Category Archives: Young Carers

Carer Stories, Carers in the media, Events, Young Carers

Young Carers Awareness Day Focused on Mental Health

Each year, national carers charity Carers Trust organises Young Carers Awareness Day, this year taking place on January 31st. The purpose of the day is to raise public awareness of the challenges faced by young people because of their caring role, and to campaign for greater support for young carers and their needs.

Young carers are more likely to suffer from poor mental health than their peers — so this year’s awareness day will focus on mental health.  Earlier this month we talked to one of the young adult carers we work with, Sue, who talked about her experience caring for her dad and the difference support from the Centre has made.

Sue said: “Friends don’t always understand that I can’t always go out, so I get called boring. I was happy to finally find support to help me feel less alone. The Carers’ Centre has helped my life change for the better.”

Here at the Carers’ Centre Young Carers Service we are responding to this need. We will be focusing more on young people’s mental health in 2019, by launching our new Positive Penguin group (starting this month for primary age young carers) as well as continuing the iCare peer support group, starting back later on in March.  These groups aim to offer a safe space for children and young people to discuss the pressures of caring, challenges they’re facing and to make friends with other young people who are in similar situations.

Continue reading Young Carers Awareness Day Focused on Mental Health →

Young Carers

Guest Post: Hear from Young Carer Alex

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

My name is Alex and I am 12 years old. I help to care for my 10-year-old sister, Izzy, who has developmental delays. She is both great fun and very hard work. I love her very much, but there are times when I find caring for her very difficult and stressful. I would like to tell you about my experience of the Young Carers organisation and why I think it is so incredibly important.

Many young carers don’t have access to things most kids do, either because their parent or parents are busy looking after their sibling or because their parents themselves need looking after, so are physically unable to transport them, or supervise. This can result in missing out on a lot of things, which doesn’t feel great.

My life felt a lot harder when my sister and I were younger, because she needed constant help and I felt there wasn’t enough attention to go around. Right now it’s tougher for my 8-year-old brother, Toby, than it is for me. It’s easier to entertain yourself when you are older by, say, meeting your friends in town, and I can just bus myself there and back, but when you’re younger, you rely on your parents a lot more.

In my family, our lives revolve around my younger sister. Continue reading Guest Post: Hear from Young Carer Alex →

Carers in the media, Young Carers

Half of infant young carers under ten are suffering broken sleep to care for family members

Young carer with her sister

Thursday 25 January is Young Carers Awareness Day (YCAD), a national day of recognition for the 700,000 young carers in the UK who provide care and support to family and friends who are disabled, ill, elderly or misuse substances.

A snapshot survey released by charity Carers Trust today reveals a high proportion of infant young carers (aged 5 – 10) surveyed by the charity are regularly suffering from broken sleep to help look after unwell family members.

There are now nearly 10,000 young carers under the age of eight in England and Wales who perform unpaid caring duties, with the most recent Census in 2011 finding a shocking 83% increase in the amount of young carers aged 5-7 since 2001 (2).

Carers Trust CEO Giles Meyer says, “The findings from our survey reveal a harsh reality for the very youngest young carers in the UK today, almost half of whom are regularly being required to get up during the night in order to look after their unwell family members.

“It is a tragic situation that children who have barely started school are losing sleep which is so significant to their development, and in the night-time, being exposed to and handling issues such as their siblings or parents’ panic attacks or epileptic seizures when they should be getting important rest.” Continue reading Half of infant young carers under ten are suffering broken sleep to care for family members →

Centre News, Events, Volunteering, Young Carers

Celebrating Carers 2017: Success!

AGM blogFriday, 13th of October was the day of our annual general meeting and Celebrating Carers awards ceremony. Despite the unlucky date, the evening was a great success and was much enjoyed by all attendees.

We are so fortunate to have our wonderful host, Ali Vowles, return to us again this year to really make the evening special. She is such a fantastic presenter and this year was no different, even when some of the script pages went wandering off! As always we are incredibly grateful for her support, so thank you Ali.

The evening was an opportunity to recognise some very special people who have supported the Carers’ Centre, carers in our community or indeed carers themselves who have achieved so much.

Our first winner was one you would have read about before; young carer Becca who looks after her mum. Since being featured on Comic Relief, Becca has used her platform to educate and inspire her peers and adults alike, putting together a presentation and role-play for her school to explain what it’s like to be a young carer.  It was fantastic to reward Becca for her efforts and hopefully inspire her to continue to educate her community for years to come.  Continue reading Celebrating Carers 2017: Success! →

Carer Stories, Carers in the media, Young Carers

Young Carer Becca Featured on Comic Relief Red Nose Day

Becca RYoung carer Becca, 10, helps to look after her mum who has Fibromyalgia. The family, via the Carers’ Centre, were approached by the Comic Relief team who wanted to make a short film to capture what life is like for young carers — and we think they did brilliantly!

We are incredibly proud of Becca and all our young carers and hope this video can shed a little bit of light on what it’s like for young carers living in Britain today.

The film highlights the difference between Becca’s day and the day of one of her friends, Izzy, who isn’t a young carer.

