Pathways to Mental Well-Being in Young Carers: The Role of Benefit Finding, Coping, Helplessness, and Caring Tasks.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Wepf, Hannah Joseph, Stephen Leu, Agnes
Abstract	Although prior research has shown that young carers may perceive benefits from their challenging situation, it is unclear how and when benefit finding leads to better mental health. This study examines pathways through which benefit finding may influence mental well-being. Self-reported data were obtained from 601 adolescents aged 15–21 (Mage = 17.87, 71.9% female) who provided care for a close person with physical or mental health problems. Benefit finding was associated with better mental well-being directly as well as indirectly via better coping and lower helplessness. These findings were similar across young carers with different caring task profiles, except for a few differences regarding social/emotional and instrumental care. The study suggests that benefit finding could promote coping skills and mental well-being in adolescent young carers with implications for the design of future research on interventions with young carers.
Related Links	https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC8352805&blobtype=pdf
ISSN	00472891
Journal	Journal of Youth and Adolescence [J Youth Adolesc]
Volume Number	50
DOI	10.1007/s10964-021-01478-0
PubMed Central reference number	PMC8352805
Issue Number	9
PubMed reference number	34282492
e-ISSN	15736601
Language	English
Publisher	Springer US
Publisher Date	2021-07-19
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2021
Subject Keyword	Young carers Mental health Stress Caregiving Stress-related growth Resilience
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Education Developmental and Educational Psychology Social Sciences Social Psychology