Who Cares for the Caregivers? Awe, Belonging, and the Case for Men In Caring Professions

Background and Purpose

Men remain dramatically underrepresented in direct care professions, including social work, nursing, home health, and early childhood education. Scholarship rooted in sex-role strain theory1 and hegemonic masculinity frameworks2 has attributed this primarily to rigid gender socialization. Yet, these accounts leave underexamined what sustains men in care work from the inside. Elliott's caring masculinities framework3 proposes that men who engage in care construct masculinities organized around emotional expressiveness and relational interdependence rather than dominance. Men in caring professions face documented risks of burnout, professional isolation, and loneliness that compound over time, with caregiving roles associated with elevated depression, anxiety, and loneliness,4,5, and with loneliness amplifying occupational stress in care contexts.6

This study asks: What are the baseline experiences of burnout, loneliness, and belonging among men in direct care professions in Charlotte, NC? It also explores awe-developing experiences and whether they improve belonging and relational well-being in this population. Belonging is understood as the perceived fit between person and social environment, drawing on Baumeister and Leary's need-to-belong theory.9 Awe is conceptualized following Keltner and Haidt10 as perceived vastness combined with need for cognitive accommodation, and theorized by Monroy and Keltner11 as engaging five wellbeing-promoting processes: neurophysiological shifts, diminished self-focus, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and heightened meaning.

Methods

This study uses a two-phase mixed-methods design (n= 150) employed in direct care professions across social service, healthcare, and educational settings in Charlotte for Phase 1. Phase 1 administers a baseline survey assessing burnout using the Maslach Burnout Inventory,13 loneliness using the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale,14, and community belonging using the Psychological Sense of Community Scale,15 . Phase 2 (n=15) delivers five structured group awe walk experiences (2 to 3 hours each) designed following Keltner's community-tested awe walk protocol, with pre- and post-walk interviews exploring shifts in participants' relationship to self, group, and care work. Analysis integrates pre-post survey comparisons with constructivist grounded theory16 applied to interview data.

Results

Preliminary findings reveal two consistent patterns. First, men in Charlotte's caring professions report elevated burnout and pervasive occupational loneliness, describing their care roles as largely invisible to supervisors, colleagues, and the wider community, a form of relational erasure that compounds over time. Second, belonging is experienced as conditional rather than given: men describe an ongoing performance of care competence, consistently feeling the need to prove their legitimacy as caregivers in feminized professional spaces. These early findings point to a workforce sustained not by institutional recognition but by the intrinsic relational rewards of care work itself, making awe, as a mechanism for deepening those relational rewardst.

Conclusions and Implications

This study advances a community-based awe walk model as a low-cost, scalable, and culturally resonant intervention to address burnout, loneliness, and conditional belonging among men in care professions, with potential for adaptation across diverse communities and national contexts. Findings offer concrete direction for masculinity-affirming organizational culture change, workforce retention policy, and future research on awe as a democratic community health tool.