This chapter discusses young people's everyday caring responsibilities within households affected by HIV/AIDS in both the global North and South. As discussed in Chapter 1, research in the UK and other high-income countries as well as in Sub-Saharan Africa has demonstrated that young carers’ caring responsibilities do differ from other children's household responsibilities in both the North and the South in terms of the extent and nature of children's care work (Becker, 2007). The research in Tanzania and the UK further develops understandings of children's care work gained from research with children caring for parents with a range of mental and physical illness or impairments conducted predominantly in the North. Our findings provide an in-depth insight into the specific dimensions of children's care work in families affected by HIV/AIDS. In this chapter, we highlight similarities and differences between children's experiences within two divergent socioeconomic and welfare contexts. Drawing on young people's narratives, diaries, drawings and photographs of their daily routines and caring responsibilities, we discuss the range of support that children provide for their parents/relatives and explore gendered and temporal aspects of children's care work.

Young people's everyday caring responsibilities

Becker (2007) has suggested that children's caring responsibilities can be located along a continuum of care, as discussed in Chapter 1. This ranges from most children who are engaged in ‘routine’ levels and types of caregiving, including household chores, regardless of the health status of their parent/relative, to children who are engaged in substantial, regular and significant caregiving and who provide considerable help with household chores. Research from the UK, Australia, the US and Sub-Saharan Africa suggests that it is the wider range of household and caring tasks, and particularly involvement in the personal care of their parent/relative, as well as the frequency and time spent on these tasks that distinguishes the work of young carers from the usual household chores that young people do in the North and South (Becker, 2007).

In a large survey of young carers in the UK, Dearden and Becker (2004) categorised children's caring tasks in terms of domestic tasks; general care; emotional support; intimate care; childcare; and other.