The hidden costs of caregiving: Meet the kids taking care of wounded veterans

Yahoo

31-03-2025

It was horrifying every time it happened, every time Kylie Briest's father choked on his food and started to turn blue, every time her mom, Jenny, sprang out of her own dinner chair to attempt the Heimlich maneuver on her husband.
Kylie lost count of the number of times she'd called 911, making quick explanations to the operator while her mind was spinning in the background: wondering if her dad would survive this night, hoping the neighbors were home so she could send her little brother, Connor, over. That way Kylie could shield him from the things she had to see, and do and wonder.
Kylie was only 3 when a roadside bomb in Iraq left her father, Corey, with injuries so severe they told Jenny to plan his funeral. So this version of him — the version that can't always swallow properly, or see or walk on his own or speak clearly—is all she's known.
She's grown up at his bedside, from the time she was a toddler helping the nurses add Daddy's medication to his feeding tube to helping carry his wheelchair up the stairs of her sorority house at the University of South Dakota so he wouldn't miss out on parent visitation day.
'This is just life for us,' Kylie said. 'This is what we do.'
The experience felt isolating, especially when she was younger. 'Kids at school look at you differently just because your dad shows up to things differently than their dad shows up,' she said.
But Kylie wasn't as alone as she thought. About 2.3 million American kids are living with a disabled veteran in their home — a number researchers said is likely an undercount.
These injured service members and veterans are often called wounded warriors; their caregivers more recently earned the nickname hidden heroes.
And their children? The ones who babysit siblings during VA appointments; the ones who comfort their parents, saying everything will be OK; the ones who clean the house or tiptoe around it while someone is sleeping, or medicated, or in a PTSD-triggered rage —they are what the Elizabeth Dole Foundation calls 'hidden helpers.'
Despite their numbers, military caregiving kids are often left out of the conversation on how our country takes care of those who served. They are rarely studied and often excluded from support programs. There are few platforms designed to connect or inform them.
Now, President Donald Trump's campaign to slash federal spending is raising alarm over long-held veterans services and benefits —dampening the prospects for disabled veterans' families already left behind.
The War Horse set out to tell the stories of three of those families. The Briests live in Yankton, South Dakota. Sisters Kimmy Fix and Delany White live in North Carolina. And Rachel, Charlie, Mark, Michael and Molly are in Northern Virginia.
They wanted to share their stories as a comfort to other hidden helpers and their families: to show them they're not alone and to hopefully make a difference for the ones who come next.
'All that we can do,' Kylie said, 'is continue to try to make our stories and voices heard.'
Kylie doesn't feel cheated or robbed by fate. She loves her family and her dad just the way he is. 'My dad has never been a burden,' she says. 'He never will be.'
But she recognizes that growing up, her path could have been made smoother. It would have been helpful to have been provided with counseling, she said, and some respite care that didn't require admitting Corey to the VA an hour away for the day. A way to connect with kids in similar situations.
'If I would have had these connections sooner, I think that would have made me a stronger person,' Kylie said.
Hidden helpers provide services that are 'unseen, unrecognized and unsupported,' according to the Elizabeth Dole Foundation, one of the few organizations to focus on children and young siblings of wounded veterans.
It partnered with the research consultant Mathematica on a 2021 study that found these children want more support and have trouble getting it.
The lack of formal support and connection comes at a social, emotional and psychological cost, the limited research into military caregiving kids found.
Child caregivers sometimes feel stigmatized and isolated, have fewer social opportunities, experience difficulties expressing emotion and learning in school and have more health problems such as stress, burnout and fatigue.
The stress of navigating multiple, complex systems and bureaucracies to get care for a spouse trickles down to kids in the household, taking a toll on their own mental health and ability to focus and perform in school, the report found.
There has been a slow culture shift within the VA of acknowledging the role of the family in caring for a wounded veteran, experts say. Support, once focused entirely on the service member, is now more likely to incorporate a caregiving spouse or other primary caregiver. But children in the household remain largely overlooked.
'I would say when we started [VA support] was veteran only, like, there was no care in the world for family at all,' said Jenny Briest. 'It's taken time but they are [now] including the caregiver.
'The kids? No. None. Nothing.'
Children who are also caregivers are sometimes forced to grow up much faster, for better or worse. The experience of caring for a parent builds them into stronger, more responsible people. But it can chip away at childhood.
'I do think sometimes we paint over the challenges by saying ... it's going to make them resilient, so therefore everything's OK,' said Steven Malick, one of the Mathematica researchers who contributed to the report. 'As if the experience of trauma is somehow virtuous.'
Consider Delany White, an eighth-grader who lives near Raleigh, North Carolina. At 14, she's one of nine kids, but as the youngest by far, she feels like an only child. Except for Kimmy.
Kimmy Fix is 22 years older than her youngest sister, but their roles can feel reversed. When they get ready for church together, Delany does Kimmy's hair and makeup. Delany also runs over an extra pair of pants if Kimmy needs them changed, holds her hand if she's getting too aggravated, and helps her transfer in and out of her wheelchair.
Kimmy, a medical corps services captain in the Army, was injured in a highway accident on her way home from a Hail and Farewell, shortly after returning from a deployment to Afghanistan. She was in a coma for over a year and emerged gradually, axon by axon it seemed to her large family.
That was almost 11 years ago, when Delany was a toddler. She's grown up helping to take care of her eldest sister.
There were times Delany went to school exhausted because Kimmy's oxygen levels had dipped overnight and they'd all been up, watchful and worried. Sometimes she didn't make it to school at all, because her parents needed to attend to Kimmy and there would have been no one to pick her up.
