Young carers in China

Thesis

Like adults, children also care. This thesis explores the lives of young carers – children who provide informal (unpaid) care to ill or disabled family members. While young carers have received growing attention in the Global North, this vulnerable population remains largely unrecognised, undefined, and unsupported in China. Based on 15 months of fieldwork with 30 young carer families in both rural and urban China, this study draws on Hamilton and Cass’s (2017) age-sensitive theoretical framework of caregiving to examine how children experience and navigate caregiving in contemporary Chinese families.

Findings show that young carers in China undertake a complex mix of tasks, including constant emotional labour not typically expected of children by adults. They also experience ongoing physical, emotional, educational, and social depletion, such that caregiving often constrains multiple aspects of their life opportunities. I argue that young carer families function as key sites of gender socialisation and the reproduction of inequality, with girls disproportionately burdened, an issue under-explored in global young carer literature. Although children in this study demonstrated autonomy in choosing or strategically negotiating their caregiving roles, their agency was often limited, conditional, and shaped by familial and cultural expectations.

Beyond documenting how caregiving shapes children’s lived experiences and futures, I develop the concept of cruel interdependency to conceptualise the relational dynamics within young carer families. Cruel interdependency refers to a multidirectional caregiving relationship co-constructed by children and their families. It is both depleting and empowering: it places significant burdens on children, yet also deepens familial bonds and embeds caregiving within a shared moral universe of love, obligation, suffering, and resilience. As such, this thesis contributes new empirical and conceptual insights to the global literature on care, and to the sociology of childhood and family in China.

Authors: Xue, K

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-2zkqew5ey
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: China; young carers; children's emotional work; unpaid care; cruel interdependency
• Subjects: Childhood Studies; Sociology