The Branch of Philosophy All Parents Should Know

Of the many challenges I encountered as a parent of young children, the biggest was trying to answer the question: Am I doing a good job? I found plenty of people, drawing on expertise in biology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary history, eager to offer opinions and tips. Some of this information was useful. But none of it gave me what I really wanted—a big-picture vision of what it meant to be a “good” parent, or of what I fundamentally owed my kids.

Care is as much practical work as it is psychological, ethical, and spiritual. Yet parenting seemed to be missing in a substantial way from the sources that I and many other people use to understand their place in the world. Religion, classic novels, philosophy, even economics have long presented the intellectual and emotional work of parenting as a footnote to the human story, rather than as a major plot point. I craved a body of thought that treated parenting as worthy of serious inquiry and established care as central to our moral concerns. I wanted context for the epiphanies and perplexities I was experiencing daily. So I went searching. And, in due course, I found my way to a branch of philosophy known as care ethics.

A confession: I had little interest in philosophy before becoming a parent. My previous exposure to the subject had consisted of a few weeks of Philosophy 101, during which far-out theoreticals such as the “trolley problem” dominated the discussion. What, I wondered then, could gaming out what I would do in the unlikeliest of situations teach me about how to deal with the day-to-day conundrums of undergrad life?

But care ethics has made me something of a philosophy convert. In this system of thought, relationships in which one human relies on another, including those between parent and child, are treated with rigor and depth. Care ethicists spend their days contemplating subjects such as the essence of what it means to care well for another, and how this care intersects with people’s capacity to be “good” or to live what they might call “the good life”—or, to honor the way care ethics keeps the subjective nature of experience front of mind, “a good life.”

Care ethics is, in a sense, anti-trolley-problem philosophy. Abstract scenarios tend to focus on one moment. Care ethics focuses on moral matters that take place over time, just as relationships do. And it doesn’t shy away from the fact that the moral decisions people might make involving their spouse or children are probably different from those they would make involving friends or strangers. “There is so much gray area with care,” Maurice Hamington, a care ethicist and Portland State University philosophy professor, told me. “Care is sloppy and messy, and you get your hands dirty, and there is so much that constantly needs to be negotiated,” which is most likely one reason philosophers have historically avoided the subject. “It’s not the kind of philosophy that you can put on a bumper sticker.”

As many care ethicists are apt to point out, when people reflect on their life, burrowing around for what really matters and who they really are, the care they gave and the care they received is almost always top of mind. Yet philosophical reckonings with morality have long failed to acknowledge this. Thinkers have instead been preoccupied with defining right or wrong based on interactions between independents, two people who are essentially equals. But humans spend much of their lives in dependency relationships: We start as children dependent on parents, become adults who care for our children, move on to caring for our parents or other adults, and later become older and require care again. Not always in that order, not always with all the steps. But true independence is the anomaly, not the norm.

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Care ethicists endeavor to confront the depths to which humans have needs, feelings, and bodies that break. Work in this area began with the psychologist Carol Gilligan, who in the late 1970s began questioning studies that had suggested that girls were less morally developed than boys. Gilligan’s research, featured in her 1982 book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, found that women and girls weren’t lacking in the ability to contend with moral questions, as earlier thinkers had argued, but that they instead had a different approach to figuring out right and wrong. When working through ethical dilemmas, girls, Gilligan found, were inclined to consider the particulars of relationships alongside big moral ideals and virtues. A girl might be more willing to lie to protect someone she cares about, for instance, while a boy might be more determined to tell the truth no matter the personal fallout, because he values honesty as an ethical principle.

Inspired by Gilligan’s work, some philosophers, most of them women, started considering the absence of care relationships in their own discipline—a field not coincidentally dominated by men. One of the first books to consider the moral dynamics of interpersonal caregiving was Nel Noddings’s 1984 work, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (the original subtitle used A Feminine Approach). Noddings—who had 10 children, described herself as “incurably domestic,” and began her philosophy career in her 40s—wrote that the care we receive as children serves as the foundation of our impulse to be good, and that this is something we might carry for the rest of our days. This represented a departure from much of the dry, objective reasoning by earlier philosophers, many of whom saw emotional relationships and domestic life as obstacles to clear-headed moral thinking.

Today, care ethics is in what Hamington, the Portland State ethicist, described to me as a “golden age.” More thinkers are working on care through various lenses, including the interpersonal, the political, and the spaces where the two meet. This development comes at a pivotal time, as American politicians, including Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and J. D. Vance, are not only debating the best ways to support parents and other caregivers but also talking about how their care experiences shaped their character and fitness to lead their country.

