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Caring Dads is one program developed to better meet the safety and security needs of children and their mothers by providing intervention for fathers who have perpetrated violence in their families. This chapter draws on experiences with the Caring Dads program to describe issues that arise in designing and providing intervention with fathers who have abused their children and/or intimate partners and to outline a series of guidelines for program accountability. Due to the importance of child and woman safety and the complexity of multisystem involvement, the delivery of a program like Caring Dads requires a high level of program accountability.

This chapter considers why we should care about carers and engages with different theoretical approaches to recognising the caring relationship and the implications of this for those involved in such relationships. In particular the chapter considers an approach grounded in the ethic of care and one based on relational autonomy. The chapter engages with an area of Irish health law where carers are clearly excluded from the legal framework – the mental health system. The mental health system is a useful case-study as it illustrates the complexities around balancing the interests of carers and cared for persons. The chapter concludes that it is important to care about carers, but doing so must be in a manner which continues to respect the distinct individual rights of each of the parties to the caring relationship.

This chapter explores the potential for the development of critical approach to care based on the concepts of precarity and precariousness. Applying those concepts at the level of both theory and analysis, it is argued, serves to draw attention to both the socially constructed uncertainties of care provision conditioned by the labour market and corporate practices on the one hand, and the uncertainties of physical ageing and the ontological vulnerabilities that arise from our bodily existence on the other. Uncertainty also confronts those who provide care in either a paid or unpaid/informal capacity. The precarious conditions of work reflect the financial fragility of the economic supports and the changing and unequal markets that increasingly underpin the way care is provided to the increasing numbers of people who live extended lives today.

This chapter looks for exemplary programs that concentrate on teenagers. It looks at evidence that the programs have assured Safe Passage by promoting educational outcomes, preventing new morbidities, and demonstrating high expectations for youth. Five programs were selected: Centro Sister Isolino Ferre, a youth and family centre with a police sub-station in Caimitio, Puerto Rico; Quantum Opportunities Program, an after-school enrichment program run by Opportunities Industrialization Centers in Philadelphia; El Puente, a high school in a community center in Williamsburg, New York; Caring Connection, a comprehensive, multi-component, multi-agency program run by the Marshalltown School District in Marshalltown, Iowa; and Turner Middle School, a university-assisted community school run in collaboration with the University Of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. All of these programs proved to be flexible and reactive. They appeared to be able to adjust schedules, personnel, and policies to meet the needs of their clientele.

This chapter takes a closer look at one of the types of programs featured in this book — the full-service community schools. It turns to school reform programs and to efforts to deal specifically with sex, drugs, and violence. It reviews the various types of school–community partnership programs that are on the horizon at the moment, presents several examples, looks at research, and discusses some of the issues that have come to the fore as these programs have evolved. A full-service community school integrates the delivery of quality education with whatever health and social services are required in that community. These institutions draw on both school resources and outside community agencies that come into schools and join forces to provide seamless programs. Examples of full-service community schools are the Children's Aid Society, Woodrow Wilson Middle School, and Missouri Caring Community Schools.

The chapter addresses empathic concern as the basis for altruistic concern. The author carefully delineates, but also links, the notions of sympathy and empathy and considers the thesis that psychopaths’ lack of sympathy might be due to a lack of empathy. There might be something more deeply different about psychopaths. It is considered that they cannot really participate in moral life because other persons are bound to see them from an objective point of view, i.e. not as moral agents. Hence there are only shaky grounds for assuming moral responsibility of psychopaths.

This chapter analyses the findings from two qualitative studies of young people’s caring roles in families affected by HIV in the UK, Tanzania and Uganda, from the perspective of a feminist ethic of care, emotion work and life course transitions. The majority of the UK families interviewed were recent migrants and refugees of black African ethnicity. Ill-health (in this case a family member affected by HIV or AIDS) is a potential (but not inevitable) source of family trouble - in ‘African’ families, young people’s contribution to care and household work are more culturally accepted than where Western norms prevail, though the clash of African and Western expectations of childhood may become troublesome, especially when young people move to the UK. The author conveys the complexity of the emotions and multiple meanings and directions of care between parents with HIV and their children in these family relationships, with some scope for perceiving some benefits from their troubles, although wider structural, cultural and material issues also shape their experiences. She argues that it is exploitation, vulnerability and (lack of) resources beyond the household that contribute significantly to troubles, rather than young care-giving per se.

While building cultures are pre-disposed towards creating systems that enable basic human needs to be met, such as enabling water to enter and exit a building, they are less attuned to constructing spaces that respond to people’s diverse psychological and physiological needs. This is the theme of chapter 8, which develops the proposition that the processes by which building actors design and construct a place, and the methods they deploy to understand how objects and people interact, are estranged from, and insensitive to, the human context, or fail to consider the relationships between spaces and the functioning of the human body. Construction practices are disembodied insofar as practitioners rarely relate their work to human scale, or the manifold complexities of the body. As a consequence, what we build is implicated in the (re) production of debilitating spaces, or environs that degrade, and undermine, the body’s capacities to work well within the built environment.

