Children as Caregivers - (Rutgers Childhood Studies) by Jean Hunleth (Paperback)

About the Book

Medical anthropologist Jean Hunleth chronicles the experiences of children living with parents and guardians who are suffering from these infectious diseases and shows how their perspectives matter in the global debates about health care. Children as Caregivers examines how well intentioned practitioners fail to realize how children take on active caregiving roles when their guardians become seriously ill.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2018 Association for Africanist Anthropology Elliott P. Skinner Book Award

In Zambia, due to the rise of tuberculosis and the closely connected HIV epidemic, a large number of children have experienced the illness or death of at least one parent. Children as Caregivers examines how well intentioned practitioners fail to realize that children take on active caregiving roles when their guardians become seriously ill and demonstrates why understanding children's care is crucial for global health policy.

Using ethnographic methods, and listening to the voices of the young as well as adults, Jean Hunleth makes the caregiving work of children visible. She shows how children actively seek to "get closer" to ill guardians by providing good care. Both children and ill adults define good care as attentiveness of the young to adults' physical needs, the ability to carry out treatment and medication programs in the home, and above all, the need to maintain physical closeness and proximity. Children understand that losing their guardians will not only be emotionally devastating, but that such loss is likely to set them adrift in Zambian society, where education and advancement depend on maintaining familial, reciprocal relationships.

Download the open access ebook.

Review Quotes

"Children as Caregivers is a rare and timely ethnographic study of childhood and illness. Readers interested in expanding their knowledge of critical global health, infectious disease, and kinship politics will find tremendous value in this book. As a testament to ethnography's value in the social sciences, Children as Caregivers provides researchers with new, creative methods on how to capture children's voices and experiences, in all their complexity."-- "Medical Anthropology Quarterly"

"Children as Caregivers offers a very interesting insight on how discourses on prevention, care, and welfare in the context of infectious diseases should not ignore the specific contribution provided by children."-- "The Lancet"

"Children's Carework in a Global Pandemic: Anthropology of Childhood and Infectious Disease" interview with Jean Hunleth
https: //culanth.org/fieldsights/childrens-carework-in-a-global-pandemic-anthropology-of-childhood-and-infectious-disease-- "AnthroPod"

"Hunleth presents a moving, yet clear-eyed, account of children's hitherto unacknowledged caregiving in the tuberculosis and HIV epidemic. Children as Caregivers is a spectacular demonstration of the vital importance of detailed ethnography for policy development."
--Anthony Simpson "author of Boys to Men in the Shadow of AIDS: Masculinities and HIV Risk in Zambia"

About the Author

JEAN HUNLETH is an assistant professor in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.