Learning to Care

The focus of this chapter is on the key spaces and places within which we learn and re-learn caring practices over the lifecourse. The most obvious place in which informal care is learnt is the home – the place in which most children are brought up and, for some, the place in which older parent and adult child may learn new ways of relating to one another. However, there are clearly many other spaces of relevance to the learning in which we engage in the course of our everyday practices – school, community spaces, a variety of leisure venues and, for many adults, the workplace. In this chapter, we focus on the home, school and ‘neighbourhood’. Spaces of leisure and volunteering will be dealt with in Chapter 5 Networks and Chains of Care, and the workplace in Chapter 6, Working and Caring. We begin with a short consideration of the meaning of space and place in relation to learning to care. We then consider the home as a learning environment at three key points in the lifecourse: growing up, being ill and growing old. In the next sections, we consider learning to care within the school and then the neighbourhood. In the last section, we summarise the key points of the chapter.