We Were Never Meant to Do This Alone: Collective Caregiving As Foundation for Social Work Research and Practice

Background and Purpose

Caregiving for children in the United States (U.S.) is characterized by individual responsibility and privatization. Whether parents are employed full-time, part-time, or not working, caregivers in individualistic countries, like the U.S., report high levels of stress and burnout, even in contexts where paid leave or childcare supports are available. This raises a foundational question for social work research and practice: what if the primary problem is not how caregiving is balanced with paid work or childcare, but how caregiving itself has been socially organized?

This paper examines collective caregiving and its implications for social work research and practice, as well as to examine the limits of prevailing policy and practice solutions that remain rooted in individual responsibility and neoliberal ideology. The guiding questions are: (1) how did caregiving come to be individualized and privatized in the U.S?, and (2) how might social work reimagine care outside a neoliberal framework while remaining aligned with its professional values?

Methods

This descriptive paper uses a narrative review drawing on interdisciplinary research in social work, anthropology, sociology, and public policy to trace historical patterns of shared caregiving, examine the social and political processes that resulted in individualized care, and critically assess dominant social policy responses such as paid family leave and formal childcare. I illuminate how caregiving has been structured across time and contexts and how contemporary policies shape caregiving practices and expectations in the U.S.

Results

The literature consistently demonstrates that collective caregiving, characterized by shared responsibility across extended kin and community networks, has been a common feature of human social organization throughout human history, while the contemporary U.S. models represents a historic and global shift toward privatized and nuclear caregiving. The review further shows that U.S. caregiving arrangements are shaped by gendered labor markets, neoliberal policy regimes, and paternalistic welfare systems that position care as a private responsibility. While dominant social work research focuses on solutions like paid leave and childcare provide critical support for families, they remain tied to labor-market participation, situate responsibility at the household level, and fail to frame caregiving as a collective social responsibility.

Conclusions and Implications

This paper contributes a reconceptualization of caregiving as a collective social process rather than an individual or household responsibility, challenging dominant policy and research paradigms in social work. Findings suggest that current social work policy frameworks address the symptoms of caregiving challenges in the U.S. without confronting the structural conditions that produce them. Implications include expanding social work research and practice agendas to examine collective and community-based caregiving models, broadening policy advocacy beyond work-contingent supports, and legitimizing non-market forms of care such as mutual aid, extended kin networks, and community caregiving arrangements. Reorienting how social work defines and supports care will enable the profession to move beyond incremental reforms and more fully align practice and policy with its commitments to collective well-being and social justice.