Nationwide — For Omarion Calloway, caregiving was not a role he chose. It was a reality he grew into early. At just 10 years old, he became a caregiver within his family, assuming responsibilities while still navigating childhood, school, and emotional development. Like millions of children across the United States, he learned early how to prioritize others, often without language for the weight of that responsibility or space to name its impact. The work was quiet, constant, and largely unseen.
What Calloway experienced personally is now increasingly recognized by educators and child welfare advocates as a widespread yet underreported issue. National caregiving organizations estimate that millions of children and teenagers in the United States provide regular care for parents, siblings, or relatives while balancing medical, emotional, and domestic responsibilities alongside their education. Despite the scale of the issue, youth caregivers remain largely absent from public discourse, policy conversations, and media coverage.
Over the past year, Calloway has been working to change that invisibility.
In 2025, he spoke at the American Association of Caregiving Youth Conference in Boca Raton, Florida, sharing his story with a national audience of educators, advocates, and professionals. The conference, led by Connie Siskowski, President of the American Association of Caregiving Youth, convened leaders from across the country focused on advancing awareness, research, and support for caregiving youth. Calloway’s remarks focused not on heroism but on honesty, exploring what it means to grow up inside care, where love and responsibility coexist with exhaustion, isolation, and resilience learned too early.
Following that appearance, Calloway released More Than Survival: A Guideline for Young Caregivers, a resource written specifically for children and teenagers navigating caregiving roles. Unlike traditional caregiver materials aimed at adults, the guide speaks directly to young people, offering validation, reflection, and practical encouragement rooted in lived experience. It acknowledges what many caregiving youth rarely hear, that their feelings matter, and that caring for others does not erase their own need for care.
The guideline is available at MoreThanSurvivalGuide.com, and Calloway encourages educators, families, youth organizations, and child advocacy professionals to share the resource with caregiving youth who may not yet see themselves reflected in existing support systems. The guide is intended not as a solution to caregiving, but as an entry point into recognition, conversation, and connection.
Calloway’s work is now expanding into documentary filmmaking. He is currently developing a short documentary titled Hands Too Small, which centers on the voices of young caregivers and examines what it means to grow up carrying adult responsibility in a child’s body. The film is scheduled for release in May 2026 and aims to contribute to broader conversations about youth mental health, family care, and the long-term impact of early responsibility.
At a time when national conversations increasingly focus on mental health, youth development, and family systems, Calloway’s advocacy highlights a critical gap. Children who care for others are often expected to be resilient without being supported. Their labor is essential, their presence constant, and their stories too often left untold.
By using his own experience as an entry point rather than an endpoint, Calloway is drawing attention to a population that exists in nearly every community, often just out of sight. His work invites a broader reckoning with how society understands care, childhood, and responsibility, and asks a simple but urgent question. Who is looking out for the children who are already looking out for everyone else?
Be sure to follow Omarion on Instagram @Omarion.n
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