So far, we have partnered with schools in Florida, Rhode Island, Colorado and Massachusetts to identify and begin to support caregiving students. The goal is for all school systems in the US to eventually be able to track disparities and support caregiving students. Here are our ongoing projects and partnership stories so far:
Florida was the first state to begin to identify caregiving students in middle and high schools in 2019, in work led also by Elizabeth Olson and Connie Siskowski. We found that 18% of children were caregiving, and they faced risk for emotional, social and academic challenges. We published two peer reviewed papers in top journals from this data in the Social Policy Reports and Journal of Family Psychology.
Since 2021, we have partnered with the Rhode Island Department of Education, and published evidence that 29% of children are caregiving for siblings, parents and grandparents in AERA Open. In 2022, Rhode Island became the first state to implement policies to support caregiving youth. This work is funded by a National Institutes of Health K12 grant.
Colorado began counting caregiving youth in the Colorado Healthy Kids Survey in 2024. The data will be available this summer.
We are partnering now with Malden Public Schools in Massachusetts to count caregiving children and identify disparities with the aim of supporting them beginning in Fall 2024. This project is supported by a grant from the Society for Research in Child Development.