Caregiving youth in the US: Advancing transdisciplinary research to support the education and development of this “hidden” population

In the US more than 5.4 million children and adolescents are providing care for family members who are aging, have chronic illness, disability, or other health conditions (Armstrong-Carter et al., 2021, Child Development Social Policy Reports). These “caregiving youth” are also students who are learning and developing amidst a complex myriad of family processes, educational systems, and state and federal social policies.

In this talk, I will describe the increasing prevalence, challenges, and uneven successes of measurement in research focusing on caregiving youth, and briefly summarize how caregiving affects academic, social, and emotional well-being. I will describe some promising approaches stemming from interdisciplinary collaborations—spanning developmental science, medicine, geography, sociology, education, and social policy. To exemplify this transdisciplinary and integrative research, I will focus on a set of collaborations that have led to research practice partnerships with state school systems, through which we are identifying caregiving youth in schools for the first time in the US. This work in Florida and Rhode Island suggests that as many as 20% of middle and high school students provide at least some care to the family every week. Drawing on this evidence, we will discuss how children’s family caregiving experiences can promote positive development, but can also contribute to developmental risk—particularly when caregiving conflicts with other developmentally-appropriate learning or social activities. We will discuss the complexities of youths’ caregiving challenges and invite a broad interdisciplinary discussion as to how researchers can identify opportunities to help young people—such as caregiving youth—whose challenges are often “hidden” from educational systems and social programs and understudied in research.

Emma Armstrong-Carter Bio:

Emma Armstrong-Carter is a Ph.D candidate in the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She is also a fellow in the Stanford Data Science Initiative and the Institute of Education Sciences Center for Education Policy Analysis. Her research program lies at the intersection of child development, data science, and education policy. She researches how children’s experiences of helping others (e.g., family and peers) can promote their own learning and wellbeing. Further, she investigates how children’s experiences helping others can both exacerbate and mitigate the challenges that many children experience in homes with family disability, family illness, or difficult relationships. This transdisciplinary, integrative research addresses multiple contexts of development including family, school, neighborhood, and geographic influences. It also informs the design of school- and government-based policies that support children’s educational success.