Caregiving and experiences of health , illness and coping in the context of pediatric and adolescent HIV and poverty

The contextual challenges in the context of HIV negatively impact the social ecology of the families. The consequences of this are that it adversely impacts the psychosocial functioning of caregivers and health and well‐being of the children. The findings showed that caregiving is performed, not only in the context of maternal HIV infection, but also in the context of inadequate material and financial resources and single‐head households where women assume the primary caregiving role. Caregiving is also complicated by the issue of maternal death and abandonment, where relatives (i.e. mainly grandparents) assume the role of the primary caregivers of children infected with HIV. On the other hand, emerging studies that started to focus on enhancing resilience in children whose caregiver is HIV positive holds promise to the fact that adequate interventions can have long‐lasting benefits on the developmental and psychological trajectory of HIV‐positive children and their HIV‐positive caregivers. Consequently, the link between poverty and HIV/AIDS has been established, and its impact on perinatal, infancy and early‐childhood development outcomes is clearly documented.