Current Research
Caregiving youth — children and adolescents who provide ongoing care for aging, ill, or disabled family members — are a rapidly increasing population in the US.
Unlike England, Canada, and Australia, the US does not yet formally acknowledge or support caregiving youth within educational systems or social services.
There is a need to better understand caregiving youths’ developmental trajectories, and associated risks and opportunities. Such information will inform effective approaches and policies to support the thriving of caregiving youth and reduce disparities.
To date, I have worked in partnership with Departments of Education in Rhode Island, Florida, and Colorado. I also do research in partnership with Massachusetts school districts. My research partners and I identified caregiving youth in schools for the first time in the US starting in 2019. Surveying 50,000+ students in middle and high schools, we provided large scale evidence that 18%-29% of youth ages 11-18 were involved in caregiving for family. Further, caregiving students were disproportionately from historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups, and faced heightened risk for emotional and academic challenges.
Based on our research, Rhode Island enacted history-making legislation: it will be the first state in US history to provide designated programs supporting caregiving youth. This legislative change demonstrates how efficiently this partnership-based work can be translated into school-based programs to support caregiving children. It highlights a clear need — and extraordinary opportunity — to understand caregiving children’s experiences in different US contexts and how to support their thriving locally.
I now partner with departments of education and school districts across the country to identify and evaluate supports for caregiving children. Most schools do not yet collect information about children’s caregiving responsibilities or have programs to support them. I build collaborative research-practice-partnerships with the departments of education, districts and schools to collect data about caregiving students (ages 5-18) wherever we can for the first time.
Specifically, we (1) identify the number of caregiving youth in elementary, middle and high schools; (2) examine longitudinal disparities in mental health (e.g., anxiety and depression) and education (e.g., grades and graduation rates), while also exploring positive impacts (e.g., gained sense of purpose, close reciprocal relationships) (3) collect information about caregiving youths’ specific experiences and needs to inform the design of interventions that we then evaluate at scale via implementation science.
For this research, my priority is interdisciplinary collaborations and partnerships with local communities. Our ongoing research partnership is starting to bring caregiving youth to national recognition, as also evidenced by the media coverage and a burgeoning national effort by the US Government Accountability Office. If you are a potential research partner, please also visit my lab website.