Visuals by Mavis Cao

Long before I became a design strategist and a parent, I was a dancer. I loved the music, the movement, and the time dedicated to enjoy moving my body.

At five years old, I began practicing my first pliés and tendus. By my teen years, I had earned a scholarship to a classical ballet school, where I trained six days a week. There, students, teachers, and choreographers alike were driven by a relentless pursuit of excellence. We demanded perfection from our bodies while vying for the same few spots in an intensely competitive field.

A pivotal moment in my career occurred during a summer workshop with Alonzo King when I was 17. Founder of LINES Ballet and a luminary in the dance realm, King is celebrated for bending the notoriously rigid limits of classical ballet. He challenged the status quo and transformed the traditional into the transcendent.

For the first time in many of our dance careers, my classmates and I were instructed to turn away from the mirror-lined wall and look at one another.

“Make the shape from the inside out. Let me see you, not what you want me to see” King said, releasing us from our teachers’ mold.

With his encouragement, we co-created an expanded choreography, incorporating elements from the others' styles as we inscribed our names together through dance.

I carried two lessons with me long after the workshop: first, that the script for excellence we're often handed is not absolute (and oftentimes, false); and second, building with community to create shared success is far more meaningful than competing against community over scarce resources.

Quiet Adaptations

Since the birth of my first child, I have been confronted with another script I unwittingly picked up: professional and parental success required working full-time and outsourcing childcare.

This narrative, deeply rooted in capitalist and racist structures, not only perpetuated these systems but caused me to grow increasingly distant from my two daughters, the women who cared for them, and my partner.

What should have been an ecosystem thriving on mutual support and collective well-being, felt fragmented and competitive instead. Those involved in my daughters’ early years each contributed as best they could, but operated in silos enforced by time scarcity and transactional arrangements.

I longed to recapture the spirit of King’s workshop and co-create a relational movement for care that would enable us to support one another as much as our children.

So, I began making quiet adaptations to design a system of care that worked best for my family. I switched jobs for more flexibility and reconsidered the relationships I needed from my immediate community.

My partner and I learned how to lean on others—especially neighbors—and found care programs that valued teachers as much as children. Through these quiet adaptations, we have grown a small, imperfect circle with others to share the responsibilities and immeasurable joy of care—not just for our children but for each other.

These shifts, enabled by significant privilege, have been monumental. However, I call them quiet adaptations because they’re workarounds—practical solutions within and against the constraints of the existing systems.

But what if we lived within a system that inherently supported care in its very infrastructure? Imagine a world where the well-being of every person is not an afterthought but a foundational element in society, where each individual’s needs are anticipated and met by collective efforts that are valued.

This is the vision we strive towards—a society where the need for workarounds becomes obsolete because the system itself is designed to foster community, support, and mutual respect.

Narrative Change, Now

While my family has been fumbling toward a care community, many others have long embraced collective approaches—from childcare to eldercare and everything in between. Mia Birdsong, Angela Garbes, and bell hooks have described the ethos of this way of caring in gorgeous detail.

Working on our Reimagine Childcare program at IDEO.org, I’ve had the privilege of learning from those designing holistic care practices that hold everybody whole and witnessing them build on each others’ ideas and ways of care.

Nationwide, these quiet adaptations are challenging traditional boundaries of childcare, addressing love, healing, and justice in our social contract—fueling the narrative changes we need. This broader understanding of care goes beyond the economic imperatives of getting kids ready for school and parents to work. With a group of changemakers, we’re retelling an old story on the value and power of collective care.

Still, neighbors arranging shared care for their children to enable adults to organize for social justice or community elders integrating oral history into caregiving to preserve cultural heritage is often undervalued and unsupported by public resources. The people practicing them - especially family, friends, and neighbors - are also excluded from public discourse and support.

We aim to transform these quiet adaptations into a powerful call to action, turning our nuanced understandings of care into a movement supported by public and private investment.

This isn’t a prescription to patch up individual failures of the current system—it’s an invitation to be inspired by a radical vision and tap into the wisdom of our own creative and brilliant responses to the responsibilities, and joys, of caring for children and each other.

Will you join us?