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A relatively recent attempt to integrate care into everyday thinking is the Social Science of Caregiving. The project, based at Stanford University, is led by the UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik, who has brought together economists, philosophers, biologists, and psychologists to better understand the nature of caregiving. It’s a subject “whose time has come,” Gopnik told me. One of the project’s big aims, she said, is to consider the ways in which government policies and culture rest on the assumption that people are independent, and to reimagine a social contract that acknowledges the ubiquity of dependency.

American society, in which support for caregivers lags far behind that in other developed nations, is not yet structured to reflect this ubiquity. I have learned from care ethicists that when a country truly supports parents and caregivers, when it treats care as a core value, it doesn’t just offer people relief in the form of rest and financial resources. It also increases and embraces the possibility that people might grow from the experience of caring for others—that they might see care, the giving and receiving of it, as an indispensable part of living “the good life.”

The more I put care at the center of my moral accounting, the more I started to consider it a clear and obvious part of a rich, meaningful existence—the kind of subject worthy of dinner-party conversations with my smartest friends. Many of the philosophers I spoke with felt the same. I’ve never come across a care ethicist who would argue that parenting and other caregiving inevitably make us better, more enlightened people. But many told me that they believe it can lead to substantial growth when accompanied with self-awareness and curiosity.

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An important part of this process is learning to wrestle with vulnerability—one of care ethics’ core preoccupations. “Vulnerability is not really something discussed in other philosophical circles,” Daniel Engster, a University of Houston political philosopher, told me. This is because our capacity to be hurt or feel weak takes us out of the realm of abstraction—the stuff on which so much theory is based—and into the unruly complexity of human connection. “In care ethics,” Engster said, “vulnerability is not something to be shunned or ashamed of. It is a real moral concept.” Should a care ethicist ever be forced to come up with a bumper sticker, it would probably mention vulnerability.

Some care ethicists focus mainly on the care recipient’s vulnerability. In this view, my big ethical job as a parent is to pay close attention to my children, attempt to understand their needs and desires, and act accordingly; my agenda for them should not really be in the picture. Other ethicists, such as Engster, make room for parents’ vulnerability and desires. Engster believes that parents and other caregivers can play a role in determining a child’s needs, but that this must stem from deep engagement with that child and curiosity about who they are. “I like to think of good care as a dance,” he said. “Whoever is leading may have some idea of where and how caring should go, but it has to be constantly responsive to the one being cared for, trying to match their steps.”

Crucially, alongside these visions of what constitutes good care sit equally useful ideas about what good care is not. “Care is not altruism,” Hamington told me, pointing to one of the most damaging misunderstandings about parenting. For me, learning this distinction felt like the unfogging of a mirror, a sense of finally being seen and seeing myself clearly as a parent. By removing care from the realm of selflessness, I felt relieved of a certain variety of mom guilt—the kind that grows from the cultural pressure to suppress my needs while trying to meet the needs of my kids. Such pressure obscures one of the highest aims of good care, which is to model for children how to listen carefully to themselves and other people, the Penn State philosophy professor and ethicist Sarah Clark Miller told me. “If we are cared for in our neediness and vulnerability when we’re young,” Miller said, “we learn to make meaning in ways that help us weather the bad, amplify the good, and generally be humans who can connect well with others.”

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In the child-rearing equation, our culture tends to see parents as the fixed factor and children as the variable factor. Children get to grow, while parents are expected to be a steady, stabilizing force. How boring. Care ethics helped me see myself as a variable factor as well. As a result, I feel not only liberated from a checklist approach to parenthood but also more able to see the challenges of parenting as a fulfilling intellectual and emotional exercise. As I help my children learn to make meaning of their own lives, I am discovering ways to make meaning in my own.

Today, if someone were to demand a definition of “good” parenting from me, I think I would start with Engster’s dance. Success isn’t meeting a set of external expectations, or maintaining a particular mood or Instagram-approved vocal register. Success is being present in the chaos of the exchange and accepting that my kids and I will have moments of knowing and not knowing, speaking and listening, holding on and letting go. Success is knowing that this dance is some of the hardest work I will ever do in my life, that I will not always be up for it, and that I will make plenty of mistakes. It also means owning these mistakes in front of my kids—because I, too, get to be vulnerable. Care, in other words, is real life. Important life. Understanding this has helped me to live what I would call a good one.

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