You Pray for Him a Bit More”: Young Adults’ Positive Aspects of Caregiving (PAC) Towards Parental Cancer

Abstract

Young adult caregivers are growing in number, yet there is a paucity of literature on their role in informal family caregiving. The Positive Aspects of Caregiving (PAC) framework has been developed within Dementia carers to indicate positive outcomes of the caring experience. The current study specifically explored the narratives of four young adult carers’ lived experience of caring towards their parents with cancer, using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) through the lens of PAC. Main themes developed from this study were unfolding the child-parent dyad, character building and affirmation of value systems, time reframed, and sustaining caregiving continuity with subthemes surrounding responsibility, appreciation beyond the role reversal, acceptance and sources of comfort. This small-scaled study contributes towards a new understanding of the young adult population, their perception of caregiving and briefly informs the PAC beyond a dementia population.

Keywords

• caregiving
• positive aspects of caregiving (pac)
• interpretative phenomenological analysis (ipa)
• parental cancer