Care, family and crisis

Abstract The care crisis in the United States predates the current administration, but there are early signals that the US government is going to roll back recent policies to expand caregiving support to a wider range of people who provide dependent care. In this short commentary, I hope to illustrate how new attacks on Medicare, housing support, food assistance and other supports for the basic needs of families are layered upon a stubbornly persistent misrepresentation of how family and community care really happens in the United States. The long history of the state devaluing and denying the full breadth and expression of family care, including care undertaken by non‐normative caregivers such as children, appears to be accelerating towards a terrifying horizon in which many families will not be able to care for each other.