"They Still Pick Me Up When I Fall" The Role of Caring in Youth Development & Community Life

This book is a call to action to parents, youth workers, policymakers―anyone who works for and worries about the next generation―to recognize and promote the values of caring in public and private life. It is about teenagers―those who no longer need the care given to babies and children but who still need support and guidance. Diana Mendley Rauner offers a rare focus on youth development as a process of experiencing care and learning social responsibility.

Much public discussion of youth focuses on individual achievement and a limited set of markers of success, on the one hand, and increasingly punitive responses to failure on the other. Missing from these discussions is an appreciation for the importance of caring and social responsibility both in the environments we create for young people and in our expectations of how they should act and what they should become.

"They Still Pick Me Up When I Fall" develops ideals for caring interaction, articulating specific behaviors and habits for practitioners as well as policies and practices that characterize caring organizations and caring societies. Each chapter begins with a profile of a youth-serving organization, drawn from the fields of education, youth work, and counseling. Throughout, an intellectual framework for care is interwoven with the voices and experiences of the youth workers and young people involved in the struggle to create a caring society.

Diana Mendley Rauner is a senior research associate at Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago.