As soon as 12-year-old Aleisha Thompson wakes up, she gets her mom’s medication ready.
Then she gets ready for school. She makes sure her mom eats before walking to the school bus stop. In between classes, she texts her mom around midday to remind her to take her medicine and eat.
It’s important “she eats,” Thompson said. “She has to eat.”
Thompson’s 49-year-old mom Shelia Boatley is diabetic and disabled. Boatley has been disabled since 2000, with numerous health problems, including nerve and bone issues, poor vision due to her diabetes, and “severely elevated” white blood cell counts that doctors are still trying to figure out. Boatley’s deteriorating health over the past couple of decades prevents her from taking care of her children the way moms usually do.
Instead, roles are reversed in her household and quietly, in millions more across America, putting a financial and emotional strain on families and young children, health care experts say.
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“Caregiving youth are not on people’s radar,” even though there are growing numbers of them, said Connie Siskowski, founder of the nonprofit American Association of Caregiving Youth (AACY), which advocates for and supports young caregivers.
How many youth caregivers are there?
An estimated 5.4 million children under the age of 18 provided care to parents, grandparents or siblings with chronic medical conditions or functional decline in 2019, up from
