‘When a kid becomes the caregiver’
August 25th, 2007Here’s a feature on a college student who is the primary caregiver for her mother — one of as many as 1.4 million children in the United States who are caring for a chronically ill or disabled relative. We get lots of detail on the personal lives and emotional landscapes of these people, but not much on the holes in the social safety net that have contributed to their situation.
The reader wonders: has the system created incentives for children to be pressed into roles as full-time caregivers? Where are the programs that this family might have accessed? What alternatives might have been considered before this teenager decided to bring her bedridden mother along with her to college?
There’s a lot of heat here, but not enough light.
From the Washington Post.
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