'I feel like having more understanding teachers or understanding admin in my school, but also having connections with other kids who go through the same stuff, who maybe have the same worries or the same responsibilities, that would have made it a lot easier,' Delany said.
Delany knew it wasn't true, but sometimes she felt like she was in second place when it came to their parents' attention. But she understood. Kimmy needed them more.
For much of their childhoods, Mark and his half-brother Michael didn't understand the difference in Charlie. The way he treated them, the way he yelled, the unpredictability—it just felt unfair.
It was always a flip of a coin as to which dad would show up that day. The one that spent hours having a catch in the backyard could at any moment be replaced by the dad who sunk into the beer-sticky funk of the basement couch for days at a time, chucking empty cans into an overflowing trash bin.
Charlie had been an active duty Marine, a multisport athlete, a bodybuilding champion at the University of South Carolina, a lawyer in two states, a firefighter and an adrenaline junkie who rode bulls for fun.
But tours in Afghanistan and Iraq left him with a traumatic brain injury, severe PTSD and a busted spine that caused chronic pain. Back in Virginia, Charlie had sunk into alcohol abuse and depression.
Going out in public was like navigating a minefield. Any misperceived comment, any sudden movement, and Charlie could explode. Charlie's family requested their last names not be published to protect their privacy.
'It took a lot of a mental toll on him, in my opinion, not being able to be the man that he was,' said his stepson Mark, now 26.
It fell on Mark, he said, to keep the house up to Charlie's exacting standards. Mark remembered being in elementary school and not being allowed to go to bed until he finished the dishes, so he just lay down underneath the dining room table — a sort of exhausted protest.
As he got older, Michael, who just turned 18, taught himself to cook beef and broccoli, butter chicken and curries so the family wouldn't have to eat Domino's on days when his dad was too dispirited or couldn't muster the energy to make a meal.
And as both boys got bigger, they learned how to protect Charlie from himself. Along with their sister Molly they learned how to talk him down, distract him, lead him away or make themselves barriers between Charlie and whatever threat he perceived.
The enemy may have existed only in Charlie's mind. But his kids grew up learning how to fight it.
Young caregivers said they wished they had better information about their parent's injuries, especially when it comes to invisible wounds like the ones Charlie struggles with that can affect behavior, cognition, and emotions.
Michael said having a better understanding of PTSD and traumatic brain injuries would have helped him be more understanding and empathetic. Now he thinks Charlie and veterans like him are trying to grip the version of themselves they used to be — grasping at themselves but always closing their fists around shadows.
'Those invisible wounds require a whole different type of caregiving that I don't think people are really recognized for yet,' said their mom, Rachel.
In fact, when she applied to enroll in VA's Program of Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers, targeted toward veterans who need significant help with self-care, she was denied.
'I don't give him a bath, I don't put on his socks, but I do safety and protection and they discounted it completely,' she said. 'I think the VA needs to step up and take care of their families.'
Neither of VA's caregiver support programs include children. A VA spokesperson wrote in January that there are no plans to expand their offerings to reach hidden helpers, but pointed out that a proposed federal rule modifying the program Rachel had applied to was open for public comment.
Military caregiving families did not weigh in en masse for inclusion of children; by the time the public comment period closed, only a few of the rule's 842 public comments made mention of minors.
Hidden helpers do have some muscle behind them. Sens. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, and John Boozman, an Arkansas Republican, reintroduced the Helping Heroes Act in late February, which would establish a family support program, designate family coordinators at every VA medical center and help connect military caregiving families with resources.
The act would also require the VA to collect data on these families' experiences, the better to understand and respond to their needs. So far, long-term data doesn't exist.
A spokesperson for the Elizabeth Dole Foundation said the act would be a 'huge deal,' requiring the VA, for the first time, to target military caregiving families with programs and services.
'There is bipartisan agreement that the VA can help connect these families with programs and networks that provide exactly this type of assistance and break down barriers for these hidden helpers,' Boozman said in an email to The War Horse.
But with the VA entangled in a massive downsizing, there is skepticism over the fate of a bill that is being introduced this session for a third time.
Despite the many hardships of young caregivers, they say their experiences have made them strong, compassionate and selfless.
Kylie Briest has made a profession of caregiving. She graduated from the University of South Dakota in 2023 and works as a NICU nurse. She's not just good with the tiny babies who need her help. She knows how to take care of the whole family.
Her brother, Connor Briest, just joined the same National Guard unit their father was in. 'He's seen Dad sacrifice everything, he knows the cost, and for him to still sign up to be in the same unit and to carry out that oath ... I think it's pretty awesome,' said their mom, Jenny.
Delany in North Carolina said taking care of Kimmy has made her kinder, more empathetic and more observant — always primed to notice if someone needs help. 'I definitely think it's shaped me for the better,' she said, 'able to see that kind of struggle and also have the courage to help.'
In Virginia, Michael started a club at his school for kids like him, who care for wounded warrior parents. He wants them to know they're not alone.
Michael has been deeply affected by the power of stories he's heard from military veterans like his dad, and he wants to play a role in keeping them alive. Maybe he'll teach military history, maybe he'll join the fight himself. He's thinking of enlisting in the Navy.
'Someone has to do it,' he said.
That's a motto he's taken from caregiving. There is dinner to cook and dishes to wash. There are stories to remember and tell. There are people to take care of. Someone has to do it.
If you have a story to share about a young family member helping care for a disabled veteran, we'd like to hear it. We may use it in an upcoming feature. Send us an email at [e-mail]
This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.