Abstract
Residing on an empirical study carried out in Istanbul with young female carers (daughters who share the care responsibility of their younger siblings with their mothers), this article explores the care provider positioning of a child by contemplating the dilemma of empowerment/vulnerability in relation to generational order and relational agency of the child. The care responsibility within the course of childhood locates a particular intergenerational experience. Understanding this experience from the standpoint of children contributes to the conceptualisation of childhood as a contested, yet relational space of interdependencies along the generational order. The study demonstrates that sharing the caring responsibility of a family member brings both empowerment and vulnerability for young carers that is negotiated within the entangled boundaries of the childhood and adulthood. The emerging themes pertaining to the empowering features of caring duties are solidarity between the mother and older daughter being/feeling capable of doing things without being supervised by an adult whereas the emerging themes pertaining to vulnerability are physical and emotional (anxiety) burdens of caring for younger sibling and the difficulty older daughter's have in balancing their own needs against their siblings' needs. The narratives of young female carers reveal the solidaristic as well as the conflicting features of the intergenerational relations (childhood in relation to adulthood) along the lines of empowerment and vulnerability that problematizes the interdependencies and agency of the child within the generational order.
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Notes
The gendered identity development of young female carers and the ways in which their gender intersects with age and class is discussed in another article and therefore will not be focus of the analysis here.
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Akkan, B. Contested Agency of Young Carers Within Generational Order: Older Daughters and Sibling Care in Istanbul. Child Ind Res 12, 1435–1447 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-018-9579-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-018-9579-7