CARE: Why We Are Moved to Respond to Others’ Needs

Humans are unusually dependent on care.

From before birth, we rely on others for regulation, warmth and sensory connection. After birth, that dependence becomes even more visible through feeding, protection, reassurance and care.

This dependence is not unique to humans. Across mammals, offspring survival depends on adults being motivated to notice, approach and respond to their needs.

And pay particular attention to the word adult here, not parent. We’ll come back to that later.

Jaak Panksepp described CARE as one of the brain’s primary emotional systems. For him, CARE was not simply the behaviour of feeding, comforting or protecting someone. It was part of the underlying motivation that makes another individual’s need significant enough to act upon.

We explore Panksepp’s wider model, including the seven primary emotional systems and the debates around them, in Affective Neuroscience: The Emotional Systems That Move Us.

A Principle – A Note on Language

Panksepp capitalised the names of his proposed primary emotional systems, including CARE, FEAR, SEEKING, PLAY, RAGE and PANIC/GRIEF, to distinguish the underlying biological systems from the everyday words we use for feelings and behaviours.

So CARE refers to the proposed primary emotional system, while care refers to the lived experience or behaviour of caring.

Modern neuroscience supports the broader idea that caregiving has deep biological foundations, and that these systems remain important across the lifespan. That said, we are particularly interested here in the importance of CARE for the young people in our charge!

Research across mammals has identified neural circuitry that plays an important role in parental and caregiving behaviour. These systems are flexible rather than automatic and are influenced by hormones, previous lived experience, sensory information and social context.

So CARE helps answer a deceptively simple question:

Why should another’s need matter to me?

And the answer is simple: because, historically and across mammalian evolution, being responsive to another’s need could be the difference between offspring surviving and not surviving.

And that raises another question.

Why does receiving care matter so much?

For the recipient, care is not simply something pleasant added to development. It is part of the environment in which development happens.

Repeated experiences of being fed, comforted, protected, held, noticed and responded to provide information about both the social and physical world.

Is someone likely to respond when I signal?

Is this environment predictable?

What happens when I am distressed?

Can I rely on another person when I cannot regulate what is happening on my own?

Over time, experiences like these contribute to the developing child’s expectations about relationship and environment.

There is increasing evidence that profound differences in early caregiving environments can become biologically embedded. Studies of severe early deprivation have found measurable differences in stress regulation, brain development and other biological processes, while improvements in caregiving environments have been associated with better developmental outcomes over time.

This does not mean that care determines a child’s biology or future. Development is far more complex than that.

But it does reinforce an important point:

Care is not only psychologically significant. Our experiences of care can change our biology.

Why adult, not parent?

Human children have never depended on one person alone.

Across our evolutionary history, care has often been shared between mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings, relatives and other members of the wider group. Researchers use the term alloparenting to describe care provided by someone other than a child’s parent, and shared caregiving appears to have been an important feature of human development and evolution.  Reviews of human allomaternal care describe fathers and other caregivers as part of a long evolutionary history of cooperative care.

That matters because CARE is not restricted to biological parenthood.

Panksepp described CARE as a primary emotional system with deep mammalian roots. Although much of the early research on caregiving focused on maternal behaviour, later work has shown that nurturing and protective behaviour is also expressed by fathers and other caregivers. Across mammals, paternal care is highly variable and strongly shaped by experience, social context and the amount of direct caregiving an individual undertakes.

And importantly, caregiving is not the preserve of one gender.

Human neuroscience gives us a particularly interesting example. Research comparing primary-caregiving mothers, secondary-caregiving fathers and primary-caregiving fathers raising infants without maternal involvement found a broadly shared parental caregiving network. Primary-caregiving fathers showed patterns of brain activity associated with both maternal and paternal caregiving, and greater involvement in direct childcare was linked with stronger connectivity within this network.

Of course, that does not mean mothers and fathers are biologically identical. But the wider capacity to notice, nurture, protect and respond to a child is not confined to one gender. Reviews of paternal caregiving suggest that neural and hormonal systems involved in care are plastic and are shaped by involvement and caregiving experience.

So a child can experience responsive, nurturing care from two mothers, two fathers, a mother and a father, or other combinations of committed caregivers. The evidence gives us much more reason to focus on the quality, consistency and responsiveness of care than to be distracted by the gender of the caregiver.

For humans, that broader capacity for care may have been especially important. Our children remain dependent for an unusually long time, and raising them has historically required more care than one adult could reliably provide alone.

So the adults around a child matter.

Parents and carers are obviously central, but they are not the only people capable of noticing a child’s signals, responding to distress, offering reassurance or providing a sense of safety and predictability.

