Young Adult Carers in the UK - The Princess Royal Trust for Carers

Chapter 4 - Managing caring tasks and responsibilities
Young carers aged 16-17 years
�e changing nature of caring
Many young carers in our sample have cared throughout their childhood, often starting
to care at an early age: “Caring is the only thing I know and that’s what I’ve been brought
up with”. Our focus group participants reported that they often found their care work
both physically demanding (leading in some cases to injuries), and emotionally draining:
“It sometimes gets difficult for me because like when I’m out with me mum doing heavy
lifting and stuff like that, there’s been a lot of times when I’ve gone in college and I’ve just
been, I’m in so much pain like I’ve hurt me back”.
“Emotionally I find it really hard, because like when like mum’s in and out of hospital and
it’s like really hard to see her like in that situation while she’s feeling down and sometimes
when she’s got tubes and things on her it’s really hard, and then you have to go home and
look after your sister and that and then you’ve got to try and push that aside, because my
sister has learning difficulties you’ve got to try and not take it out on her, and she also gets
upset when my mum’s in and out of hospital, so it’s really hard emotionally”.
In cases where caring has become ‘institutionalised’ within the family, young carers often
place their own needs second to those of the person they provide care for: “Your family
comes first and then school or college, well with my life anyway, and then you’re right
at the bottom, you’re kind of the last thing you have to think about”. Large scale research
(Dearden and Becker, 2004) found that as young carers get older they often take on more
caring roles and responsibilities which are more personal/intimate care-related as well as
responsibilities for household management. Many of the project workers we surveyed
confirmed that there was “Explicit or implicit pressure [on 16-17 year old carers] to devote
as much time and energy as possible to helping at home”. It is not surprising, therefore,
that some young carers in our focus groups also acknowledged that their caring roles
had increased around the age of 16, partly because their parent(s) had greater
expectations of them and what they could and should do in the home:
“she relies on me to do more things to help her with everything… Since I turned 16,
my mum’s relied on me so much since I was like seven… she just expects me to be able
to do things because I’m in college and I have like, I finish like 20 to 1, and, or I have
like free periods in the middle and she expects me to come home and do stuff”.
“now I’ve got a lot more stuff for me, with college and everything, so I actually have less
time, and my mum’s expecting me to do more because I’m older, but I don’t have as
much time as I did when I was younger”.
As young carers get older, and as the person they support gets older, some young carers
have to undertake more ‘gendered caring roles’ which in the past might have been
conducted by parents, other adults or older siblings:
“I have an older brother but things like my mum has to do with my little sister because she’s
11 now, it’s kind of like there’s things basically that boys cannot do, because she’s got to
that kind of age it’s things like nappy changing or getting dressed, or getting showers and
things, things he can’t kind of do. And my step-dad has got a kind of fear about doing that
too because of her age. So there’s only me and my mum to do everything like that for her.
We can’t really leave it for any of the boys to do”.
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