of Life: Contradictions in a cultural repertoire for elder care

• In Event: 40201 - Diverse Perspectives on Care Work

Abstract

A growing number of Americans are providing unpaid care for older adults. Though informal caregiving is a meaningful experience for most unpaid care partners, caregiving can also cause care partners to experience physical, psychological, and financial strain. This strain is intensified by a privatized elder care system that pushes primary care responsibilities onto family care partners without offering them structural support through comprehensive care policies (Abel 2022; Calarco 2024).

Care partners are left on their own to navigate the elder care system and the challenges of caregiving. As unpaid care partners adapt to new caregiving roles, they may apply caregiving frames from earlier in their lives to the ways they care for spouses, parents, or friends. Lareau’s (2011) concerted cultivation has become the dominant cultural repertoire for childrearing among middle class families. Under concerted cultivation, parents create a structure of near-constant development for their children, proactively organizing activities and intervening in institutions to connect their children with as many resources as possible for success. Concerted cultivation is a powerful cultural repertoire in capitalist societies that prioritize individual achievement, but as sociologist Kathleen Lynch (2022) argues, capitalist ideologies contradict the values underlying our human need for care.

Drawing on a year of ethnographic observations and 77 in-depth interviews with older adults, unpaid care partners, paid caregivers, and aging advocates, I find that middle-class and affluent care partners draw on strategies from concerted cultivation as they navigate the elder care system. Many care partners emphasized independence, growth, and busyness as goals for their loved ones. They used their educational, cultural, and social capital to proactively find and connect their loved ones with care resources. This enabled their loved ones to access high quality care, but put added pressure on care partners during an already stressful time of life.

Author

• Erica Janko, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill