‘The sooner you can change their life course the better’: the time-framing of risks in relationship to being a young carer

Abstract

In this article, we compare accounts given by young carers and specialist support workers about the riskiness of becoming a carer relatively early in life. We argue that since the mid-1990s, the policy response has problematised the comparatively early adoption of a caring role as a risk factor for future personal development. This temporal issue has become societally organised around concern about NEETs (young adults not in education, employment or training). Such a concern is predicated on cultural assumptions, now being undermined in response to economic crisis, about the existence of a critical age for transition to adulthood, successful navigation of which requires a time-limited period of personal freedom. Our findings suggest that, whereas support workers mostly see young caring in terms of risks to future prospects, young carers themselves identify not only current stresses, but also personal gains, from their experiences. Instead of categorising the timing of their caring as a source of risk, young carer respondents questioned service shortcomings which they felt made it harder for them to cope in the present, particularly inadequate social service support for relatives with disabilities and insensitivities in the education system. They did not see service providers as helping them to manage their futures. We locate this tension in risk social science debates about individualisation, transition to adulthood in late-modern society and risk management for those deemed vulnerable.

Keywords:

• risk
• risk management
• risk perception
• young carers
• risk time-framing
• qualitative research

Notes

^1. The origins of the relatively new role of ‘young carers worker’ will be outlined below.

^2. However, young women have faced more restrictive cultural prescriptions than young men, a difference which has been somewhat mitigated in recent years through the strengthening movement towards sexual equality (Spence 2006).

^3. Arnold Bennett’s play, The History Boys (2004) brilliantly evokes this paradox of young adulthood in contemporary culture since the only way in which the straight-laced headmaster of a secondary school can achieve his ambition to get as many boys as possible into a prestigious university is to rely on the eccentric, unreliable teacher who is able to develop his students’ creative talents.

^4. Little international comparative research into young caring has been undertaken. Becker (2007) noted that needs assessment surveys had been undertaken and followed up with the establishment of dedicated services for young carers over roughly the same time period, from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s, in Australia and the United Kingdom. According to Becker, the first US survey was not published until 2005, and little specific support for young carers had been organised.

^5. However, cultural relativity should not be overdone since there may well be inherent limitations as to what children are capable of at various ages. Little is known about the plasticity of human development, and, in particular, the level of role demands, e.g. being exposed to war, which will permanently damage children through the ‘loss’ of childhood. Moreover, children everywhere are now exposed to Western, particularly American, models of childhood through the mass media.