The final chapter, chapter 10, begins by noting that there are much better ways to build than at present. Different worlds can be crafted enabling people to live in more humane ways that are respectful of ecology and the environment. Building and construction practices need to reject the ‘more of everything’ approach, and shift towards a quality-based paradigm in which crafting becomes the basis for the design and production of the built environment. The chapter considers how far an ethics and politics of care and caring can be instilled into the construction of places, and discusses what a caring building ethic refers to and may entail in practice (see Bates, et al, 2017). Here, an important focus relates to learning about how care and building may be conjoined, including discussion of the pedagogic and practical challenges in creating caring building values and practices.

This chapter presents analyses of men’s accounts of their family participation and family trajectories. It explores the questions of how and in which ways men participate in their families in low-income contexts and foregrounds their caring arrangements and family configurations. The diverse and divergent sets of caring arrangements described by men in different generational positions are considered, drawing on empirical examples across the cases. The findings in this chapter demonstrate how caring arrangements in low-income families are both negotiated and contested over time. This includes across familial generations, between men and women, and often in engagements with services and agencies external to families.

This chapter explains the book’s rationale, arguing that work-care reconciliation debates and analyses have previously drawn rather limited attention to the care given by family members of working age to relatives who need their support because of illness, disability or frailty in old age. The chapter presents data on the growing significance of work-care reconciliation, arising from both labour market and demographic change, and explains the international comparative approach taken in the book. This compares two countries in each of three types of welfare system, liberal-democratic (Australia and England); Nordic (Finland and Sweden) and East Asian (Japan and Taiwan). The chapter also explains the book’s organisation into three parts, concerned with working carers of older people, disabled children and partners where serious illness or disability raises care and support needs.

This chapter provides new insights into the lives of parents who provide care for a disabled child in Taiwan and Japan, revealing how they are shaped by social norms and the extent they are affected by new and emerging welfare and social care policies. Four case examples from interviews with mothers of children with disabilities are presented to explore how women in each country reconcile paid work with lifelong caring for a disabled child. The chapter argues that in its employment and welfare policies, Japan has recently begun to move towards a ‘universal breadwinner model’. By contrast Taiwan has been described as remaining within the idea of the ‘family wage’.

This chapter documents international policy developments and provides a gender critique of retirement, employment and pension policies in Australia, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, the UK, and the US. It assesses the degree to which the individual country's extended working life policies have adopted the agenda (increasing pension age and introducing flexible working) set out by the OECD and the EU. Policies include raising state pension age, changes in the duration of pension contribution requirements, the move from defined benefits to defined contribution pensions, policies on caring for vulnerable members of the population, policies enabling flexible working and anti-age discrimination measures. An expanded framework is used to assess the degree to which gender and other intersecting issues such as health, caring, class, type of occupation and/or membership of minority communities have (or have not) been taken into account in designing and implementing policies extending working life.

Many people are employed in jobs that are linked to care. But it is in this context that care as a value has come under particular attack. The work of those paid to care for disabled people and others has been criticised for denying the right of individuals to make their own decisions about the support they need in order to live their lives as they choose. Criticisms of the practices of some ‘care workers’ has translated into a rejection of care as a value in favour of other values – in particular the linked duo of ‘choice and control’. This chapter considers what an ethic of care analysis can offer to understanding care work of different types. It emphasies the need to look not only at what workers do, but the context in which they do it, for example, the way in which care workers are employed and rewarded, and the extent to which such work is being undertaken by women migrants who may have left their own family members in the care of others. It proposes what ‘care full practice’ can look like.

Three alternative reforms are discussed. Genuine Tax Credits: (Current ‘Tax Credits’ are a means-tested benefit, and are not true Tax Credits.) Tax Credits ascribe an amount of money to each worker. If there are no earnings, then the whole Tax Credit is paid. As earnings rise, the Tax Credit is withdrawn, until a break-point is reached, beyond which the worker pays tax. Negative Income Tax is similar, except that it is specified in terms of a rate of withdrawal for wages below the break-even point Both Tax Credits and Negative Income Tax are administered by the employer through the Pay As You Earn tax system, imposing administrative problems if someone changes their employer or their employment status. If household arrangements determine the amount of the Tax Credit, then the employer needs to know employees’ personal details. Experiments have shown that a Negative Income Tax does not stop people from wanting to be employed. This is a useful result. Also discussed is a Participation Income: like a Citizen's Income, but conditional on the claimant performing such activity as employment, caring work, or voluntary work. Because a Participation Income would require a casework approach, this would be difficult to administer.