By Carlos Andrés Pérez Narváez 

Coordinator of the Gender and Work Program

at the Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute

Throughout our lives, we all care for others and need to be cared for. This deeply human activity connects our essence with solidarity and empathy toward others. Care is essential for life, but it is also a right, fundamental to people's well-being and daily development. Furthermore, it is work that generates value for society and the economy.[1] Although it is impossible to survive without care, the issue is only just beginning to occupy a prominent place on public agendas.

In the face of multiple global crises—social, economic, political, environmental, migration, and inequality—care has emerged as a key component in rebuilding our relationship with the planet and among people.

Care is much more than a basic need; it represents a transformative axis for rethinking our social relationships and our connection with the environment. Placing care at the center of public agendas opens the door to a profound change in the social compact. This change implies recognizing that human interdependencies and our relationship with the planet are fundamental to ensuring the sustainability of life.

Recognizing the importance of caregiving is essential, but so is highlighting the unfair distribution of this work: historically relegated to the private sphere and disproportionately burdened with women's bodies and life plans. This has perpetuated structural gender inequality.

The redistribution of care is, above all, a matter of social justice. And this moment represents an opportunity to position care as a fundamental right and an essential pillar of well-being and future development.

In addition to providing care, policies are needed to free up women's time and create the necessary conditions to drive cultural changes that promote social co-responsibility for care.

To democratize care, it is essential to listen to those who provide care and those who need it first: paid and unpaid care workers, as well as indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and gender-diverse populations, and, of course, young people.

The Young women are protagonists of the care relationships that occur in homes. According to the 2022 National Survey for the Care System by INEGI,25.9% of the main caregivers in the country are women aged 15 to 29 and 2.4% of the total number of girls, boys and adolescents aged 8 to 14 provide care in their homes., with women being the most likely to do so. These figures show that women's involvement in care work begins in childhood and that 1 in 4 primary caregivers in households are young women.[2]

At the Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute (ILSB), we have generated evidence on the realities and care needs of populations that have been excluded from the main discussions of this agenda.

Based on a survey of 134 women, we conducted a qualitative study that allowed us to gain insight into how young people perceive and experience caregiving in their daily lives. This study allowed us to gain firsthand insight into how young people approach this agenda and generate proposals for the development of caregiving policies.

A view of care from the perspective of young women[3]

Youth is often a time when strong social ties are built in different spaces. In this sense, the emotional component of caregiving is central for young women. For them, spaces of care are those that allow them to share experiences and knowledge, for example, school committees, health centers, peer groups, among others.

Furthermore, they recognize the importance of access to family planning and sexual and reproductive health programs as elements directly linked to care, as they allow them to decide about their life plans.

Young women also point to the urgent need to sensitize men to assume a more responsible role in caregiving, especially through active fatherhood that promotes shared responsibility in raising children.

The challenges vary depending on the context: in rural areas, the main ones are the lack of family care services in their communities and the absence of equitable support that responds to their real needs. This lack, combined with the overload of domestic work, further exacerbates the disproportionate caregiving responsibility young women assume.

In urban settings, the challenges lie in limited opportunities for family planning, access to sexual and reproductive health programs, and a lack of responsible fatherhood, which forces women to abandon their life plans due to unplanned pregnancies and teenage motherhood.

However, among the opportunities, both rural and urban young women are open and able to establish agreements with their male partners to jointly provide care within their homes.

This finding is significant because it demonstrates a growing openness among young men to sharing caregiving responsibilities, which represents a key opportunity to drive cultural change.

Working with young men is essential to fostering greater shared responsibility for caregiving. Furthermore, their approach to these tasks provides a pedagogical opportunity to cultivate tenderness, empathy, and solidarity—values that, in the long term, contribute to disarming the propensity for violent behavior toward women, other men, and themselves.

There is a widespread perception among young women that public policies regarding care are not directed at them, although they manage to identify some policies that are related to the prevention of unwanted pregnancies, the decriminalization of abortion in some states and access to infertility prevention methods as care measures to the extent that they contribute to life and family planning for adolescent and young women, so that other personal projects are not interrupted by assuming care responsibilities (school dropouts, job losses, economic impacts, etc.).

As can be seen, there is an urgent need to incorporate youth perspectives into the design and implementation of public care policies. Integrating youth voices, demands, and experiences will allow for the development of more democratic and effective policies.

Including youth in this agenda will not only free up the time of millions of women, but will also be an investment in the future. The solutions and keys to building a new social model that places life and care at the center lie in the hands of young people. Investing in them means investing in a profound cultural shift that transforms our way of caring for life, our land, and living together in community.

References:

[1] Cfr. Batthyány, K. (2015). Policies and care in Latin America: A look at regional experiences. Santiago, Chile: ECLAC.

[2] INEGI, National Survey for the Care System 2022, INEGI, Mexico. Available at: https://www.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/saladeprensa/boletines/2023/ENASIC/ENASIC_23.pdf

[3] The results of this section are contained in the study: Women Who Care. Care from an Intersectional Perspective. 2023 Care Survey, conducted by the Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute. Available at: https://ilsb.org.mx/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Mujeres-que-cuidan.pdf