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.
1. Introduction: children, young people and ‘care’
John Horton and Michelle Pyer
2. Who cares and how would you know? Conceptualising ‘doxic’ care
Gill Hughes
3. Theories underpinning kinship care
Rebecca Pratchett and Paul Rees
4. State of care: the ontologies of child welfare in British Columbia
Sarah de Leeuw
5. Caring citizens: emotional engagement and social action in educational settings in New Zealand
Bronwyn E. Wood and Rowena M. Taylor
6. Orphanages as Spaces of Care and Control
Tom Disney
7. Carefully controlled: young people and their pathways through spaces of secure care
Anna Schliehe and Annie Crowley
8. Children creating spaces of care in diverse early childhood centre built environments: a complex interplay of social relations and materialities
Ann Pairman and Carmen Dalli
9. Children and young people as providers of care: Perceptions of caregivers and young caregiving in Zambia
Caroline Day
10. Caring after parental death: sibling practices and continuing bonds
Ruth Evans
11. Kindness: caring for self, others and nature – who cares and why?
Tracy Hayes
12. Young women’s careful and careless drinking geographies
Samantha Wilkinson
13. Views of young people with cognitive disability about care in their relationships
Sally Robinson, Karen R. Fisher, Malcolm Hill and Anne Graham
14. Globalising child circulation: the care of children who are privately fostered across international borders
Karen Wells
15. Reflection 1: Distance, connection and the power, freedom and obligation (not) to care
Kathrin Hörschelmann
16. Reflection 2: Providing care: challenges for practitioners and service-providers
Michelle Pyer and John Horton
17. Reflection 3: Children, young people and ‘caringscapes’
Sophie Bowlby
Biography
John Horton is Associate Professor in Human Geography and Associate Director of the Centre for Children and Youth (CCY) at the University of Northampton, UK.
Michelle Pyer is a Senior Researcher in the Institute for Health and Wellbeing at the University of Northampton, UK.