Hello everyone.

Welcome back to So Your Parents Are Old.

I'm Vanessa Grigoriades.

So if you're listening to this show, there is a good chance that you know that recently the costs of elder care and child care have risen, and perhaps even at a rate higher than inflation.

Meanwhile, wages have barely gone up. In the past year alone, it's estimated that 100,000 women have left the workforce, many of them to care for children, aging relatives, or both.

And of course, family caregivers are hardly getting paid for the most part. It can be so

damaging to a family's finances, and it actually has so many cascading effects on the economy

as a whole. And what's totally weird is that putting public money towards these things is widely and

deeply supported by the public, both Democrats and Republicans. So WTF, how are we going to deal with this?

To talk about that and talk about the history of how we got here, my guest today is Julie Cashin.

She spent her career working to make our elected officials care about care.

She's a senior fellow and director for women's economic justice at the Century Foundation,

and she has worked on these topics for decades. So welcome,

Julie. Thanks for having me, Vanessa. So tell me also about your parents. So my mom lives with her

partner in Long Island, and my mom is healthy. And also often notes that when I was younger, she took care of me and now I

take care of her. I'm not taking care of her in a lot of ways right now, but I did recently go

and make her give me all of her passwords and also make sure I knew where her will was and make

sure that I understood her wishes over time.

And part of it was because a number of years ago, her partner was in an accident where he was in a

coma for four months. And we did not know what his wishes were. And it was really hard to know what to

do. He miraculously recovered. But even like during

that moment when we were in the hospital, there was a moment where one doctor basically said to us,

...