As a thank you Comic Relief took Becca and her family to watch Blue Peter live!

Click here to watch Becca’s story.

Carer Stories, Events, Young Carers

Celebrating Carers 2016 – the results!

Celebrating2016_logoOur annual awards ceremony was held in October and once again the event was hosted by the fantastic Ali Vowles of the BBC. It was a chance to recognise our unsung heroes: carers, volunteers, and partners and to look back over what we’ve achieved this year.

The evening was made possible by the generosity of Sirona Care & Health and by our other wonderful sponsors; Bath College, Curo, Gerrard Financial Consulting, Gradwell Communications, Minuteman Press Bath and Way Ahead Care. Continue reading Celebrating Carers 2016 – the results! →

Breaks, Young Carers

Young Carers Get Creative

Animation 1

Story by Rosie Hurley 

A couple of weeks ago a group of our young carers had the chance to get creative with professional animators.

The project was run by the national arts charity Create, whose programme art:space allows young carers to step away from responsibilities and have fun learning new skills. Working alongside SouthGate shopping centre in Bath, and funded by British Land, art:space helped our young carers to produce their own short animated film from 27-29 July.

The film, called ‘Ninja’, looked like great fun to make, and definitely shows off the skills the young carers learnt. It experiments with different animation techniques, and involved drawing charcoal images and then photographing them, before rubbing them out and redrawing them again for the stop-motion animation effect. To animate the abstract shapes and patterns they used computer software which resulted in an impressive multi-form film. The film is available to watch on YouTube. Continue reading Young Carers Get Creative →

Carer Stories, Young Carers

Young Carers Get Top Nutrition Tips

Dan and Roy
Dan and Roy at the workshop

Story by Rosie Hurley 

On Wednesday 27th July, Sue Judge, a nutritional therapist, came to the Carers’ Centre to lead a cooking and nutrition workshop for young carers.

Sue greeted us in the garden with lots of tasty-looking ingredients laid out on the tables under the gazebo. She introduced healthy eating and nourishment, before revealing that we’d be making our own lunch with the food and equipment she’d brought. On the menu was Mexican quesadillas, with salsa and hummus, along with fresh apple, carrot and ginger juice.

After introducing us to the basic concepts of what it means to eat healthily, (and she may have regretted asking us what we had for breakfast!) Sue then gave each of us different foods to prepare for our lunch. These ranged from grating carrot and chopping spring onion for the quesadilla fillings, to blending up onions and tomatoes for the salsa, to juicing the apples and carrots. The juicer itself was something of a spectacle — it was a big contraption that looked like a sausage maker — it was hardly a NutriBullet, but it worked just as well! Continue reading Young Carers Get Top Nutrition Tips →

Breaks, Carer Stories, Events, Young Carers

The YAC Bowling Night

FOR BLOGLast month, the YC team treated some Young Adult Carers aged 17-24 (YACs) to a night of bowling at the Longwell Green complex in Bristol. Luckily, there were just enough of us to squeeze into our minibus, which was donated to us by The Wheels Project a year ago. Steve (the Young Carers Officer) was our driver for the evening and ensured the journey there was almost as fun as the actual event!

At Longwell Green, we enjoyed a drink and a quick sit down before heading off to the lanes. We started bowling and within ten minutes Cherie had established that she was the strike queen getting two strikes in her first two turns. Steve and Joe were in fierce competition; as the only two males there they felt they had something to prove!

Continue reading The YAC Bowling Night →

Breaks, Events, Young Carers

Family Time: Bath City Farm

The beautiful view surrounding our carers as they enjoyed Meeting the Romans at Bath City Farm
The beautiful view surrounding our carers as they enjoyed Meeting the Romans at Bath City Farm

Last week, carer families had the chance to have a break when we took them to ‘Meet the Romans’ at Bath City Farm. We were blessed with amazing sunshine and a beautiful view over the rolling hills of the city.

Once we were in the farm, our carers explored what life was like in a Roman Bath. The children got to create mosaics, make sundials, eat Roman food, see real-life artefacts and even chat to a Roman Gladiator. Then our carers had a fantastic time exploring the farm and seeing all the animals. The pygmy goats were a definite favourite but I personally loved Rufus, the Gloucester Old Spot boar!

After all this sightseeing, we stopped for a spot of lunch at the fabulous Trough café. The Carers’ Centre provided each family member with a £5 food voucher to make our families lives that little bit easier. We all enjoyed looking at the Bath landscape as we ate, and all felt really lucky to be there on such a lovely day!

As always, it’s so great that we as a Centre can treat carers to a fun day out as a family. Having the chance to get out in the sunshine and do something different like meet the Romans is worth so much to carers, and it’s wonderful to know we’re helping to relieve their caring role, even if it’s just for a few hours. Bath City Farm had so many fun activities on offer, and the carers really got a lot out of the day.

Planning our Family Day activities can be challenging, but the hard work always pays off once we see the smile on the faces of a family caring full-time. We had a blast at Bath City Farm and can’t wait for the next activity – hope to see some of you there!