No More Annas

{Every weekend I will be featuring a post by a member of the Caregiver Credit campaign. This one was written by Theresa Funicello, author of Tyranny of Kindness}

“Anna,” a Wisconsin resident whose son Angel was diagnosed with a terminal illness, asked for and was refused flextime by her boss. As Angel’s need for her increased, she took too many days off and was eventually fired. While on unemployment, she sought government disability benefits for him, but was told his condition did not fit the definition of “a long-term disability” because he was dying. Before long, Anna ended up on welfare, as we now know it. Because she was “employable” she was assigned to an unpaid workfare job. For a while, she regularly showed up at her workfare site for the stipulated 25 hours a week.

In the final weeks, after Angel fell into what was referred to as an “unresponsive” state, Anna
remained at his bedside full time, missing her workfare assignment. Consequently,
she was cut off welfare, her sole source of income.

Mothers and other caregivers replicate Anna’s story to greater or lesser degrees countless times across the country. Giving care to a healthy or ailing child, an aging parent, a dying friend, or an incapacitated spouse is work that demands time and too often, financial deprivation.

Government provides some protection for everything from unemployment, retirement, disability, old age and even for dips in farm prices. Caregivers, however, work without a safety net. Loving someone does not make it less difficult for the giver of care or less valuable to the cared-for and society itself. At the very least, whenever a person in need remains at home and non-institutionalized (nursing home, foster care, hospital, etc.) society profits in human and economic terms.

Over 90% of all home caregivers are women, largely mothers. Whereas more than half of all mothers tend to be in paid jobs, those with family incomes below the median tend more often to remain in the home full time. Could it be that they have more value in the home than out? Not according to our system of national accounts that fails to value them at all. After all, how much can one’s labor be worth when it usually counts as zero?

Nearly four times as many married women work part-time for pay as married men. Two times as many women as men are paid at or below the federal minimum wage. Among men on minimum wage, the majority are teenagers. Among women, adults make up 3/4ths – mostly, mothers.

In fact, caregiving is not free. Nor should it make the giver poor. Currently, a partially refundable $1,000 per child tax credit ameliorates the cost of raising children in or outside the home. Social Agenda proposes first converting it to a Caregiver Credit to include care of adults as well as children and to focus on the giver of care; second making it fully refundable so it covers all who exit the job market to give care as well as those buying alternative care and third; increasing the value of it to make a real dent in the cost of giving care. The start-up cost of a fully refundable Caregiver Credit would be about $10 to $15 billion, depending on usage (most income programs are underutilized). It is far less costly than the alternative: institutionalization. It would entail less bureaucracy, be more transparent, and begin to set mothers and other caregivers on a course toward economic parity.

Not long after her son’s death, Anna was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Anna’s doctors said stress was a factor in her rapid deterioration. She died homeless. When her son first had become “unresponsive”, she was asked why she “failed to comply” with workfare rules, thereby causing her case to be closed. She had answered, “Because when I touch his face, he smiles.”


The author is the Executive Director of Social Agenda, Inc., a think tank and advocacy group that is leading the Caregiver Credit Campaign to convert the Child Tax Credit to a fully refundable Caregiver Credit.