Children, Young People and Care

John Horton, Michelle Pyer, John Horton, Michelle Pyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317416081
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The very notions of childhood and youth are intimately connected to contemporary norms, practices and spaces of care, caring and care-giving. The provision of care is widely figured as both the primary responsibility of parents, carers and practitioners who work with children and young people, and the primary factor in shaping children and young people's development, education, socialisation, wellbeing and contentment. However, children and young people themselves are rarely figured as key actors in the provision of care. An overwhelming presumption that children and young people are to be cared for has effectively marginalised their agency and responsibilities as carers, or in relation to practices and spaces of care.

Bringing together a significant array of multidisciplinary work on children, young people and families, this collection draws together new research on the diverse lives and experiences of children and young people as carers, as cared for, and in relation to spaces and institutions of care. It is the first collection specifically devoted to the subject of care in relation to childhood and youth. As such, the book will be a key resource for academics, practitioners and students seeking leading-edge empirical and conceptual material on this topic.

1Introduction

Children, young people and ‘care’

John Horton and Michelle Pyer

Preface: three articulations of childhood, youth and ‘care’

Warm, sensitive, and responsive care is the foundation of sociomoral behaviour.… Parenting and communal practices such as breastfeeding, touch, alloparenting, and play … are associated with important physiological and psychological outcomes that significantly raise the likelihood of a child interacting with others in prosocial ways. Most important, a community of individuals who receive the kind of parenting that is associated with sociomoral flourishing is more likely to create a community in which joy and well-being are fostered by and for all.

(Gleason and Narvaez 2014, p.335, 345)

Today, President Obama outlined his plan to make affordable, quality child care available to every working and middle-class family with young children. His plan includes: making a landmark investment … that helps every eligible family with young children afford high-quality child care … [and] creating a new innovation fund to help states design programs that better serve families that face … challenges in finding quality care.

(White House 2015, unpaginated)

Young people don’t care about politics … or do they?

With the EU referendum just months away, campaigners from both sides of the debate are trying to energise and engage with 18 to 24-year-olds so that they vote…. Their turnout in political elections is usually lower than any other age group…. Research suggests a significant proportion are not interested in politics and do not turn out to vote.

(BBC 2016, unpaginated)

Starting points: contextualising ‘care’

In so many contexts, and in all kinds of ways, when we think about childhood and youth we are always already thinking in terms of ‘care’. The very notions of childhood and youth are intimately, normatively and fundamentally connected to contemporary assumptions, discourses and spaces of care, caring and caregiving. Thus, as suggested by our preface, we might find ourselves habitually working to provide safe, nurturing, happy, responsive, sensitive environments for children or young people in our care, or debating the merits or limitations of policy interventions relating to child-care or youth support, or critically reflecting upon the extent to which children and young people (do not) care about democratic processes and political issues. As the first prefatory example articulates, the provision of care is widely figured as both the primary responsibility of parents, carers and practitioners who work with children and young people, and the primary factor in shaping children and young people’s development, education, socialisation, wellbeing and contentment. While specific practices and spaces of care may be socially and historically contingent (as evidenced by diverse anthropological and historical examples of familial, domestic, cultural or communitarian behaviours in relation to care) the expectation that children and young people should be ‘cared-for’, ‘nurtured’, ‘supported’ and allowed to ‘flourish’ by adults may be instinctual, and is certainly so widely recurrent as to appear essential and fundamental. This normative, discursive responsibilisation of adult care-for children and young people is widely reproduced within extensive frameworks of state policy interventions, legal/statutory programmes and institutional spaces devoted to care-provision. In diverse contexts, familial and domestic caring practices are increasingly shaped, regulated and mediated by local, regional, national and supranational policy, legal and institutional infrastructures. And, as in our second prefatory example, these are often explicitly named as spaces of, or plans for, ‘care’: as in the global preponderance of policies relating to ‘child-care’ or ‘social care’, or services provided for young people ‘in-care’ over the last century. These complex, shifting and often-precarious geographies of formalised care, welfare and service provision are instrumental (for better or worse) in constituting the everyday lives of many children, young people and families. However, as the third example on the preface suggests, children and young people themselves are rarely figured as key actors in the provision of care. In many contexts, an overwhelming presumption that children and young people are to be cared-for has effectively marginalised their agencies and responsibilities as carers, or in relation to practices and spaces of care. More widely, young people (perhaps particularly teenagers) are too often represented as uncaring and apathetic in relation to all manner of political, social and community issues.

