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Family on a thread – by Spencer McGladdery

In the week we celebrate Young Carers Action Day to raise awareness of young carers and the incredible contribution they make to their families and local communities, Barrow Sixth Form College student Spencer McGladdery has written a first-person piece about the challenges of being a young carer. Spencer studies CTECs in Media and Art alongside GCSEs in English and biology at the Rating Lane campus and is a carer for his parents. The former St Bernard’s School student aspires to a career in the media and says college is a ‘relaxing’ place for him to learn. Below, he gives a powerful account about the role of a young carer and explains how he balances study and life.

Do you want to know the most common question asked about young carers? The most common question asked is ‘What are the problems young carers have to face?’ I will tell you exactly what problems a young carer has to face on a regular basis.

As a young carer myself, I feel as though I must elaborate on this question with facts and statistics as well as a look into my life to give some form of conclusion.

A young carer is a person who is under the age of 18 and is helping a family member with a physical and or mental illness. A young carer can help with physical support – like lifting heavy things or helping a person get dressed or out of bed in the morning – to emotional support where the carer will be there as emotional encouragement to help the family member with the way they are feeling. So, if they were feeling depressed the carer would help with kind and loving words or physical affection, a young carer also has to take on tasks that adults would normally take on like cooking, shopping, cleaning and even collecting prescriptions. Myself, I feel as though I am an emotional and physical carer as I help my mother with lifting heavy baskets of washing and walking our five dogs, as well as the occasional dog we look after, I also help my mum when she’s feeling down, always ready to give her a hug and listen to her worries whenever necessary.

Why is all that important? Because the mental whiplash from the stress that being a young carer brings can affect the mental state of the carer as well as their school life and social life. Their education will drop or be at a lower standard compared to their peers, this could be due to the lack of self-care they should be spending on themselves outside of school, as they spend a large majority of their time helping the family member with their illnesses they could even in most cases not attend school just so they can help out at home. Their social skills and social life will be incredibly difficult too, making it hard for them to start up normal everyday conversations with other people and could also lead to some form of social anxiety or mental illness that will affect them in the long run or even in their present day.

If you were to Google ‘How many people in the UK are young carers?’ it would tell you that in 2011 there are about 166,000 but in actuality there would have been a plethora of more cases out there. They didn’t know exactly how many young carers were out there in the UK for many reasons, some of those reasons would be that the carer doesn’t want people to know that they’re a young carer.  This could be because the carer doesn’t want people to worry about them or it could be that the carer could get bullied for it, causing the carer to go through unnecessary stress and anxiety.  I too didn’t know I was a young carer until my mum registered me and my younger brother with ‘Young Carers’ to give me and my brother support and things to do outside our house, but I feel as though my parents shielding this from me and my other younger siblings for a long time played a huge part as well.

My mum’s name is Vicki and my dad’s name is Andrew, they both suffer from life threatening health issues. Andrew has high blood pressure and this can cause him to have painful headaches that last for weeks and potentially months if he isn’t healthy and on top of his medication. Andrew is a self-employed carpet fitter so the money he earns isn’t a lot and he has no time to spend for himself.  He is constantly working and, if he isn’t at work, he is doing something to help out around the house or buying food or taking the kids to school or picking up the kids from school or helping lift heavy units for family members and friends. He is a 49 year old man and is very independent but the only one he is dependent on is his wife and if he lost her he would probably give up.

Vicki has a rare type of heart disease you can only get from being pregnant, she got this after delivering my younger sister. She also has a leaky heart valve; all of this is on the left side of her heart and she also has Fibromyalgia too. The pain she goes through is unimaginable, it would cripple any man in an instant, she has to take medication multiple times a day so she can survive. She lacks physical strength and gets breathless very easily, if she ever did stimulate her heart too much it could lead to a potential heart attack, she can barely sleep at night because of the pain she’s in and the painkillers she takes are very strong. Despite all I just told you, if you were to meet her at first you wouldn’t be able to tell she’s in pain or really ill for that matter, even when all this is going on in her life she still pushes onward and does what’s best for the family. My mum does all the paperwork in the house because she’s the only one who knows what to do in that department and if we didn’t have her doing that work she does, then we would all not have a home. She is a very independent woman but the one person she depends on is her husband, she is dependent on him and if he was to pass on in any way she would fall right into a dark state of mind and give up as well.

