If you wanted to design a social system to care for children who have lost their parents, I don’t know if you could do much better. With four children, each kid can get individual care and attention, but there were four social workers each had three 24-hour blocks per week, so they had time to have their own lives with enough flexibility to take vacations and sometimes have two workers with the kids instead of one.
To get that individualized care, though, they had four social workers and four children. One-to-one.
Of course, you could probably add a few more children, or subtract a social worker, as a cost-saving measure. It’d be less sustainable, but it wouldn’t significantly change the experience. But you couldn’t stray that far from one-to-one without changing the nature of the experience, without industrializing it to the point that individual care is lost. With four kids, the kids can feel like kids; if there were forty kids, they’d probably feel like they were cattle.
We’re pretty limited when it comes to care. In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person.
Not the OP, just wanted to start a discussion about this here.
Some thoughts of my own:
I’m reminded that we live in a thoroughly maladaptive world, that ‘normal’ is everyone doing the best they can despite some/many/all of their most fundamental needs—such as care—being insufficiently met.
I think, to the extent the title of this essay is true, it seems a neglected and much ignored truth. I notice that my world models assume a very finite capacity for caring, yet this awareness is not present in my conscious thoughts and strategies and my day to day interactions—I routinely overestimate my own capacity for care, and rarely notice when my own need for care is insufficiently met.
I notice that I do not care skillfully, and worryingly I don’t know that I would recognise such skill in others.
Care Doesn’t Scale
Link post
Not the OP, just wanted to start a discussion about this here.
Some thoughts of my own:
I’m reminded that we live in a thoroughly maladaptive world, that ‘normal’ is everyone doing the best they can despite some/many/all of their most fundamental needs—such as care—being insufficiently met.
I think, to the extent the title of this essay is true, it seems a neglected and much ignored truth. I notice that my world models assume a very finite capacity for caring, yet this awareness is not present in my conscious thoughts and strategies and my day to day interactions—I routinely overestimate my own capacity for care, and rarely notice when my own need for care is insufficiently met.
I notice that I do not care skillfully, and worryingly I don’t know that I would recognise such skill in others.