Care and Coronavirus: Perspectives on Childhood, Youth and Family

The COVID-19 pandemic radically altered the everyday worlds of children, young people and families. Exploring their experiences and practices of care during this period, Care and Coronavirus: Perspectives on Childhood, Youth and Family brings developments in the field of Childhood Studies into productive dialogue with care to forge new ways of thinking through care and childhood.

Split into five sections, each bookended with a practitioner reflection, the chapters discuss how the pandemic engendered and necessitated novel forms of caregiving and experiences of receiving care. Highlighting changes to everyday norms and routines, contributors focus on diverse spaces of care and incorporate perspectives from children, practitioners, policymakers and academics. Investigating early childhood systems of care, children and young people’s health and wellbeing, parents as subjects and recipients of care, schooling as care and young people navigating care and control beyond school, authors offer key reflections for thinking through these experiences during the pandemic, challenging the inequalities and commodification of care that was revealed in these times.

Arguing that COVID-19 heightened the attention paid to care and the ways in which care is vital for the maintenance of ourselves and the world around us, Care and Coronavirus calls for a reflection on the failures and successes of care during the pandemic and in its aftermath so that we can plan for a more caring future.

Tom Disney is a Social Geographer and Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Northumbria University.

Lucy Grimshaw is a Social Scientist and Assistant Professor of Social Policy at Northumbria University.