https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/magazine/child-family-caregivers-aacy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
This is so upsetting. The stress of caregiving on adults is often too much to bear. I feel like there is no way a teenager can do it is unfathomable to me.
The article mentions teens who have to do surgical wound care, bathing, help a mother with brain tumors who has fallen unconscious, accompany them to medical appointments and take notes, and deal with all their own needs, meals, reduced SNAP benefits, missing school.
One 13-year-old living with a single mother with advanced diabetes and high blood pressure has to bathe her mother, disinfect and wrap her partly amputated feet, check her blood pressure twice a day and decide on adjusting the level of meds depending on her blood pressure.
she said she hates missing school but keeping her mother alive is more important. My heart is breaking for these kids. One also works a part-time job to help pay rent.
Here are some excerpts:
“Financial incentives are shortening hospital stays, and services that used to be provided on the wards are left to those at home. “People are being discharged without the resources they need to be able to care for their loved ones,” says Michelle Bolden, a nurse who founded the nonprofit Call for Caring. “We send them home to manage Foley catheters or wounds or g-tubes — all types of things. And there’s minimal amount of training that’s done.”
“Last year, the home care waiting list for Medicaid beneficiaries alone topped 600,000. Nearly one-third of all home care aides, who typically make less than $17 an hour, are immigrants, and the Labor Department projects about 766,000 openings every year. Inevitably the work falls to whoever else lives in the household — even if they’re children.”
“Another factor contributes to keeping these children under the radar: Identifying those who care for family members can also mean having to reckon with child labor laws. “If we are to acknowledge these children as caregivers, then we’re also maybe by default acknowledging that children are working,” Kavanaugh says. “And we don’t want that.”
One grandmother who is raising her grandson is afraid to go to the doctor for fear she will be told to go to the hospital for treatment and then he will be left alone and put into foster care. It’s so heart breaking.
How do they come up with the estimate of 4 million?
What does the author pose as a solution?
“Family caregivers are not controversial,” says Elizabeth Olson, a leading researcher on young caregivers and a geography professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But once you talk about kids being involved, all of a sudden it’s a controversy.”
Such controversy exists, in part, because of the complexity of child protection laws in the United States. Currently, 42 states consider a parent’s disability as a reason to terminate parental rights. Lawmakers, says Kavanaugh, of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “don’t know how to wrap their minds around how to support a kid that’s not part of the foster care system.”
I also think the article kind of pussyfooted around the problem of very sick adults who can’t really perform their function as parents anymore still insisting that their children live with them and be their caregivers. I’m putting this very bluntly, but that seemed to be what it was boiling down to along with poverty and family dysfunction. At least one family in the piece are all extremely obese — the children look almost as unhealthy as the parents. I don’t know how one would go about fixing these situations other than removing the kids from the homes, but then where do they go? There definitely needs to be ways to give resources to these kids, but without then legitimizing them becoming enslaved caregivers for years and years.