Teachers, teaching assistants and other trusted adults are part of that wider caregiving environment too.

This does not mean that a teacher replaces a parent, or that every adult-child relationship should be understood as an attachment relationship.

It means something simpler:

Children are biologically prepared to receive care from more than one adult.

And in education, that gives relationship particular significance. A consistent Emotionally Available Adult who notices, responds and remains available can become part of the environment through which a young person experiences care.

A Principle

In loco parentis

Teachers and other school staff have long been understood as acting in loco parentis – literally, “in the place of a parent” – while children are in their care.

In modern education, this is principally about duty of care, not about teachers becoming substitute parents. But it is a useful reminder that the responsibility of adults in school has never been limited to delivering curriculum content alone.

Why does the quality of care matter?

Care is not about whether an adult is present.

What matters is also how that adult notices, interprets and responds.

A child’s signals are not always clear. A cry might for example,  mean pain, tiredness, fear, frustration or simply a need for closeness. Withdrawal may reflect a wish for space, or a sign that the child has stopped expecting anyone to respond.

Responsive care depends on the adult being able to notice those signals, make a reasonable judgement about what they might mean, and respond in a way that is timely, proportionate and predictable.

That does not mean getting it right every time, though – No relationship works like that.

What matters is enough consistency for the child to begin to predict that, when something goes wrong, someone is likely to notice and help. When adults misread a signal, as we all do, the opportunity to reconnect and repair matters too!

Research on caregiver sensitivity has repeatedly linked responsive, contingent caregiving with more secure patterns of attachment and better social and emotional development. Repeated studies show how quickly infants react when a normally responsive adult suddenly becomes emotionally unavailable, and how strongly they work to restore connection.

So the quality of care helps shape another set of questions for the developing child:

Will you notice me?

Will you respond when I need you?

Is your response what I predict?

And if we get it wrong, can we find our way back?

Over time, repeated experiences like these help build expectations about relationship and environment.

And that matters in education too.

A young person does not need every adult to respond perfectly. But adults who are predictable, attentive and willing to repair after moments of mismatch can help create the conditions in which trust, regulation and engagement are more likely to grow.

A Research Example

The Still-Face Paradigm

In the 1970s, developmental psychologist Edward Tronick and colleagues developed what became known as the Still-Face Paradigm.

In the experiment, a caregiver first interacts normally with an infant, then suddenly becomes expressionless and unresponsive for a short period. Infants typically try hard to re-engage the adult – smiling, vocalising, reaching or changing their behaviour – and often become visibly distressed when those attempts fail.

When the caregiver becomes responsive again, the interaction can recover.

The experiment has been replicated many times and has become an important way of studying how sensitive infants are to responsive social interaction, and what happens when that expected response is briefly withdrawn.

It is a powerful reminder that, from very early in life, care is not simply about an adult being physically present.

Being noticed and responded to matters.

What does CARE look like in education?

CARE in education is not about turning teachers into therapists, or expecting every adult to become a substitute parent.

It is about recognising that the way adults notice, interpret and respond to young people becomes part of their experience of school.

For some children, that might mean an adult noticing when something is different before behaviour escalates.

For others, it might mean a predictable welcome, someone remembering what matters to them, an adult staying calm when they cannot, or somebody being willing to reconnect after a difficult moment.

None of these things are dramatic.

But repeated over time, they can become part of what a young person learns to expect from relationship and environment.

CARE therefore asks us to look beyond the behaviour we can see and remain curious about the need underneath it.

Not every behaviour is a request for care.

Not every difficulty can be resolved through relationship.

But when a child is struggling, one of the most useful questions an adult can ask is:

“What might this young person need from me right now?”

Sometimes the answer will be reassurance.

Sometimes space.

Sometimes a clear boundary.

Sometimes practical help.

Sometimes simply being noticed.

CARE does not tell us to respond in the same way every time.

It reminds us that how we respond matters.

Acknowledging the Evidence

Motional Foundations brings together evidence from multiple disciplines to explore how Emotional Wellbeing develops and how that understanding can inform practice.

This Foundation draws particularly on Jaak Panksepp’s work on the CARE system, alongside research from developmental neuroscience, attachment, caregiving and human social development.

The evidence base includes both animal and human research. Cross-species studies help us understand the biological foundations of caregiving, while human research helps us understand how care, responsiveness, relationship and environment shape development over time.

These fields are still developing, and no single theory completely explains how care influences Emotional Wellbeing. Motional uses this evidence as a framework for understanding patterns of strength and need, rather than as a fixed or complete account.