19 September 2025
Throughout 2024 and 2025, Carers Victoria has continued to strengthen our approach to understand the emerging, sustaining and evolving priorities of Victoria’s unpaid carers.
Throughout this time, we’ve held focus groups with hundreds of carers across Victoria to directly hear from them about key challenges and their ideas for solutions.
We recently invited award recipients of the 2025 Carers Victorian Young Carer Scholarship to come along to an online focus group to share their insights. Two focus groups were held in July with seventeen young carers aged between 9-19.
Participants generously shared their stories of caring and the unique challenges and issues they face as young carers. Some of the key things they told us are below:
Lost time and missed experiences: Many young carers are juggling their education, household duties and caregiving; leaving little time for socialising, play, rest, sport or, in some cases, even homework. Many described the ways this loss of time is affecting their wellbeing, and the sort of opportunities they can take part in.
“I have limited time for myself – caring and school take up most of my day. My friends go out and do things… I often can’t join in.”
Challenges juggling education and caring: Young carers offered some fresh perspectives and concrete ideas on making education more manageable alongside their caring roles. These included: formal, practical school support programs such as homework clubs or time during school hours, flexibility with deadlines and special consideration for carers, building a shared school culture of openness about caring and for peer awareness and anti-stigma campaigns in school.
“I can’t always prioritise myself. I have to help my mum and little sister… I’d prefer their needs and happiness over my own, even if it means my schoolwork suffers.”
Recognition and awareness: Young carers spoke of wanting to be better recognised for the crucial role they play - not only because it validates their experience, it also to make it clear that carers are valued just as much as the person they care for.
“I wish people realised that young carers actually care for people. It’s not just, ‘Oh, you have a brother or sister with special needs.’ It means I have a job looking after them, and that takes time and energy.”
Social, emotional and financial support needs: Young carers talked about increasing anxiety about the future and the financial strains in day-to-day life. They also talked about their needs for more flexible counselling options and importance of respite.
“There are days it’s really emotionally hard. My biggest challenges are the emotional stress, lack of time for myself, and balancing caring with everyday life. It’s a lot for one person.”
For all the challenges, many of the same young carers also expressed the pride they carry in their caring roles. Some of the focus group participants discussed the skills they developed through their caring roles which could hold them in good stead in the future.
“I learned life skills that kids my age may not have, like cooking”.
Carers Victoria is deeply committed to amplifying the voice of young carers to shape our service design, our policy priorities and our advocacy to Government and the broader sector. We will continue to ensure young carer voices are heard and their insights inform the work we do.
