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Caregiving happens in time and place, but geographers’ methodologies to explore where care happens receive scant attention in the literature on caregiving. In this article, we explain our development of a methodological approach to recording and analyzing the dynamics of everyday family caregiving by children and adolescents and how caregiving produces places and spaces that are invested with experiences and emotions. The methodology, which we call Versatile Everyday Emotion Mapping (VEEMethod), draws on the philosophy of care ethics, theoretical frameworks from critical youth and feminist geography and feminist GIS, and participatory practices tailored to working with youth. Referring to data produced by young participants in a multiyear, single-sited study of the everyday experiences of caregiving youth in the United States, we review how VEEMethod offers a robust geographic method and critically consider the challenges of comparing and analyzing incongruous mapping outputs. 

This article examines the U.S. legislative and policy landscape and its historical and contemporary recognition of young people as caregivers and their importance to public health, both as care providers and as a category of special concern for overall wellbeing. Drawing on feminist geographies of health to situate a historical analysis, we aim to answer two key questions: First, what is the history of recognition of caregiving youth in key moments of federal action to address family caregiving needs? Second, how might we use this history to better understand and analyze the patchwork geography of caregiving youth recognition in the U.S. and other countries that similarly lack formal national policy recognition to improve and enhance public health? We use the term patchwork to describe how federal recognition of caregiving youth in broader debates about public health is uneven across both time and space, and contingent upon civil society, non-profit organizations, and researchers working in and with geographically bound communities. Our results illustrate how a focus on the relationships of recognition, both in the past and the present and at local and national scales, reveals a different perspective on caregiving youth in the U.S. with a much more complex history than previously identified. The article describes how relationships established in the absence of federal policy or legislation are sometimes directed towards building more formal recognition, and other times with the goal of changing practices in a specific location.