This edited collection draws together new research exploring these kinds of interconnections between childhood, youth and care. Although chapters are predominantly written by researchers working in the disciplinary tradition of Human Geography – representing the significant array of geographical work on children, young people and families (see Kraftl et al. 2014, Skelton et al. 2016, and the international journal Children’s Geographies) – they engage with a remarkably diverse range of conceptual and empirical work on the topic of ‘care’. In the following chapters, the term ‘care’ surfaces in different ways in diverse research contexts and via parallel theoretical or methodological traditions. Indeed, a key point of this book is to demonstrate and juxtapose some of the complex, multiple ways in which care happens, matters and is articulated in diverse scholarly contexts, and in different children and young people’s lives. It is therefore hard, and arguably problematic, to settle on a neat, singular definition of ‘care’ (see Bowlby et al., 2010, pp. 39–41, Milligan and Wiles 2010, pp.737–8). However, as a minimal and inclusive point of departure we understand care, in the geographer David Conradson’s (2003a, p. 508) terms, as “the proactive interest of one person in the well-being of another”. As Sophie Bowlby (2011, p. 618) notes, in practice this definition encompasses a wide range of tasks, relationships, situations and modes of “intimacy, care and support that people use to get through the vicissitudes of life, both major and minor”. Many authors have attempted to map the multiple ways in which care exists and matters in different situations, relationships and practices (see Barnes 1997, 2012, Noddings 2013, Rogers and Weller 2013). For example, the feminist political scientist Joan Tronto’s (1993) fourfold typology of phases and capacities of care has been widely influential. As Table 1.1 summarises, Tronto (1989, 1993, 2013, also Fisher and Tronto 1990) argues that care can entail at least four different kinds of activity, and at least four distinctive, corresponding kinds of moral-ethical disposition (note that although these fundamental activities are termed ‘phases’, Tronto recognises that they very often overlap, repeat, intersect and occur in complex nonlinear sequences).

As we outline in the following section, this kind of typology has been the basis for a series of important critical theorisations of the politics and ethics of care. In particular, a great deal of social scientific work begins from a distinction between what are typically termed caring-about (corresponding to the first phase of Tronto’s typology) vis-à-vis caring-for (approximately corresponding to the other phases). As Milligan and Wiles (2010) explain, caring-for “implies a specific subject as the focus of caring” whereas caring-about comprises “a more general form of commitment that refers to less concrete objects”. Thus while caring-about is theorised as a somewhat generalised disposition toward, or feeling of, being caring, the more specific work of caring-for may encompass diverse

Table 1.1 Tronto’s (1993) typology of phases and capacities of care

Phases of care	Corresponding capacities of care
Caring about: an initial noticing and recognition of the need for some form of care, and a preliminary assessment of how this need could – or should – be met	Attentiveness: noticing the need for care; permitting oneself to “suspend one’s own goals, ambitions, plans of life, and concerns, in order to recognise and be attentive to others” (p.128)
Taking care of: assuming a degree of responsibility for addressing, responding to, or setting in motion a sequence of actions in response to a need for care	Taking responsibility: accepting and taking up responsibility for some form of care, particularly beyond one’s minimal pre-existing everyday obligations
Care giving: practically acting in response to care needs, doing the immediate, practical, ‘hands-on’ provision of care, as required	Competence: cultivating skills and habits to ensure that care needs are met adequately, effectively, appropriately and efficiently
Care receiving: some form or degree of reciprocity and acknowledgement from care recipient(s), evidencing that care needs are being met	Responsiveness of care recipient: providing evidence or acknowledgement that care needs have been appropriately attended-to, taken-responsibility-for, and competently addressed

activities undertaken by formal paid workers or informal, unpaid workers such as family, friends and volunteers. It exceeds the norms of reciprocity commonly practiced between adults…. At its most fundamental, caring for is about the personal, the performance of proximate and personal care tasks but it can include other everyday tasks such as childminding, pet care or household tasks. At a distance it can involve arranging and monitoring paid and professional care. (Milligan and Wiles 2010, pp.740–1)

Or, moreover, as Bowlby (2011) elaborates,

[care] can involve ‘caring for’ – that is tasks of care – as well as ‘caring about’, which refers to emotional investment in another person’s problems and concerns. Clearly the two are related but ‘caring about’ does not necessarily lead to ‘caring for’, while ‘caring for’ can occur without ‘caring about’. However, the experience of ‘caring for’ often leads to ‘caring about’ someone. Care is part of many different kinds of social relationship – for example, care can be paid or unpaid, formal or informal, and may result from social obligation, lover, fear or because of a need for income. (p.606)

The sociologist Carol Thomas (1993) further highlights the complexity of the term ‘care’ by identifying seven dimensions which characterise any caring practice. The seven dimensions are listed in Table 1.2 alongside some prompts for reflection: you may find it productive to use these prompts to think about how any particular act of care (perhaps one from your own work, or from the following chapters) is distinctly patterned in relation to each of the seven dimensions.

