Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today we focus on a hidden population, youth who care for chronically ill, injured,

elderly, or disabled family members. Connie Siskowski is founder and president of the American

Association of Caregiving Youth. Julie Belkowitz is a pediatrician at the University of Miami School of

Medicine. They talk to Dr.

Josh Sharfstein about who these kids are and what they need. Let's listen.

Dr. Siskowski, Dr. Belkowitz, it is great to have you both here on the podcast to talk about

the issue of caregiving youth. Dr. Siskowski, I'd like to start with you.

What do we mean by caregiving youth?

Well, Josh, first of all, thank you for having us to help raise awareness about this otherwise hidden

population of children who are providing care for family or household members who are chronically ill, elderly,

disabled, or injured. And as a result, they sacrifice their education, their health, their well-being,

and childhood. They are essentially an invisible population. How did you become involved with

caregiving youth? How did you start to with caregiving youth?

How did you start to see them?

Well, I was a caregiving youth when I was in middle school, and the trauma that I experienced

affected my life as an adult, not professionally, but personally.

And so I went to the first international conference on family caregiving in London

...