As part of “respite” stays, children or adolescents who help a sick or disabled relative have the opportunity, finally, to relieve their responsibilities for a moment and talk about their daily lives.
When leaving school, not all students have the opportunity to hang out with their friends or engage in an extracurricular activity. Go to football practices, take dance or theater classes? Certainly not: some children and adolescents already have heavy responsibilities that we imagine are reserved for adults. One of their loved ones is sick or has a disability, and they are invaluable help in their home: they are “young carers”. Situations that leave little time for hobbies and free time. To support these young people and allow them to breathe, there are associations like Jade (for “Young carers together”).
Jade offers carer children, aged 6 to 17, so-called “respite” stays to take a break from sometimes chaotic family life when it is punctuated by the disability or illness of a loved one. Nothing anecdotal: after work carried out with Paris Cité University, the director of the association, Amarantha Barclay Bourgeois, reveals that 14.3% of high school students are young carers and that this figure reaches 16% among students. Jade was also able to identify the profiles of these children or adolescents who accompany their sick parent: the person being helped is, most of the time, their mother (60%) or a member of their siblings (50%), and 46% of young people caregivers assist more than one loved one. Even more striking data: only 44% of participants in Jade workshops “had become aware of their role as young caregivers”.
Noémie, 14, discovered the association thanks to the social worker who follows her at her college in Evry (Essonne). The schoolgirl did not even know that she was a young caregiver even though, since childhood, she has accompanied her sister, Jeovana, paralyzed from birth. On a daily basis, it helps him with his mobility but also with his privacy. Beyond this state of affairs, her situation is extremely difficult: with her sister and her mother, Ana, they left Angola in 2019 in the hope of taking advantage of a better situation for Jeovana’s health. But, five years later, their request for asylum has still not been accepted and the three of them survive huddled together in a social hotel room in Savigny. “Without any financial and medical resources”Noémie is sometimes bitter “feeling of having left one’s country and one’s family for nothing.”
Often “depressed” by the health of her sister – who sometimes feels “guilty” to represent heavy responsibilities – Noémie enthusiastically discovered the summer respite stay offered each year by the Jade association in Brittany, a region that she did not know. For five days, a group of 24 children and adolescents enjoy a little time just for themselves, away from their duties as caregivers. However, Noémie hesitated to leave: her sister had just been operated on and was still convalescing, but Ana and Jeovana convinced her, despite her worry.
In Essonne, one-week stays with a creative theme, to create films while talking about their daily lives, are offered every fall. “The artistic approach works very well”welcomes Amarantha Barclay Bourgeois. In Lyon, Jade organizes theater workshops for these young people. Whatever the method, the objective is simple, summarizes the director of the association: “Giving a breath of fresh air and energy to young people.” Allow children or adolescents to leave the family unit for an entire week to, quite simply, “just being young, just being teenagers” is essential for these kids who are already almost adults.
Among the participants of the last respite stay, there was Méloa. At 13, she is in fourth grade and likes “draw, listen to music but, above all, be calm and sleep” – an altogether ordinary portrait of a young teenager. However, as her mother, Aurélie, tells us, Méloa’s schedule does not allow her to “listening to Billie Eilish’s latest album on repeat in your bedroom.” She is in fact the big sister of two brothers, the oldest of whom, at 8 years old, suffers from illnesses which take up as much space as time at home: he suffers from a rare syndrome, epilepsy with spikes and waves. sleep disorders (POCS), but also asthma, “dys” disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
When a family member is sick or disabled, Amarantha Barclay Bourgeois observes several types of reactions among young caregivers. “Some children will do anything to get someone to finally pay attention to them,” when others, like Méloa, will adopt a diametrically opposite attitude. “It’s quite feminine, as a behavior, to become model students, with very precocious adult behavior”explains Jade’s director, who has worked with a large number of young caregivers. The idea is, for the latter, “not to add an additional burden to parents”.
This purely helping nature is revealed when Aurélie, Méloa’s mother, speaks again. While she talks about their family’s daily life, punctuated by appointments with the neurologist, the psychomotor therapist or, quite simply, the management of an unexpected crisis, her daughter takes advantage of these few minutes to go and empty the dishwasher . Unlike a teenager who is reluctant to do even the slightest household task, Aurélie feels “forced to tell him stop” when she feels that Méloa is taking too many responsibilities on her shoulders, while recognizing the dilemma: she would be in real trouble without her help.
When mother and daughter decided that she would go on a respite stay for a week, the teenager immediately worried about the consequences of her absence from home. Ultimately, the schoolgirl did not regret her stay. Very shy, she does not talk about her family situation to her classmates. So, finding yourself in a group of young people experiencing the same thing was a kind of haven of peace. This stay was not an opportunity for her to vent about her problems, but rather to “think of something else”. For once.
Source: www.liberation.fr
