“Care work is essential to survival”

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With the FamilyCare@LMU diversity initiative, LMU is putting the focus on families in the summer semester 2025. Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky is Chair Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies and co-speaker of the Bavarian Research Association ForFamily, in which she investigates various family models.

Our conversation will be about family.
What is family actually?

Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky: This is a lot less clear than common-sense has it. What constitutes family changes over the course of history and varies by culture. In the present, there are many different forms of family. For a long time, the classical model for researchers was a married couple - mother, father, their biological children, all in one household. But that’s inadequate today.

In research, we now use the concept of “doing family”: family is wherever people ‘do’ family. That means, wherever multiple generations are committed to care for each other responsibly in long-term units – that’s where family is.

One of your research interests is changes in family structures in Bavaria.
Is the classical family on the retreat?

In terms of numbers, there is much less change than many think, hope, or fear. Statistics tell us that in Germany, 70 percent of children under the age of 18 live in households with their mother, father (and biological siblings). The other 30 percent are children living with divorced or single parents, or in patchwork families.

In addition, there are same-sex couples and rainbow families, which make up a very small proportion of the total. Even rarer are family constellations like co-parenting – adults who team up to establish a family without ever having been or being romantically involved with each other.

Where does the change come in?

What’s changing is the way in which we perceive and value the variety of what can make up a family. At the rhetorical, cultural, and media levels, but also partially in the political and legal realm, there is a transformation, indeed proliferation, in what can legitimately constitute family. In TV shows, movies, magazines, and talk shows, we encounter a colorful diversity that leads to more visibility and acceptance of the numerically rarer family forms.

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It should be noted, moreover, that what we call queer families or rainbow families today have been around much longer than many people think. These families faced much more discrimination and stigma; they had to conceal themselves and live in risky situations. Nowadays, there is much more acceptance and visibility as well as increasing – if still very deficient – legal equality for queer families.

So family was and is diverse. But it’s also stressful and comes with a lot of work.
Which brings us to care work. What does this term encompass?

Everything related to looking after and caring for. When we think of care, we generally think of caring for our fellow humans in the first instance. But care can also mean looking after pets, gardens, or the environment. Generally speaking, it is an attentive response to the needs of living creatures, including ourselves – ‘self-care’. Care happens in many extremely diverse forms: professionally as care workers and teachers, privately in families or cohabiting relationships, or as a volunteer activity.

Care work can be spontaneous and fleeting – such as when we help an unknown person to cross the street. But it can also last for many years or a lifetime – as in the case of families. All forms of care have one thing in common: They always involve relationships. This can include violence as well, as care relationships are often asymmetrical and characterized by dependency.

How is this work distributed within families?

In Germany, care work is very unevenly shared. Women, especially mothers, do a lot more care work – both unpaid in everyday life and in jobs that involve care. The gender care gap remains huge. This has powerful effects on income, pension entitlements, careers, and the societal participation of women. We live in a political system that offers inclusion and resources almost exclusively on the basis of paid employment and not, say, care.

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Mothers are more likely to have interrupted employment histories and to have part-time or more poorly paid jobs. Of parents with children under the age of three, 73 percent of mothers work part-time but just 9 percent of fathers. Many mothers stay at home fully for non-paid care work, without an income of their own. Those who are not employed fall through almost all the cracks in our society or are extremely dependent on the paid work of others. As one result, old-age poverty in Germany has a largely female face.

Where does the idea of the breadwinning father and the mother who stays at home to look after the children come from?

This model is relatively young in historical terms. Since the start of the 19th century, care work has been considered “women’s work,” and motherhood as the naturally given core of femininity. According to this narrative, men are naturally unsuited to these tasks. This attribution of roles, which emerged historically, still affects our contemporary culture, our individual behavior, and it massively shapes the reality within families.

It emerged with the rise of the industrial society as a bourgeois ideal – an elite model that many could not afford. This applied especially to proletarian families, where mothers had to seek employment outside the home, even if this was subject to social disapproval and these women were systematically exploited both morally and economically for precisely this reason.

In former socialist East Germany, the working mother was not only part of official ideology, working outside the home just like fathers, but this was also the empirical normal – in contrast to the postwar model in West Germany. To this day, the labor force participation rate of mothers, particularly in full-time employment, is significantly higher in eastern Germany. That being said, care was also viewed as ‘naturally’ women’s work in East Germany.

Why does nothing change here?

The idea that women are ‘naturally’ more suited for care-work finds its way into taxation and social policy. There are structural frameworks, such as privileged taxation for married couples (Ehegattensplitting), which are strongly gendered. This also applies to the choice of higher education and career: Women are more likely to choose professions that can be combined with family life, whereas young men usually do not give such things a moment’s thought. And then when it comes to starting a family, it seems only logical that the mother’s job or career takes a back seat and she takes on the lion’s share of the care work.

Men often take the easy way out here. They point to the external circumstances, make arguments about financial security, or claim that management wouldn’t understand it if a man takes extended parental leave. Sociologists would say that fathers and men exhibit rhetorical modernization but behavioral rigidity. Furthermore, the lack of change is due to socially constructed gender stereotypes that see care work as female and therefore unmanly.

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What does this mean for society?

It’s a huge benefit that many more mothers and women today are in the workforce than in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Because not being in the workforce is a huge risk in every respect: legally, economically, culturally.

However, there is a problem: Many politicians are currently saying that people will have to work longer hours – and they do not mean care work in the family, as it is usually unremunerated anyway. What systematically gets swept under the table here is that our society is based on a whole care infrastructure that allows us to go out and work in the first place. Care work is essential to survival. If we do not care – for our children, our sick and elderly, animals, plants, the environment, ourselves, others – then we all die. Literally. Without care, nobody survives. Nor does our economy. Nobody ‘works’ without care, nobody can do any job without care.

But paid work and care work are currently in competition, aren’t they?

If we increasingly exploit care work in this gendered manner, but at the same time tell women and mothers they need to do more paid work on top of this – it’s simply a recipe for failure. The alternative is to outsource care work and pay others to do it – whether it’s the kindergarten, the private tutor, or the home for the elderly – but this always comes with a price tag that not everybody can afford. And it has its limits, also in terms of ethics and humane treatment.

Incidentally, this is not a new phenomenon. Care is externalized in a variety of ways, entrusted to others, such as migrants. Cleaning jobs are a good example in this country, as is elder care. Care is always intersectional and never just about gender: Class, migration status, and so forth are always significant factors as well.

The problems surrounding care and the way it is being rendered impossible in our current society are structurally individualized and privatized. In other words, people are expected to somehow sort everything out for themselves, even though the impossibility of combining care and paid labor are structural and societal. The private sector and politicians are not doing enough to help us as a society ensure that care and paid work are equally facilitated – for all people and above all regardless of gender.

As a society, we should place much greater emphasis on the social and personal value of care work. It demonstrably gives meaning to people’s lives in a very specific and irreplaceable way and is part of a good life. The thing men most regret on their death beds is not having spent enough time with their family. And this is one more reason for putting care work at the heart of social policy, working hour models, careers, and employment cultures.