Fortunately, my mum and dad are both doing ok for now with their conditions and we continue to live on this thread. I have asked Vicki and Andrew a few questions to help with this topic and the last things they said to me at the end of the interview was simple yet inspirational, the quotes were ‘Life is genuinely what you make it’ and ‘Be the master of your own destiny’. I know to some people reading those quotes at first glance may appear to be cliché but let me remind you that a hurt mother and father working hard to keep their family safe, fed and warm had said that, not just some random person on a street. People who understand and know the pain of the positions they and their kids are in.

That is just a little insight into my life as a young carer and the problems to me and my family it brings, so imagine what some nine-year-olds and six-year-olds have to go through. There are even carers as young as five years old working to help keep their family afloat. In the whole of the UK alone there are around 800,000 young carers and 27 per cent of them aged 11-15 miss school to stay and help and even 39 per cent of children in school didn’t even know of their caring role.

A big problem for young carers is that their mental health is overlooked. Before the pandemic, over one third of young carers reported having a mental health problem. During the pandemic half said they could not have a rest from caring which ultimately affects their mental state even more than before, as before they could go to school away from the family, or they could go out for a bit with friends or by themselves to unwind from the inevitable stress that awaits them at home. In every three young carers, one of them has a mental health issue like depressive symptoms, social anxiety, emotional stress and even in some cases clinical depression. Some 80 per cent of young carers feel like they don’t get to partake in the activities that people of their age do, this makes them feel like they have less and or feel like less as a person.

Taking on this caring role from a young age can have a long-term effect on these carers, this has an effect on their romantic life, social life and life skills over all, giving them an amazing skill called empathy. Empathy is the ability to feel other’s feelings compassionately and be able to empathise with those people. Now empathy sounds like a really good skill to have and it is, but empathy can also cause you to make mistakes and think about the other person in a more forgiving manner when they are treating you wrongly, affectively putting you in many toxic relationships with people who would just want to use your goodwill for their own malicious intent making you go through a horrible amount of stress that can lead to you spiralling into a paranoid state of mind, so when using your empathy make sure you’re using it on someone deserving.

Being a young carer means most of the time your family is poor or just getting by. My family is in an alright spot at the moment, we make enough money for us to be stable and have food, water, heating and the other common essentials needed in everyday life, that doesn’t mean we were always ok though, because of my mother’s heart failure we were sent right into debt, we were only just making it by till we eventually became financially stable. Some young carers have to deal with living in poor environments and having old or no electronic devices which is hard these days now that almost everything is becoming digital like online school work and online lessons, all this can really upset or frustrate a young carer.

Another problem with being a young carer is the frustration it brings as well as the loneliness that follows. Young carers can sometimes be frustrated with the situation they are in as they feel they have no control over anything that is happening in their life. The person they are caring for could be getting more and more sick, not able to hang out with friends or make any in the first place, their partner could be getting moody with them because they don’t have any time for them etc etc. All this frustration and lack of personal care can make the carer feel lonely, making them feel like no one around them understands the situation. ‘They can’t go to their friends for help because they don’t want to listen or they can’t help, they can’t go to the person they’re caring for because that will just add extra stress and worry onto the person and that would be bad and they can’t ask for help from a teacher because that would just cause problems.’  These are some of the things that the carer would think and believe to be true, they would assume the worst case scenario because a lot of their life has been the worst case scenario.

Above all, I believe the worst issue a young carer has to face is the effect this will have on the young carer when they become an adult. All that mental hell they had to endure and all that relentless stress they had to suffer can definitely affect them in the long run, causing things like clinical depression, social anxiety, feelings of isolation, anger problems, carer fatigue, lack of purpose after the person they cared for has passed on or being cared for by other people, low self-esteem, lack of emotional management, emotional numbness and much more. One in every 20 young carers miss school to help out at home, this means a good few people won’t have good education when they’re older, further harming the development of the carers and their ability to get themselves a job or to have any basic educational skill that could help them with day-to-day life.

‘What are the problems young carers have to face?’ That is a question I hope will eventually begin to fade with time, everything seems bad right now but eventually those poor children and teenagers like me will get their well-deserved happy ending, we just need to fight a little harder for ours but I’m hopeful that eventually things will end up alright in the end.

If you would like to check out this website that helped me with this article, please search up https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/what-we-do/our-work/supporting-young-carers/facts-about-young-carers

For more information about Young Carers Action Day on Wednesday March 16th, click here

#YoungCarersActionDay

 

Young Carers Action Day poster

 


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