In contemporary psychology and education, care is often framed as an individual capacity, a private respon-sibility, or a skill to be taught through intervention programs. Such framings, that are deeply shaped by Western, nuclear-family norms, narrow our understanding of how humans actually develop, relate, and learn in diverse cultural ecologies. Drawing on long-term research in India and Brazil, this paper proposes ‘Care as Foundation’, an approach that places culturally embedded caregiving practices at the centre of how we conceptualize human development and educational practice.

Caregiving is not merely an emotional disposition but a social, distributed, and epistemic practice through which communities cultivate competence, belonging, and moral responsibility. This perspective challenges psychology’s persistent emphasis on autonomy, self-regulation, and individualized development, offering instead a model grounded in relationality, interdependence, and multiple caregivers—including adults, siblings, peers, and community members.

Situating care within cultural-developmental theory and epistemic justice, the paper shows how attending to everyday caring practices in marginalized settings reveals alternative ontologies of personhood, childhood, and learning. These insights offer powerful correctives to globalized educational agendas that universalize Euro-American expectations of parenting, schooling, and emotional regulation.

We argue that future practice in psychology and education must begin with care—not as remedy but as ontology, recognizing the relational infrastructures that make learning and development possible. Re-centring care in this way opens pathways for more culturally grounded, equitable, and socially responsive pedagogies and research practices.

The global advance of neoliberal reforms in education has coincided with—and arguably contributed to—a documented crisis in child and student well-being, marked by a steady increase in psychological diagnoses. This crisis, rooted in the neoliberal cultivation of competitive individualism and the erosion of collective solidarity, is met not with systemic transformation but with a parallel psychology of adjustment. Main-stream psychological approaches are weaponized to compel students to manage the distress produced by these very reforms, effectively privatizing the problem and obscuring its political origins, while further entrenching deficit views that stigmatize and marginalize students with labels of psychopathology. Consequently, this paper argues that disrupting this vicious cycle and providing adequate care requires a radical break from mainstream (reductionist) psychological tools that have historically buttressed the status quo and are perfectly suited to the current demands of neoliberal school governance.

Inspired by the transformative activist stance in dialogue with critical, feminist, and social practice approaches, we explore an alternative by reconceptualizing care through activist agency. We argue that care is fundamentally a collective achievement, realized through individuals' contributions to transformative community practices. This reconceptualization can guide the development of pedagogical practices grounded in fairness, equity, and de facto equal opportunities—fostering the equitable development of activist identities engaged in social transformation. Drawing on insights from implementing a transformative developmental intervention in a foster care program, we conclude by discussing how to confront neoliberalism's erosion of collective goals by establishing communities of mutual care that interrupt all forms of marginalization.

Teaching schoolchildren emotion regulation strategies has become a key tenet of a wide array of pedagogical approaches around the world that seek to develop a pedagogical response to the globally rising concerns for the well-being of children and young people. As exemplified by the U.S.-based Social Emotional Learn-ing Framework, such strategies – particularly those concerned with emotions of negative valence – are widely considered a crucial means of promoting well-being and cultivating caring communities in schools. While the promises of teaching such strategies may seem appealing, we must proceed with caution. For when delving into the research underpinning these frameworks, it becomes apparent that they are based on a rationalist conception of schoolchildren’s emotionality that treats negatively valenced emotions predominantly as inner hindrances in need of regulation. This arguably risks producing uncaring educational practices in which the responsibility for alleviating emotional distress is imposed on the children experiencing it, while the structural conditions that give rise to such adversity are exempt from critical scrutiny and transformation.

If we theorise care practices as collective, transformative endeavours aimed at transforming the intersecting social, institutional and socio-cultural conditions that produce distress and escalating spirals of marginalization/vulnerability, this calls for a break with rationalist approaches to schoolchildren’s emotionality in educational contexts. An alternative conceptualisation can be drawn from various branches of critical and sociocultural psychology, highlighting schoolchildren’s negative emotions as carriers of knowledge and mediators of collective transformative agency. The paper elaborates this alternative conceptualisation and discusses its implications for pedagogical practices in schools.

Notions of a “well-being crisis” or “care crisis” signal growing concerns about children’s mental health, evident in rising school attendance problems and increasing diagnoses. Yet this crisis extends beyond children: frontline professionals—pedagogues, teachers, educational psychologists—face mounting stress, while structural conditions reveal unsustainable resource allocation to special education, staff shortages, and retention problems. These pressures and complex cross-sector challenges are often framed as children’s individual deficits requiring expert psychological interventions.

Drawing on our participatory Practice Research project Collaboration about Children’s Well-being in Communities of Everyday Life, we examine the conflictual nature of research collaboration between our research team and practitioner co-researchers (pedagogues, teachers, educational psychologists and counsellors, speech-, physio- and occupational therapists) ) within this multilevel care crisis. These encounters seek to create dialogical spaces that critically reflect current constraints on cross-sector and cross-professional collaboration and point toward more sustainable alternatives. However, research collaborations themselves are shaped by structural limitations on participation and voice and remain exposed to demands for impact, accountability, and efficiency—pressures influencing both researchers’ and practitioners’ work.

By situating research collaboration as a potential site of political resistance, we discuss how methodological choices can enact solidarity and caring practices, opening transformative possibilities. This requires navigating conflictual conditions and embracing mutual vulnerability—conceptualizing care not only as an object of study but as a collective and political practice within research itself.