As Bowlby et al. (2010) note, the dimensions listed in Table 1.2 can combine in different ways so that different events of care are patterned and differentiated as a result of the distinctive, contingent constituent features of carers, care-recipients, care practices and social-economic and spatial-institutional contexts. Thus, for example, these dimensions can combine to constitute types of care as diverse as “formal elderly care in America provided by a private firm; informal care exchanged among family members in Africa, or ‘free’ childcare provided by a state-run nursery in Europe”, and ranging across all manner of “domains in which care takes place (such as the family, workplace, hospital) as well as … many types of relations (including intimate partner, relatives, friends, work colleagues)” (Bowlby et al. 2010, p.40). Even more complexity and multidimensionality is suggested by a wide range of studies which identify diverse caregiving ‘styles’ among individuals, care professionals, or organisations. Corcoran’s (2011) typology of family caregiving styles in relation to elderly relatives in one particular study in North America (see Table 1.3) provides just one illustration of ways in which diverse caring dispositions, habits and preferences may be constituted by individuals’ personality, positionality, upbringing, experiences, resources, behavioural styles, social capital and/or social-environmental factors.

Table 1.2 Thomas’s (1993) seven dimensions of care

Dimensions of care	Our prompts for reflection
Carer	Who is the carer? What are their characteristics, personality and positionality? What is their location, age, gender, religion, ethnicity, social class, profession, ‘dis/ability’ or social-cultural, educational and geographic background? How might these characteristics matter in the provision of care?
Care-recipient	Who is the care-recipient? What are their characteristics, personality and positionality? What is their location, age, gender, religion, ethnicity, social class, profession, ‘dis/ability’ or social-cultural, educational and geographic background? How might these characteristics matter in the receipt of care?
Relationship between carer and care-recipient	What is the nature of the relationship between carer and care-recipient? How might different relationships (e.g. familial, parental, sibling, marital, romantic, friendship, colleague, acquaintance, formal, professional, contractual or institutional) constitute different forms or experiences of care?
Nature of care	What form is care taking in practice? Which phases or capacities of care (see Table 1.1) are most evident? How might the style of care (see Table 1.3) be characterised?
Social domain	How is the relationship between carer and care-recipient connected to other individuals or social groups? How do these connections support or hinder the care process? How is care contextualised and affected by local, national or global social-demographic factors? How do social-cultural norms, assumptions, ideals or inequalities matter?
Economic character	How is care constrained or afforded by economic conditions? How do economic inequalities shape the capacities of carers and the experiences of care-recipients?
Institutional setting	More broadly, where does care take place, and how does this matter? How do spatial and environmental characteristics of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: children, young people and ‘care’
• 2 Who cares and how would you know? Conceptualising ‘doxic’ care
• 3 Theories underpinning kinship care
• 4 State of care: the ontologies of child welfare in British Columbia
• 5 Caring citizens: emotional engagement and social action in educational settings in New Zealand
• 6 Orphanages as spaces of care and control
• 7 Carefully controlled: young people and their pathways through spaces of secure care
• 8 Children creating spaces of care in diverse early childhood centre built environments: a complex interplay of social relations and materialities
• 9 Children and young people as providers of care: perceptions of caregivers and young caregiving in Zambia
• 10 Caring after parental death: sibling practices and continuing bonds
• 11 Kindness: caring for self, others and nature – who cares and why?
• 12 Young women’s careful and careless drinking geographies
• 13 Views of young people with cognitive disability about care in their relationships
• 14 Globalising child circulation: the care of children who are privately fostered across international borders
• 15 Reflection 1: distance, connection and the power, freedom and obligation (not) to care
• 16 Reflection 2: providing care: challenges for practitioners and service providers
• 17 Reflection 3: children, young people and ‘caringscapes’
• Index