The Cost of Love: Emotional Labour and Moral Tensions in the Lives of Chinese Young Carers

Like adults, children also provide care. This article explores the emotional labour of young carers who care for ill or disabled family members in China, a context where children's caregiving remains largely invisible in both policy and scholarship. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with 30 young carer families in both urban and rural China, this study investigates how children manage, suppress, and perform emotions to sustain family life in the absence of formal welfare support. Building on Hochschild's (2012) concept of emotional labour, the analysis reveals how culturally embedded scripts, such as filial piety, operate as 'feeling rules' that legitimise and normalise children's affective contributions. Findings demonstrate the ambivalent nature of children's informal caregiving: while caregiving can foster pride, maturity, and recognition, it also generates exhaustion, guilt, and role confusion, extending beyond conventional notions of parentification. Situating these dynamics within the political economy of care, the study shows how children's emotional labour operates as an unacknowledged subsidy to social reproduction, masking structural inequalities and welfare retrenchment. By recognising children as consequential emotional actors, the article reconceptualises care as both a moral practice and a site of inequality, advancing young carers scholarship beyond Global North contexts.