In this concluding chapter, we give a brief overview of the key themes in the book, emphasizing the importance of care in the relational pedagogy we have been discussing. We argue that practitioners should take children seriously by seeking their perspectives and identifying what matters for them while building common knowledge with them and working relationally to help take forward their social situations of development. But our primary purpose here is to look forward and consider the implications of the subtle skilled work we are advocating for practitioners. Care alone is insufficient. Practitioners who work with children and families need knowledge of child and adolescent development; subject matter knowledge in schools, and for other caring professionals their core professional knowledge, such as legal responsibilities for social workers; and knowledge of pedagogy. The professional interactions with children, families and other practitioners in a relational pedagogy are reciprocal, involving ongoing mutual engagement, where power differences are played down, and professional agency is crucial. Much therefore depends on how institutional leaders mediate government policies: Creating and supporting agentic responsive practitioners is a leadership responsibility. Questions of values therefore crucially underpin the ideas shared in this book.

The prologue sets the stage for the book that follows. It describes where the book will go and how it will get there. It defines “enablers as followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in, behaviors that are destructive.” The prologue explores the all-important concept of followership, provides a brief history of relations between leaders and followers, and introduces the concept of the “leadership system,” that is, the equal importance of 1) leaders; 2) followers; 3) contexts. The concluding section of the prologue introduces distinctions among President Donald Trump’s enablers by dividing them into Trump’s Tribe and Trump’s Team. It similarly introduces the context of the book, which is the coronavirus crisis in the United States, especially during the first six months, January through June 2020.