For most of us it is families who meet our health needs in childhood; for warmth and shelter, for love and comfort. Families, too, serve as our first and most significant health teachers. In adulthood, most people create new families (often more than one) to support them ‘in sickness and in health’. In old age, it is our family again who cares most and does most for us. (Graham, 1984, p. 17)
Most of Great Britain's six million carers do not know that they are carers – ‘I'm not a carer, I'm a wife, a mother, a son’. Pitkeathly, quoted in Burke and Signo, 1996, p. 24
loving | making a cake |
cuddling | changing nappies |
making phone calls | changing soiled bedding |
healing | looking after people |
doing things for other people | taking pains for |
feeding someone | bothering about |
cooking for my family | avoiding anger |
affection | protection |
Care work |
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Doing things for other people; feeding someone; changing nappies; changing soiled bedding; looking after people. |
Care – love or affection |
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Loving; cuddling; making phone calls; taking pains for; bothering about; protection. |
‘In care’ means stigma for children and young people.
The terminology used in this area is important because it colours non disabled people's attitudes to disabled people and their needs … ‘Care’ is being rejected by growing numbers of disabled people because it … relates their needs to a society which treats them with compassion rather than to a society which respects their civil rights. (Kestenbaum, 1996, p. 6)
something that is needed when people cannot function in daily life without the practical help of others.