Caregiving: Navigating Tensions of Caring for Self and Others

Self-Care: How Consumers Balance Self-Centered Care Consumption with the Needs of Others Rachel Hochstein, Florida State University, USA Colleen Harmeling, Florida State University, USA Ela Veresiu, York University, Canada SESSION OVERVIEW Caregiving is an inherently intimate act where individuals, families, and service providers make decisions about how to best enhance individual and communal well-being. [...]providing products to fulfill basic needs of life such as soap, medication, and baby formula is the basis for many consumption markets. [...]Hochstein, Harmeling, and Veresiu discuss how consumers determine their self-care needs and navigate tensions that occur when consumers choose to put their own physical and mental well-being first. In this way, the seesaw metaphor affords a dynamicity to vaccinehesitant parents' decision-making rather than succumbing to the assumption that they are "oriented towards the static state" (Palomera and Vetta 2016) of adopting a discourse. [...]the economies of worth framework illuminates how parents execute emotion work while gauging risks and contingencies involved.