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Aaliyah Taylor, a 16-year-old high school sophomore, is used to having more responsibilities than a typical teenager. She helped her dad feed and tend to her grandmother until she died in 2023, tasks that frequently stressed her out as she was trying to manage her own health issues, like her scoliosis.
“I felt like every 5 seconds I was called for something, even though I just sat back down,” she said.
Mariyah Carson, Taylor’s best friend and a 15-year-old freshman, managed similar family duties as her uncle struggled with diabetes-related immobility and blindness until his death a few years ago. She remembers planning with her siblings how they would approach his care.
“We’d take turns. Like, if you’re doing homework, it’s my turn, and I go down there and watch him,” Carson said. She and Taylor said they continue to help out with other loved ones.
On a recent afternoon inside a Charles Drew High School auditorium, the two sat next to each other at a table topped with plastic bags, fragrant oils, and sugar pouches. The girls quipped and giggled over the instrumental jazz background music while they made body scrub bags, kits intended to help them relax at home.
Carson and Taylor are students at the school in Riverdale, just south of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The body scrub station was the opening activity for this school year’s final session of the Young, Gifted and Caregiving program, a new Atlanta-area initiative to support high-schoolers responsible for taking care of adults or children.
While most of the over 50 million unpaid family caregivers in the United States are adults, experts estimate that there are millions of adolescent Americans who provide this type of work every year. Research on the experience of teenage caregiving is limited, but studies suggest that young caregivers struggle to care for themselves and are at higher risk of anxiety and depression, chronic diseases, and dropping out of school.
These risks are what Young, Gifted and Caregiving aims to address. Once a week throughout February and March, Michelle Bolden, a registered nurse and the founder of the Atlanta caregiver support nonprofit Call for Caring, traveled to Charles Drew to lead lessons for 10 students.
She and an array of guest speakers — like attorneys, nurse practitioners, and mental health specialists — have tried to teach the students how to manage caregiving responsibilities while maintaining their own well-being and ambitions.
It’s the first time Bolden, who recently finished a Chamberlain University doctoral nursing program, has hosted in-person classes for high-school caregivers.
“We couldn’t create that community without them being in-person,” Bolden said.
Erin Kent, a caregiver research associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, said that while there’s strong evidence that support programs can help adult caregivers, there are few, if any, analyses that have examined the best ways to aid high-schoolers with these responsibilities.
But she said evaluating new programs, like the Charles Drew program, is how researchers like herself can determine what could help young people in that position. And school-based initiatives could be more effective at finding teenage caregivers than programs in other settings.
“School is probably going to be the place that reaches more youths,” she said.
School supports teens with caregiving duties at home
Tangela Benjamin had only been Charles Drew’s principal for a few months when she was called to address a student meltdown in October 2023. The sleep-deprived girl complained about how the school’s rules conflicted with family duties.
“She said, ‘A lot of parents don’t parent, and responsibilities that should be on adults are on teenage kids,’” Benjamin said. “And she was like, ‘I happen to be one of these kids with all of these responsibilities.’”
The principal knew there were plenty of students in Riverdale, where the median household income is $16,000 below the national number, who face hardships at home even without tending to their loved ones’ needs. Learning that some faced an extra set of duties, Benjamin said she felt obligated to find a way to extend the school’s support.
“It was very much a great eye opener, and it quickened my spirit a bit,” she said.
It’s a big reason why a year later, when she met Bolden and heard about her work, she jumped at an opportunity to bring a program tailored for high-school caregivers to Charles Drew. Last fall, the Charles Drew staff put together an email survey to find students who have been informal family caregivers. The administrators identified 30 students, and they invited 10 to join the Young, Gifted and Caregiving program.
Bolden wanted to help all 30, but she said it would be difficult to create deep connections with that many students.
“Once it gets too large, they’re not going to talk,” she said.
Those 10 students, including Taylor and Carson, were invited to attend four weekly classes throughout the winter to learn about how to balance their family responsibilities and their own well-being. Among the skills facilitators taught in each session were basic CPR techniques, chronic disease management, and supportive strategies.
The Young, Gifted and Caregiving program also hosted a Charles Drew charity 5K run, a fundraiser for the school and for a program to give caregivers breaks from their family duties. Bolden said one of the caregiver students on the Charles Drew cross-country team won the race.
