Young carers are children and young persons under 18 providing significant or substantial care, assistance or support to family members who have a disability, suffer from chronic illness, mental health problem or other condition connected with a need for care. They assume a level of responsibility that would usually be associated with an adult. Young carers 18-24 years old are referred to as young adult carers. Although there are no data available for all countries involved in the partnership, we know that the phenomenon is wide-spread. For example, according to statistics 6,2% of German teenagers provide care for a ill family member, 7% of Italians 15-24 years older are young carers. In Scotland, 4.33% of the total number of young people aged between 16 and 24 identified themselves as carers. On the other hand, when surveying in schools among students living with parents with some kind of chronic illness or disabilities, figures in Italy reached almost 20% of students. Young carers undertake a wide range of caring roles and responsibilities, including emotional support, personal care, housework and household budgeting. While research has found that caring can result in positive impacts, there is a relatively strong body of evidence on the adverse impact of caring on health outcomes, social activity, educational engagement and employment opportunities for young carers (e.g. Aldridge, 2008; Becker, 2007). As such, children who live with and care for parents or other family members who are ill or disabled may require support in their capacity as children and/or as young carers. Young carers are still very much invisible. On one hand, significant proportion of young carers have not disclosed their caring responsibilities to their school, they are no more likely to be in contact with social services than are their peers, and only a minority have had an assessment of their needs or been informed about sources of help (Barnardo’s, 2006; Dearden and Becker, 2004; The Children’s Society, 2013). On the other hand, many families do not recognise their children as ‘carers’ (Smyth et al., 2011), some children do not recognise or identify with the role, and there can be a degree of reluctance, even anxiety, among families in disclosing caring responsibilities. Building on this information, the TOGETHER project aims to support social inclusion and engagement of young carers in DE-OS-IT-GR and UK by helping young carers and professionals to adopt a whole family approach, where: members of the household (including the care-recipient) are encouraged to communicate openly about the illness and caring; the condition of the care-recipients are explained clearly to the younger members of the family; helping relationship building within the family; professionals are encouraged to take a whole-family approach when working with care-recipients. The TOGETHER project intends to reach this aims by developing, testing and dissemination three intellectual outputs: (1) awareness rising material to inform children and adults about how important is to cooperate and be supportive with each other when there is a caring responsibility in the family - IO1 (2) a training workshop curriculum for young carers and their families, to support the creation of an open dialogue about the illness / condition of the care recipient, the impact on the young persons and how the whole family can respond to this - IO2 (3) an e-learning programme for professionals about how to promote a whole family approach for young carers and how to replicate the workshop elaborated in IO3. Our ultimate goal is to have an impact on families where there are caring responsibilities and where there is a young member, in order to prevent / reduce negative impacts on him/her, as well as improving his/her well-being, social inclusion and community engagement All partners involved in the proposal are organizations with solid backgrounds of work with and for young informal carers. All of the partners have also been working with or researching young carers and the issues that affect them. The coordinator is DWBS from Germany, while partners are ANS (Italy), EUROCARERS (BE), Carers Trust (UK) and EDRA (GR).
Building on this information, the TOGETHER project planned to develop tools and a workshop manual to support social inclusion and engagement of young carers in DE-IT-GR and UK by helping young carers and professionals to adopt a whole family approach where: members of the household (including the care-recipient) are encouraged to communicate openly about the illness and caring; the condition of the care-recipients are explained clearly to the younger members of the family; helping relationship building within the family. Our ultimate goal was to have an impact on families where there are caring responsibilities and where there is a young member, in order to prevent / reduce negative impacts on him/her, as well as improving his/her well-being, social inclusion and community engagement.
Young carers are children under 18 providing significant or substantial care, assistance or support to family members who have a disability, suffer from chronic illness, mental health problem or other condition connected with a need for care. They assume a level of responsibility that would usually be associated with an adult. They undertake a wide range of caring roles and responsibilities. While research has found that caring can result in positive impacts, the adverse impact of caring on health outcomes, social activity, educational engagement and employment opportunities for young carers. Young carers are still very much invisible. On one hand, significant proportion of young carers have not disclosed their caring responsibilities. On the other hand, many families do not recognize their children as ‘carers’ and there can be a degree of reluctance, even anxiety, among families in disclosing caring responsibilities. Many young people then take on caring responsibilities that might be overwhelming but they feel trapped in their role as there is a lack of communication within the family.