THE INSPIRATION SERIES / CONNIE SISKOWSKI
Who is looking
after the helper?
Connie Siskowski saw the child inside the caregiver. Then she helped build the support that recognition deserves.
By Rob Urban
A child can be dependable.
And still need help.
Connie Siskowski was eleven when she began caring for her grandfather. Decades later, as a nurse and researcher, she helped give a name and a public presence to children whose responsibilities looked a great deal like her own had looked.
They were caregiving youth: students helping relatives who could not manage independently because of illness, disability, or other health circumstances. Their work took place in family homes, often beyond the view of the adults responsible for their education. At school, the consequences might be visible even when the cause was not.
Siskowski founded the Boca Raton-based American Association of Caregiving Youth, or AACY. Her work asks educators, health professionals, and communities to notice both parts of a child’s life. A student can love the person they care for and still need help carrying the responsibility. Being dependable at home should not make a young person’s own needs disappear.
This is what I admire most in Siskowski’s work: she takes a young person’s contribution seriously while insisting that their own life deserves attention. Affection for a relative, pride in being useful and the need for relief can all exist together. A good response has room for the whole person.
The child who
became the nurse.
Ashoka’s account of Siskowski’s life, prepared for her 2009 fellowship, describes a childhood in Nutley, New Jersey, where she lived with her mother, brother, and grandparents. Her grandfather was an important source of affection and security. When he became ill, she helped care for him.
After his death, while she was still in school, she volunteered in hospital and first-aid settings. She later attended the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing on scholarship, became a cardiac nurse specialist, and pursued further education. Her career in Florida included work bringing medical services into people’s homes.
That combination placed her close to family caregiving from several directions: as a child doing it, a nurse encountering it, and eventually a researcher asking what it meant for students. Personal memory could tell her the experience existed. Research could help establish that other children were living it too.
Siskowski’s organizational history connects her doctoral research in Palm Beach County with the move toward services for young caregivers. The organization itself began in 1998 as Boca Raton Interfaith in Action, providing volunteer help to homebound people and caregiving families. It later transferred its adult services to another nonprofit and adopted the AACY name in 2010.
The focus sharpened as the work developed. The Caregiving Youth Project began at one Palm Beach County middle school in fall 2006. A population that had been easy to overlook now had a program designed around it.
School is part of
the caregiving story.
AACY’s service plan moves between school, home and time with friends. That structure matters. Each setting holds a different part of the child’s life, and support needs to travel between them.
A school sees a student during certain hours. A health service may concentrate on the relative receiving care. A family can be so occupied with the immediate demands that there is little time left to explain the whole arrangement. The young person moves among these settings, carrying responsibilities that no single institution necessarily sees in full.
AACY’s current services are organized across those settings. At school, the program offers skills sessions and lunch meetings. At home, staff identify needs and connect families with resources, including tutoring, computers, and respite support. Outside school, activities such as overnight camp, bowling, and picnics give students time with peers.
These activities address different needs without asking the child to become a different person in each place. Academic support matters because the student still has an education to pursue. Time away matters because a young caregiver is also a young person who deserves ordinary enjoyment.
Friendship has a practical dimension here. Spending time with other children who understand family caregiving can reduce the amount of explanation required before a conversation begins. A child may not need to translate every detail of home life to be understood.
The program does not make the relative’s illness vanish. Its contribution is to build support around a situation that already exists, so the child’s future can remain part of the family’s present.
RECOGNITION, MADE PRACTICAL
A place in the record.
One of AACY’s more revealing initiatives concerns community-service recognition. The organization offers eligible high school students a verified certificate acknowledging their caregiving. Depending on a school’s policies, that work may also qualify for service hours or other forms of recognition.
The qualification matters: AACY cannot promise that every school will count the hours in the same way. It reviews applications, requires parental or guardian approval for minors, and can communicate with schools about a student’s role.
The underlying question is easy to understand. A teenager may have little time for a conventional volunteer activity because they are already helping someone at home. If the school recognizes only the activity outside the home, a substantial contribution can remain absent from the record.
Siskowski’s organization gives that contribution a way to be documented. Recognition does not replace respite or academic help, but it can correct an incomplete picture of what a student does with their time.
I admire the patience involved in making recognition usable. Somebody has to design the form, review the application and speak with the school. Those steps may look modest beside a public campaign, but they are where a student’s contribution acquires a place in the record. Care for a person can include care for the paperwork that will speak on their behalf.
A local program.
A larger question.
The Caregiving Youth Institute, launched in 2014, extends AACY’s work through research, professional education, connections, and advocacy. The purpose is to improve understanding and support beyond the reach of one county’s direct-service program.
That broader ambition grows logically from the original problem. Children do not stop having caregiving responsibilities at a county line. Other communities need ways to identify them, listen to them, and organize help within their own schools and services.
The national work also has a local counterpart in backpacks, familiar faces and a night at the ballpark. In the organization’s August 2026 newsletter, Siskowski greeted students at the start of a new school year. Her message encouraged them to talk with their family specialist when responsibilities at home and school became difficult to manage. The issue also reported school-supply deliveries and outings, including a baseball game.
There is a useful consistency between that message and the life behind it. Siskowski once occupied the child’s place in a caregiving household. Her organization now makes it possible for another child to have someone outside the household who knows what is happening and can help.
Their future belongs
in the picture.
Siskowski’s work makes me think about how easily competence can conceal a need. A child who gets something done may receive admiration and another responsibility. The adults around them may never learn what that reliability costs.
AACY’s answer has texture: a family specialist, a lunch meeting, a computer, a certificate, an afternoon with friends. These are different ways of saying that the child’s education and enjoyment still matter. The young person gets to be more than the dependable member of a difficult situation.
Siskowski recognized a familiar experience, studied it and helped build an organization around the people living it. The children were already doing consequential work. She insisted that the rest of us learn to see them, and then do something useful with what we saw.
Follow the work.
For current services and ways to help, visit the American Association of Caregiving Youth. Eligibility and school recognition depend on the particular program and local policies.
This essay draws on AACY’s history, program and service pages, its August 2026 Treasure Talk newsletter, and Ashoka’s 2009 fellowship profile. Links appear alongside the relevant details. Sources checked September 2026; reflections are Rob Urban’s.