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 ... |
