A book can help with
For the child quietly carrying more than their share at home.
In a great many households a child helps out far beyond the ordinary: keeping an eye on a parent who is unwell, translating, doing more of the practical running of the house than their friends can imagine, or looking after a brother or sister with additional needs. Often nobody has named it, and the child assumes every family is like this.
Books matter here because these children rarely see themselves in a story. Reading about someone in the same position tells them they are not alone and, importantly, that what they do is real and worth noticing. It also gives them permission to mind sometimes, which is the hardest permission of all to give yourself.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Doing more than your share
Older children feel the weight of it, and often the guilt of resenting it.
Tyler is late for school again because his mum is unwell and his little brother needs help getting ready. Then a spaceship crashes into the school gym, and the children stuck in detention turn out to all be carers. It is the rare book that lets a young carer be the hero of an adventure rather than a case study.
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Ellie has cerebral palsy and a serious talent for baking, and when her family moves to a small Oklahoma town to help look after her grandpa, whose memory is going, she starts over as the new girl in the wheelchair. The caring falls on the whole family, and the book is honest about how tiring and tender that is without ever making it grim. Ellie herself is funny and sharp and entirely her own person, which is rather the point. Lovely for a child who’s quietly helping to hold things together at home.
or on Bookshop.org
Carrying a great deal
An older child can take an honest novel about a household where the roles have quietly reversed.
Dolphin and her sister love their vivid, tattooed mother and increasingly look after her as her mental health deteriorates. Wilson doesn’t soften it, and children in similar homes have long found it the book that finally described their life. It’s a heavy read, so do look through it first.
or on Bookshop.org
Julia spends a summer in a Shetland lighthouse while her mother, a marine biologist, hunts for a Greenland shark and slides further into a bipolar episode. Julia ends up carrying far more of it than a ten-year-old should, and covering for her mother the way children in that position do. Beautifully written and properly sad in the middle, so it helps to know what is coming.
or on Bookshop.org
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Something to do together
A page for noticing everything a child actually does in a week, and one thing that’s just for them. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Organisations that work with young carers are consistent about two things: these children are frequently unidentified, and support exists in most countries once someone knows about them. A child in this position also does better when the caring is recognised out loud rather than assumed.
So tell their school what they’re managing at home, look for local young carers support, and make sure they have something in the week that is entirely theirs. And let them say that it’s hard sometimes without feeling disloyal, because it is hard, and saying so changes nothing about how much they love their family.
These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.