With many of my writing prompts I try to keep them gender neutral, but with this one I wanted to put a male child in this role rather than leave it to either. You can of course change that and use a girl if you want. Either way the character in this prompt has a lot of responsibility on his shoulders, responsibility that shouldn’t really be his.
It is left up to you to decide how many siblings he has and what his relationship with them is. While it is implied that he does realize this isn’t normal, it’s possible that he still does think it’s normal and just needs someone who can help him figure out how to raise his siblings better.
My thoughts on it were more along the lines of he knew it wasn’t normal and it was very difficult for him to keep up, but he loved his younger siblings and isn’t sure what to do. He’s pretty sure that if he tells anyone they will all be removed from their parents home. Depending on the actual condition of the family and laws wherever he lives, this may or may not be true, but in my mind, this is how I saw him thinking.
He wants help. He absolutely wants help. He just doesn’t know where to look to try and get that help or even in what form he should be trying to get that help. All he knows for sure is that if he gets what he considers to be the wrong help things will happen that he doesn’t want to happen. And that is why he keeps doing what he is doing. He is afraid of the consequences of speaking up.
For me this is at least a little based off my own trust issues. No, I didn’t have to raise my younger siblings growing up. No, I never was too worried about someone taking us away, except for once which was ultimately a situation where nothing came of it, I am very thankful to say. And I do think that incident did start my trust issues, because I didn’t understand why it was happening and I did then and still do think that it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
This, however, is not my story. The character in the prompt is not me and while I think it comes from my trust issues, the idea of the situation the character is in does not. His situation is something I cannot fathom having to go through and I honestly don’t know what is the right answer if anyone is in this kind of situation. Since this is meant to be fiction, what would you have your character do, if you decided to put him in that situation?
