THESummer is ending and the countdown has almost begun. On the horizon, the domestic barricades are already looming behind which you will return to fight. I speak of complex activities, mainly carried out by women, who in the USA, where the researchers with the inventiveness are not lacking, they took the imaginative name of “Kinkeeping”. The word, now entered the official dictionary, is A combination of “kin” (family person) and “keeping”, which we could translate here with surveillance, custody, in short..
But we are not talking about the daily maintenance of the house in order, or of the care of the children (but also of the elderly parents), all activities that in our country still struggle to be shared.
Here we are further. “Kinkeeping” means all that to be done, typically feminine, to keep the parental or social ties tightwhich are substantiated in thinking and organizing common meetings and activities, actively attending school chats, remembering birthdays or other celebrations, choosing, buying and delivering gifts, and so on.
Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Vangeri Gilbert).
In 2017, when American researchers began to study the phenomenon, their surveys attributed this role for 91 percent to women. And it is difficult for things to be changed in less than a decade. Also because To make “Kinkeeping” it takes time, and it seems that women have more. Or, to better say, they know how to organize it betterdoing more things at the same time.
To give the idea of how crucial this role is, Scholars have compared family life to a film, where men are the actors and women producers, while everyone else moves in the backstage. With the logical consequence that, at the end of the day, the applause go to those who have been on stage, and not to those who organized it behind the scenes.
This to say that All of you “Kinkeeper” sometimes you are stressed, often angry, in too many cases miserable. Keeping all together passionately has an emotional cost, so you are indulgent with yourself: if for once you have forgotten the birthday of Aunt Clotilde, make it a blessed reason.
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Antonella Baccaro’s articles on I woman and on Corriere della Sera.