The MidLife Caregiver - Who Are You?

A caregiver is:

“someone who is involved in helping someone else manage the tasks of living” (A. H. Zimmer)

Parents care for young children, and adult children are often caregivers for their elders, who have become frail and more dependent.

There’s a wide range of what constitutes caregiving. On one end of the continuum we could place the person who lives with their parent and cares for them 24/7, while on the other end might be the daughter who lives on the other side of the country and hires someone to manage and look after their parent.

In the middle we could place, in no particular order, a son who looks after finances, a daughter who visits her mother regularly in their nursing home and takes her on outings, the daughter-in-law who drives her father-in-law to adult daycare, the daughter who hires and manages in-home care staff, and so on.

The issue of care giving and caregiver burnout is a woman’s issue as about 75% of caregivers are women. Most are between 35 and 64 years of age. Two-thirds have jobs in addition to their care giving. These statistics are from the Us Department of Health, Women’s Services.

The value of this unpaid care provided mostly by women is difficult to gauge, but is estimated at $148 to 188 billion in the US.

Many of our elders live longer now than they did when we were growing up. That factor, along with health care cuts means that women are doing more and more unpaid work, and doing it up to an older age. So sometimes we have young seniors caring for elderly seniors.

Many caregivers, (37% per the US census), are the only ones providing unpaid care to their loved one. It is a very stressful and demanding role. Many become so stressed they have burned out physically, mentally and spiritually.

It’s important that we get very clear about how much responsibility we are willing and able to take on for our aging parent’s care, and also why we are make the choices we make. The clearer we are about our priorities, the easier it is for others to understand where we’re coming from.