Ethics of caring in the child-friendly projects: New challenges

Abstract

This paper aims to consider the implications of Noddings' ethics of care theory for child-friendly projects and their underlying philosophical assumptions. It is explained that this theory with its emphasis on the children's needs and rights and, more importantly, the emphasis on the care relation and care encounter indicates how Noddings' main concepts and ideas could be taken into consideration in exploring the challenges of implementing child-friendly projects. Therefore, the main concepts of ethics of care theory including need and right, empathy and sympathy, receptive and projective, care about and cared-for, expressed and inferred needs were investigated by considering their connection with the origin and the destination of child-friendly projects. Accordingly, a series of questions was set out to illustrate the theoretical challenges that are posed in implementing any child-friendly project. These questions were also categorized in light of three core characteristics of Noddings' theory of caring: 1) relational ontology; which refers to the relational nature of children life, 2) attention with concern; which refers to the moral sentiment/non-rational life of children and 3) particularism; which refers to the singularity of children's lives. As individuals/researchers and as members of the child-friendly community we can focus on these questions to understand the challenges of the project and provide a potential instrument for its qualitative evaluation.