Child care is health care.

Need proof? Consider the family farm.

Not at all a realistic portrayal of life on a modern family farm. Photo by Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales on Unsplash

If you haven’t spent much time around working farms, the phrase “farm family” may bring to mind bucolic images of a mother with a perfectly content baby on her hip making fully-from-scratch chicken parmagiana for her husband who’s out in the field.¹ Reality for most farm families is muddier, messier and much more fraught with financial stress.

For many farmers who are also parents, one source of that stress is child care. Especially on small farms, the family is the labor. Caring for kids may mean lost hours in the barn or the fields—labor not easily replaced by hiring someone to take a parent’s place. Help from extended family may be out of reach, especially for first-generation farmers. And quality off-farm child care is expensive and in many rural communities non-existent.

There are many policies and programs in the United States aimed at helping farmers bolster their business. They help with capital and low-interest loans to grow land base or update equipment. They provide educational opportunities and marketing assistance for farmers to create new products and connect with customers. The part of the family farm those programs broadly fail to consider, to the detriment of the business itself, is the family.

“Any challenge at the household level is going to impact the farm business,” rural sociologist Florence Becot told me.

Becot, along with colleagues Shoshanah Inwood and Andrea Rissing, took a long, hard look at how farm service providers and programs, including many aimed specifically at women farmers, address the challenges of child care. What they found is that they don’t.

It became clear in their interviews that many service providers did not consider care work on the farm to be farm work, so it was seen as outside of their programs’ purview, the researchers wrote in a paper published in Frontiers in Public Health. The romanticized notion of the family working together on the farm was woven through the program literature, without any acknowledgement of the challenges involved.

I spoke with Becot recently for a story I’ve been working on about health care access among Maine farmers, for Maine Farms journal, which is sent once a year to Maine Farmland Trust members. (You can become a member here to get the print version, with photos by Yoon S. Byun.) Becot also studies medical vulnerability among farm families and how intertwined a family’s health needs and social needs are.

Farming is dangerous. And attentive child care, on or off farm, is an important factor for keeping kids safe. One child dies in a farm-related incident every three days in the United States, according to data from the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. Dozens are injured every day.

And the balance of care work and farm work is a major source of emotional and financial stress for farm families. Plus, child care often is what enables parents, no matter their occupation, to take care of their own physical and mental health.

Farm and family are connected. You could say that about most people—home life affects work life, and vice versa. What’s different for farm families is how integrated the business and the family is, the wall between them so permeable, or non-existent. The mental load of striving, sometimes impossibly, to meet the needs of both is heavy, Becot said.

Recently, the researchers have been surveying farmers about what they need to better manage their own mental health, given that farmers experience higher rates of anxiety, depression and suicide than other occupational groups. Accessible child care comes up over and over again, Becot said.

“People have been struggling, and they’ve been struggling kind of in the shadows,” she said.

It’s all one more example of how, as stress and parenthood researchers Molly Dickens and Darby Saxbe have argued, child care is essential health care.

“In failing to support caregivers with effective policies, we miss the most promising opportunities to promote both adult and child health,” they wrote for CNN in 2021, when the major investment in child care written into Build Back Better was still on the table. '“If we can reduce stress in the critical windows during the life span—early childhood, the transition to parenthood, caregiving for loved ones of all ages—we may be able to bend the arc of late-life disease trajectories.”

That historic plan was squashed, and for now we’re back to stitching the fragments of our patchwork system together as best we can and worrying about the health effects when it invariably falls apart.

The Women in Agriculture Act, co-sponsored by Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, became law this summer. It creates a Women Farmers and Ranchers Liaison within the U.S. Department of Agriculture and gives priority to rural development funding aimed at increasing the availability and quality of child care in farming communities.

Meanwhile, pandemic relief money for child care providers across the country is about to run out, and Democrats in Washington are pushing for new funding through the Child Care Stabilization Act. For ideas about how to talk to your representatives about the bill, follow the nonprofit advocacy group Chamber of Mothers.

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One to read

Nature Reviews Neuroscience has just published a review of parental brain science by some leading researchers in the field. The review looks at research in rodents and in humans, calls for more studies of non-gestational parents, and lays out a series of questions to explore. The science to date has come a long way in identifying what changes occur in the adaptation to parenthood. The researchers call for more work examining exactly how they change and the relationship between brain changes and behavior.

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Mother Brain comes out in paperback TOMORROW!

And I’ve got a bunch of great book events coming up in the next two months:

• SEPT. 28, 6 p.m.: I’ll be with the one and only

  Hannah Matthews
  , author of You or Someone You Love: Reflections from an Abortion Doula, at the South Portland Public Library. I love Hannah and this library and the people who work there.

• SEPT. 30, 7 p.m.:

  Amanda Montei
  and
  Sara Petersen
  will be talking about their books, Touched Out and Momfluenced, and I get to moderate. This one’s at Back Cove Books in Portland. Registration is required, and the $5 ticket price can be put toward purchase of any book at the event or paid as a donation to Birth Roots.

• OCT. 24, 6 p.m.: I’ll be talking with

  Angela Garbes
  , author of Like a Mother and Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, at Portland Public Library, as part of the Spotlight Series on motherhood. Angela is brilliant and hilarious and very good company.

• NOV. 9, 6 p.m.: On a road trip this summer, while my family was listening again to The Wild Robot audioboook, my husband turned to me and said, “You should interview Peter Brown.” When Brown dreamed up Roz the robot, who lands on a remote island and soon finds herself caring for an orphaned gosling named Brightbill, he created a beautiful portrait of parenthood. We’ll talk about it and the role caregiving plays in the third installment, The Wild Robot Protects (out Sept. 26) at Mechanics’ Hall in Portland. The event is free, but registration is required. Note: This event is meant for an adult audience. Brown will do an event for kids at Back Cove Books next month.

1. Please, disabuse yourself of this belief, quickly, and buy

Sara Petersen

’s book for more on how social media both reflects and distorts our image of what a mother should be.