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Comment by nohuck13 | Hacker News Reader

As a parent of a disabled child I sometimes feel alone and overwhelmed even with a loving spouse and a well paid tech job. I can't imagine the experience as a teenaged solo carer with no options.

Without quibbling with this basic directional correctness, the numbers in the article are bunk.

> "In the United Kingdom, about a million young people under 18 years old spend more than 50 hours a week caring for family members"

There are 14 million people under 18 in the UK [1]. If 1 million under-18s spend 50+ hours caring for family members, and only a few thousand tragic cases are under 9 (as the article claims) then the claim is that something like 1 in 3.5 children aged 9 to 18 spends 50+ hours caring for family members?

[1] https://data.unicef.org/how-many/how-many-children-under-18-...

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> 1 in 3.5 children aged 9 to 18 spends 50+ hours caring for family members.

Surprising, but you can't just dismiss statistics on the basis that they're surprising to you. A lot of people lead very different lives, invisibly.

15-20% of people are disabled: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

Not immediately clear if "caring for family members" includes older children caring for younger children, but that would certainly bring up the numbers.

It is possible that the "50+ hours" is not accurately counted.

Note that the 15-20% of people who are "disabled" are not defined as needing around-the-clock caregivers. Disability is a spectrum.

I would indeed dismiss that particular statistic about the number of kids spending 50+ hours looking after family members, because it is likely wrong by an order of magnitude.

Also that doesn't mean that 15-20% of people of parenting age are disabled. It might skew elderly.

My hunch is that either:

Somewhere an "up to 50 hours" has become "over 50 hours". If written as "up to 50 hours" it would be much less surprising.

It should read "Over 5 hours". A million spending 5+ hours a week would also be much less surprising.

A million spending over 50 hours would imply perhaps another million spending say, 20-50 hours, still a huge burden.

Disabled does not mean you need a caregiver

I'm sure you're right that bad things tend to be invisible to me, the article even has an example of children trying to keep their shopping a secret.

But 1 in 3.5... idk, if you assume households with kids have a couple of kids, that's getting pretty close to saying the median UK household with a 9 to 18 year old has a 50+ hour caring situation. I don't see that being invisible.

> Not immediately clear if "caring for family members" includes older children caring for younger children, but that would certainly bring up the numbers.

Suspect this is basically right as well.

I suspect it hinges on "caring" - if we assume a child aged 0 to 5 needs constant supervision, that is 84 waking hours or so that need to be supervised. If that supervision is caring, then someone could easily spend 50+ hours caring for them even as they do other things.

And you can just walk off when they're asleep? The might wake up. Someone in that age bracket needs 24/7 care, although much of it is merely requires presence.

>> It is possible that the "50+ hours" is not accurately counted.

Or we do not understand the definition of care. Perhaps "care" covers all those times where the child has custody or otherwise is the only person watching over a disabled person. That could therefore include nights when perhaps the kid is the only carer in the household even though all are asleep. Then 50+hours doesn't seem so huge.

>Surprising, but you can't just dismiss statistics on the basis that they're surprising to you.

Why not? While there are many falacies that people are surprised by that are mathematically true, when someone presents numbers, the more surprising the claim, the more evidence they need to present to back it. Science isn't perfect, there is the possibility of error, fraud, and the whole messy bit of scientific reporting having an abysmal record of accurately reporting what scientists say. For a surprising enough claim, without multiple verifications from independent sources, it is fine to dismiss it.

"It is possible that the "50+ hours" is not accurately counted." Furthermore, what do those hours entail and how is 'care' quantified? It could drastically change how those hours are tallied.

Are we talking strictly changing sheets, assisting with a bed-pan, medication administration? Or 'softer' tasks like enrichment/entertainment and quality family time.

Do those hours also include emotional toll it takes on a person to constantly straddle the line between family member and caregiver? It's like secondary school coursework: for every hour spent draining catheter bags, suctioning tracheotomy tubes, or administering nutrients through a feeding tube (Jevity Plus smells like death, ask me how I know), there thrice that many hours spent toiling and dealing with the emotional fallout of "protecting your protector".

All that to say, as meaningful as it is to try and collect this data, I would posit that there is no true way to quantify the full breadth of the reality that many people live day in and day out. I, for one, have been forever impacted by my upbringing that included immense amount of caregiving.

That's my thought, also. If you count older siblings keeping an eye on younger ones I don't see it's that hard to rack up 50 hours/wk. I get the feeling we are seeing the all-to-common pattern of taking a real problem and presenting statistics about it to create a deception that it's bigger than it really is.

I think you’re correct, this recent press release from the cited source (Carers Trust) says it’s 1 million total caregivers under 18, of whom 50,000 spend 50 hours/week caring for others.

https://carers.org/news-and-media/news/post/361-carers-trust...

Did a little digging and while I can’t find the raw data from Carers’ Trust, this report definitely seems to misrepresent some of the definitions they use.

Carers’ Trust seem to identify groups they call ‘young carers’ (18 and under) and ‘young adult carers’ (18-25) in various of their reports. This is an example of their own writing on the subject: https://carers.org/news-and-media/news/post/361-carers-trust...

They generally claim that there are 1 million ‘young carers’ in the UK, and 600,000 additional ‘young adult carers’

That page gives the more plausible rate of high intensity (50 hours a week+) care as “At least 50,000 children and young people, including 3,000 aged just five to nine, spend 50 hours or more a week looking after ill or disabled family members.”

It’s not clear whether ‘young people’ is synonymous with ‘young carers’ or also includes ‘young adult carers’

Too late to edit but 1 in 3.5 should have been 1 in 7 which is double 1 in 14, thanks adammarples. :/

Half of 1/14 is 1/7, not 2/7

Bah. Thank you. You are right. It's too late to edit.

1/7 is double 1/14 since 1/7 == 2/14.

Half of 1/14 is 1/28 since 2(1/28) == 1/14.

It's obvious what he meant and he was right.

Yes good point, I didn't mean that

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