Precarity and the question of children’s relationalities

Abstract

With the global pandemic having disproportionately affected adults, the caregiving roles of children have garnered increased media attention. This belated visibility has, however, tended to reproduce the racialized and classed hierarchies that mask children’s caregiving in contexts of precarity. While the caregiving actions of middle-class children now circulate within a more affective register as small acts of kindness, the everyday caregiving roles of marginal children in the majority world largely continue to be naturalized and made invisible. In stark contrast, existing research on these children’s caregiving practices has skillfully analyzed its temporal, spatial, relational, and structural workings (Dearden et al., 2000; Evans et al., 2009, 2019; Garcia-Sanchez, 2018). However, the extent to which Childhood Studies has been able to engage the broader implications of children’s caregiving within precarious contexts in the majority world remains ambiguous. Could recognizing the different relationalities that these caregiving practices mark help realign our existing reluctance? Through briefly engaging existing research on marginal children’s caregiving and reading this together with efforts to historicize and reevaluate these different relationalities, including the challenge these pose to neoliberalism’s subjective technologies, I offer some preliminary ideas around a potential reframing. With different levels of immersion in household and domestic chores marking most children’s lives across the world, research focused on children’s caregiving has been careful to distinguish between varying intensities in caregiving roles (Evans, 2014; Ochs and Izquierdo, 2009). Broadly speaking, scholarship on children’s caring identities in the global North has concentrated on families with impairments and chronic illness as well as on the roles played by migrant children as “care brokers” (Garcia-Sanchez, 2018; Orellana, 2009; Yarris, 2017). In majority world contexts, research has foreground how caregiving is embedded within everyday aspects of children’s social roles and has traced how disease, death, and global economic processes exacerbate these expectations (Abebe 2013; Evans, 2014; Evans and Becker, 2009; Hunleth, 2017). This research has helped highlight relationality as a key aspect of children’s caregiving (Evans et al., 2019; Horten et al., 2017; Ribbens McCarthy and Gillies, 2018). Discussing Zambian children’s attempts to become closer to ill guardians, in contexts where infectious disease is interwoven into everyday life, Hunleth (2017) frames this as, “a process of commensurability in which some children and ill adults forged—or attempted to forge—a common vulnerability, one in which boundaries between healthy and sick, adult, and child became blurred” (p. 10). Her analysis of caregiving as “many things all at the same time” resonates strongly with Evans et al. (2019) mapping of how children’s geographers have 1021748 CHD0010.1177/09075682211021748ChildhoodEditorial editorial2021