Oscar Barbarin has served on the faculties of the Universities of Michigan, Maryland, and North Carolina as well as Tulane University. His scholarship examines social context, ethnicity and child development, particularly the impact of racism and material hardship on socioemotional development. He has studied the development of children with life-threatening illness, urbanization in South Africa, and quality of early childhood settings. His research has centered on boys of color and the identified auspicious conditions that promote their mental health, social competence and emotional resilience. These conditions include (a) systems of caring, (b) structures supporting their self-regulation of behavior and emotions, and (c) interpretive frameworks by which affirming familial relations, culture and spiritual values provide boys of color a sense of connection, purpose, and an understanding of their place in the world. He has proposed that paradoxical attributions are a key cognitive strategy in maintaining emotional balance by affirming personal agency.

This chapter explores the women’s experiences as their child approaches their first birthday and reflects on the changes and overlap between findings in the original motherhood study and these later contemporary accounts. By this point, a return to the workplace and working motherhood provides a dominant theme, but the language of ‘balancing’, ‘sharing’ and ‘50:50’ is much less evident in these interviews. Often complicated and precarious care arrangements are put in place in order for the women to be able to afford to work, as UK childcare costs are prohibitive. The chapter also traces how a backdrop of neoliberal expectations and digital amplification, together with the demands of more intensified parenting, patterns caring in couples. Taking this focus and using real-time narratives, the process of becoming more practised and the (relative) expert on your own child is also examined across this chapter, providing a contemporary view of maternal agency and selfhood. Are women ‘having it all’ as lazy assumptions about working motherhood have asserted, or just doing it all?

The concluding chapter draws together the empirical threads identified in the preceding chapters and considers their theoretical and political implications. At one level, the aims of the book have been simple and straightforward: to examine in what ways women’s experiences of transition to first-time motherhood have changed since the original study was conducted 21 years earlier. But the unfolding accounts of transition have been anything but simple or straightforward in what they signal about women’s lives, societal expectations and contemporary motherhood. This returns us to a question posed in the opening chapter of this book, ‘has it ever been a more challenging time to be a woman who is also a mother?’ This was asked for several reasons, including a notable policy gap between discursive tropes of ‘balancing’ work and family life and everyday working and childcare conditions in the UK. But it was also posed in relation to older first-time motherhood, the effects of digitalisation on transition/motherhood experiences and how selves and gendered agency are narrated. Just over a decade ago, in her controversial article, Anne Marie Slaughter concluded that ‘women still can’t have it all’. My question is: why are we still doing it all?

This introductory chapter outlines how children are active agents with motives and intentions, and what practitioners can do to support children’s learning, development and well-being in different age periods. It is therefore relevant for adults who work with children from birth to late adolescence, both within and beyond formal institutions. We also intend it to be useful to researchers and other professionals concerned with children and young people.

Our aim is to look forward toward children’s futures and how they can be supported to benefit from and contribute to what society has to offer. We argue that, by taking children’s intentions and emotions seriously, we can create an education that benefits children across the age periods. When children move through the institutional practices that society creates for them, they will learn, acquire new motives and develop. Therefore, the tools that we offer will allow carers and practitioners to tailor their support to children in different age periods. These ideas underpin a caring relational form of pedagogy, which is particularly but not only, important when children are dealing with changes in society’s expectations for them. These changes occur as they move, for example, between family, day-care or school, and when new challenges arise in familiar situations.

This chapter focuses on relational practices of care to nurture prosociality in children and adolescents. We begin by introducing care as an ethical stance toward another that requires attention and commitment to another, as well as sensitivity to the developmental needs and uniqueness of every child. We then outline the practices of relational care, and how they matter for efforts aimed at nurturing children and adolescents’ prosocial orientations. It is argued how recognition of and careful attention to children and adolescents and their ethical development can move humanity forward, and how true commitment to others and an ethical self can contribute to the flourishing of all children. We present examples of nurturing care, including community-based and organizational initiatives as well as existing research-based psychological programs, and we discuss implications for policy. We conclude by outlining next steps for a future agenda of transforming nurturing care for all children and adolescents.

Humans are a highly social species with multiple physiological systems that have evolved specifically for social relating. There is now considerable evidence that the quality of our social relationships has an impact on both physical and mental health. Especially important is the dimension of feeling supported, valued and cared for, as opposed to feeling unsupported, devalued, excluded and uncared for. This chapter explores how compassion-focused therapy is rooted in working with these evolved, care-focused, motivational and physiological regulating systems. It is a therapy that highlights and helps patients to recognise the value of developing a compassionate orientation to themselves and others. The chapter also explores the degree to which some, but not all, spiritualities pursue the same goals, and how spiritual orientations to compassion can – for those with such views – support their progress through therapy.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the ageing process in relation to psychopathologies encountered in the practice of old age psychiatry. In addition, it addresses the role of spirituality and religion in ageing, and discusses ways in which people approach the challenges of transition in later life. The authors discuss the importance of a multidimensional and holistic approach that includes paying sufficient attention to core aspects of being and personality, which can convey important information with regard to coping skills and how they influence responses to diagnosis, treatment and outcome. Deep among these core aspects lie the root constructs of a person’s vision of life and personal meanings, and what some would describe as the presence of a spiritual/transcendent dimension.

The heart of nursing is intrinsically linked to what you do as a nurse and why you do it, but it is also about how you do it – the ways in which you represent and enact the core values and intent of the profession.

While some of your views and beliefs are likely to be shared with other students and experienced nurses, your reasons for wanting to be a nurse, and what you consider to be at the heart of nursing, will vary depending on your personal perspectives and experiences. This chapter begins by considering some of the common perspectives on nursing, noting how your own perspective is likely to change as you progress through your studies and into practice. We look at why people choose nursing, the different views and influences they are likely to encounter and the diverse range of roles and settings in which they may work. We then discuss how this informs what it means to be a nurse and your emerging sense of professional identity. The chapter concludes by exploring caring, compassion and kindness – concepts that lie at the heart of nursing, even though they are likely to be understood, applied and experienced differently in the context of each nurse’s own practice.

The Introduction challenges three limited approaches to ethical education, that is, the teaching of moral values as a subject matter, as the fostering of cognitive moral reasoning, or as the cultivation of virtues or character traits. We argue that ethics does not consist solely in informational propositional knowledge, but instead, it requires cultivating sensitivities that constitute caring in a relationship; ethics is rooted more deeply in the social and emotional aspects of human relationships than in the cognitive reasoning of moral principles, which will not awaken the need nor enliven the ability to appreciate the differences in others; ethics cannot be reduced to a list of virtues. We further argue that these three approaches are limited not only in their capacity to enable young people to overcome challenges in relationships with and feeling for others, but also in these being situated within an instrumentalised conception of education. This conception tends to ignore the importance of living human relationships within a school community as intrinsically valuable, hence missing out a core ingredient in ethics. To overcome these limitations, this book proposes that ethics should be understood primarily in terms of engaging with others in human relationships that consist in caring and mutual appreciation.

The chapter considers the impact on family law of adopting the concept of the relational self. In particular, it explores the role of family law, the definition of families, financial orders on separation, the definition of parenthood, the concept of parental responsibility and the nature of children's welfare. It explores how a relational self model would ensure that family law protected and promoted valuable relationships.