Kinder und Jugendliche als pflegende Angehörige: Wer sie sind und was sie leisten. Eine internationale Literaturstudie (1990–2006)

Abstract

With a growing body of research on the situation of adult family caregivers in Germany, hardly anything is known about the situation of children who are involved into the care of their relatives. This literature study is part of a research project that intends to close this gap. Primarily, English literature of the last 15 years was analysed to gain insight into specific characteristics of young carers and their families. There is no standard definition of young carers. The prevalence of young carers has been underestimated for a long time; for Great Britain it is 1.5% of all children under the age of 18. Children provide caregiving tasks at any age, and the amount of their help grows with their age. The majority of young carers live in single-parent families, and the single parents are mostly mothers. More than half of the family members in need of care suffer from chronic illnesses that affect the body. There is a wide range of caregiving tasks described in the literature; young carers do the same as adult informal carers. However no uniform categorical system could be found, which makes comparisons between studies almost impossible. This might be due to a lack of a theoretical framework in most of the studies. Since it can be assumed, that children in Germany may become young carers as well, their situation needs to be studied under the specific circumstances of the German health care system.

Young carers: growing up with chronic illness in the family - a systematic review 2007-2017

“…Children in single households are still more likely to be involved in caregiving than children whose parents live together [12][13][14]. Study findings also confirm that care is provided for chronically ill mothers in the majority of cases [5,15]; the results on this aspect vary between 67 and 75% [12,13,[16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…Study findings also confirm that care is provided for chronically ill mothers in the majority of cases [5,15]; the results on this aspect vary between 67 and 75% [12,13,[16][17][18][19][20]. Apart from the mothers, it is often the grandmother who receives care from young carers, followed by chronically ill siblings.…”

“…The results presented by Nagl-Cupal et al [5] also show the enormous amount of time that young carers spend on supporting their families; they identified great differences between non-caregiving and caregiving children in [17,23]. The amount of these tasks depends on the care and support needed, and varies according to the course of the disease and the stress involved [13,15,19,24]. According to the Austrian school survey [5], 15% of the children and young carers are very often completely on their own with their caregiving duties.…”

“…Two of the included studies developed a categorical system from their available data [13,19]. In her Grounded Theory study, Metzing [13] focused on the recipients of help and care to organize the inductively derived categorical system (Fig. 2).…”

“…This includes the emotional and practical support for other members of the family [5,14,15,19,21,[23][24][25][26][27][28]. Two of the included studies developed a categorical system from their available data [13,19]. In her Grounded Theory study, Metzing [13] focused on the recipients of help and care to organize the inductively derived categorical system (Fig.…”