At the start of the high school program, Bolden wasn’t sure how long it would take the students to feel comfortable sharing about home lives and experiences with caregiving. But she said it was clear from the first session that they were open to it.
“I thought it would go really slow,” she said. “But they just picked up and really engaged right away.”
Program helps teens balance caregiving with self-care
At the final session this school year, Bolden invited two guest speakers to share how the students could make plans to prioritize their own health needs while tending to their family members.
It’s a balance some of the Charles Drew caregivers are still trying to figure out. While working at a local farmers market over the summer, Zahion Mikell, a 16-year-old sophomore who helps care for his siblings and great grandmother, remembers scampering from one task to the next when another employee asked to check his blood pressure.
“I was just ripping and running, ripping and running,” said Mikell, who also serves as a Youth County Commissioner.
The screening showed that he was at risk of hypertension, and the other employees told him to take care of his health.
Mikell said he tried to do that. But at the first student session of the Young, Gifted and Caregiving program, when Bolden and the other facilitators were teaching the students how to use a blood pressure pump cuff with their family members, they used Mikell’s arm in a demonstration. Once again, his numbers concerned the adults around him.
Since then, Bolden and the Call for Caring workers have made sure to check Mikell’s blood pressure at their weekly meetings. While reading his levels at that final session, Bolden told him he had moved from the “red zone” to the “yellow zone.”
“So that’s good,” Mikell said.
“But for you that’s high,” Bolden responded. “No, not good.”
“I like yellow though,” Mikell replied as the adults around him laughed.
Some of the students expressed the mental and emotional toll that caregiving has taken on their well-being. Tiandra Hodge, another 16-year-old sophomore, has only lived in the metro Atlanta area over the summer. She’s from the British Virgin Islands, but she left her parents and life in the Caribbean to finish her education in the United States last summer.
Hodge lives with her sister and helps feed and bathe her sister’s children, all under age 6. When the stress of adjusting to a new country, a new high school, and a new set of family responsibilities becomes overwhelming, Hodge said she can forget to eat.
She said she has few options to vent about her problems with anyone in-person.
“It’s very difficult,” she said.
That’s one of the reasons she said she’s found the Young, Gifted and Caregiving class helpful. At the end of that fourth session, in response to Bolden asking the student caregivers to share one thing that stood out about the class, Hodge focused on the shared community the program had created.
“I don’t have nobody to talk to about this,” Hodge told everyone in the auditorium.
Caregivers get continued support as they dream big about future
Bolden is excited for Young, Gifted and Caregiving’s future. She plans to lead another session at Charles Drew next school year, hoping to engage and support the other caregiver students who couldn’t fit in the first year.
She also hopes to recreate the program in at least two other Georgia schools this year. Bolden wants to host a series at one of Atlanta’s high schools and a middle school in Sandy Springs.
With these plans of expansion, she said she wants to make clear to this year’s Charles Drew students that support for them won’t wither away. Throughout the final session, Bolden brought up multiple times that her nonprofit would continue to engage with the inaugural class members and help with any challenges they might continue to experience.
She even suggested that they could be student ambassadors for the next Charles Drew caregivers in the program.
“These are adults you can trust and still be able to network,” Bolden told the students, gesturing at the Call for Caring workers and the Charles Drew staff who had joined the session. “I don’t want you to think that because you’re here in this situation, it’s not going to get better.”
Kent, the University of North Carolina professor, said one long-term benefit she’d expect from a program like Bolden’s is that the students now know that they are caregivers. With that knowledge, she said, the teenagers can start to seek out help for any issues that may come up.
Just before getting some cake to celebrate the class’s completion, Taylor, the 16-year-old who cared for her grandmother, talked about her future aspirations. She envisions moving to Houston and working as a chef or an entrepreneur.
But if she’s put in a position where she has to care for adults again, like her parents, Taylor said she feels more prepared to meet that task. She’s a little nervous about forgetting the lessons of the past month, but she now knows there are resources for people in her position.
“I would be more experienced to help my mom and my dad once they get a little bit older.”
Allen Siegler is a reporter covering public health in Atlanta for Healthbeat. Contact Allen at asiegler@healthbeat.org.
