Young adulthood

A large proportion of long-term care for people with disabilities and/or long-term health conditions is provided by unpaid carers, including young people, with potential impacts on their education, employment and health. Supporting carers is a focus of long-term care practice and policy in many countries. A key part of this support in England is through provision of services to the person with care needs (often called 'replacement' care). We aimed to explore the role of replacement care services in supporting young adult carers' health, education, and employment.

Although children of parents with an alcohol or other drug (AOD) issue appear to assume a range of caring responsibilities within their families they have, until recently, been excluded from the growing body of young-carer research, policy and practice. This is problematic, as this group may experience greater levels of social exclusion whilst experiencing similar negative impacts of care as their caring peers.

The concept of social capital is very much an ‘adult’ concept, created by adults for adults, with children as the passive recipients of, primarily, parental social capital. The concept has been broken down into three particular subcategories – bonding (getting by), bridging (getting on) and linking (getting around). However, these subcategories equally do not relate readily to children and young people nor to different groups of young people.