More on Family Caregivers
On several occasions I’ve written about the issues of caregivers (the shortage of family caregivers, the financial impact on care giving) so i was interested in this article by Kaiser Health News, A Late-Life Surprise: Taking Care Of Frail, Aging Parents notes the failure of adult children to plan for their roles of caregivers-a role that may last a number of years and even cause the adult child to stop working. The KHN story focuses the profile of a “typical family caregiver, ““When we think of an adult child caring for a parent, what comes to mind is a woman in her late 40s or early 50s,” said Lynn Friss Feinberg, senior strategic policy adviser for AARP’s Public Policy Institute. “But it’s now common for people 20 years older than that to be caring for a parent in their 90s or older.” The story cites a new study from “the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College [which] is the first to document how often this happens. It found that 10 percent of adults ages 60 to 69 whose parents are alive serve as caregivers, as do 12 percent of adults age 70 and older.”
The study shows that “about 17 percent of adult children care for their parents at some point in their lives, and the likelihood of doing so rises with age … because parents who’ve reached their 80s, 90s or higher are more likely to have chronic illnesses and related disabilities and to require assistance, said Alice Zulkarnain, co-author of the study.”
So consider the implications, some of which I mentioned in the above parenthetical in the opening sentence. The article lists the physical wear and tear “on older [caregiver] bodies, which are more vulnerable and less able to recover from physical strain” the potential for psychological stressors which can exacerbate any health issues the older caregiver may have, and social isolation of caregivers. There’s also the financial toll that may come, with “hard-earned savings at risk with no possibility of replacing them by re-entering the workforce.”
The article mentions a number of caregiver resources. The report from the Center for Retirement Research is available here.