Forum from the Archives: Alison Gopnik and Anne-Marie Slaughter on Why We’re Not Paying Enough Attention to Caregiving

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Caregiving is the most universal of human acts. But also one of the most invisible. While caring for a child, parent or loved one can be meaningful, and life defining, it can also be exhausting and life breaking. Drawing on her groundbreaking research on baby’s brains, UC Berkeley psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik is leading a multidisciplinary project to better understand the social science of caregiving with hopes of translating those insights into practical policies. Gopnik and policymaker Anne-Marie Slaughter join us to talk about how rethinking our approach to caregiving and how we support care providers, could lead to a better, more functional society. Guests: Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy, UC Berkeley; author, "The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children" Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, a non-profit think tank; author of "Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Support for KQED Podcasts comes from the Exploratorium.
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0:51.0	From KQED.
1:04.3	Thank you. From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:07.5	This week we're listening back to our recent interviews with writers, artists, and thinkers who make the Bay Area great.
1:12.6	Alison Gopnik is one of the most interesting scientists in our region.
1:16.6	She's devoted her career to understanding, in her words, how young children come to know about the world around them.
1:23.6	Some of that work has been pioneering developmental psychology, but children don't grow up alone.
1:29.3	They're embedded in caregiving networks, and now Gopnik is leading a multidisciplinary project to understand the social science of caregiving.
1:38.4	That's coming up next right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Caregiving is essential human labor. All children need caregivers and most people need caregivers at
2:05.0	some point in their lives. Nothing could be more important literally for the continuation of our
2:10.7	families and even the species. And yet, caregiving remains wildly undervalued and understudied.
2:19.6	The reason for this is almost too obvious to state, for decades, most academic researchers were men and most of them weren't doing the caregiving.
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