If you’re caregiving for an aging parent, you aren’t alone. Nearly one in eight adults in the U.S. is caring for an aging parent. Family caregiving is increasingly recognized as a normal (if stressful) phase of the parent/child lifecycle.
You might sit on hold with the insurance company, wash the accumulation of dishes in the sink, check your mom’s blood pressure, help her to the car, drive her to a doctor’s appointment, and pick up the groceries she needs. And that’s only if she doesn’t need help with dressing, feeding, and getting to the toilet, all before or after a long day at work and helping adolescent or young adult children.
Quick pause. Let’s not fall into stereotypes: Older adults are not a needy bunch in general. Support tends to flow downstream from parent to child throughout much of life.
By the end of life, however, many parents find their abilities waning and their need for help increasing. Dementia presents obvious needs for care, but mobility issues, heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions also impede functioning. Recovery from surgery or an acute health problem may require a quick pivot to provide support even when parents are otherwise independent.
Only a third of caregiving families can afford paid assistance. Even with financial resources, finding appropriate healthcare personnel and scheduling them can be challenging.
Enter the caregivers extraordinaire: adult children.
Who Are These Caregivers?
Caregivers for aging parents are as diverse as the population of grown children.
Women disproportionately serve as primary caregivers, but sons are increasingly engaged in caring for parents.
Some grown children manage parental care from a distance, responding to emergency calls, coordinating long-distance services, and making stressful trips. But most caregivers live within a 30-minute drive, and many reside in the same household.
Research shows that better-educated grown children provide more financial and informational support. Grown children with a high school or associate’s degree are more likely to provide hands-on care.
In families with multiple siblings, one child usually takes the lead as caregiver. But as parents decline, available siblings take on increasing tasks, for better or worse.
Regardless, caregivers all share the challenge of caring for a parent.
You Don’t Really Become a Parent to Your Parent
The term “role reversal” is a misnomer. Caring for a parent is nothing like caring for a child. Parenting typical children involves an upward trajectory. Over time, children acquire new abilities, master new skills, and provide endless amusement (I never laughed so hard as when my children were toddlers). You can arrange playdates or hire babysitters, or drop off your child at a friend’s house. You can’t do that with a parent.
Watching the person you love steadily decline is nothing like watching a child take their first step or head to kindergarten. The disintegration of established history is different from building a new relationship with a growing child. Prior history can also rekindle pain and conflict with the parent or with other family members involved in care.
And losing the parent you once had evokes a grieving process. When parents have dementia, they may reach a threshold when they no longer know their children, a profoundly painful transition. But caregiving in general changes the tenor of the bond with a parent.
In sum, when adult children become caregivers, their role expands in many directions, bringing new challenges and stressors. Decisions, difficult conversations, physical demands, and time commitments become part of daily life in ways they were not when parents were independent.
Caregiving can involve rewards, a sense of purpose, cherished moments, and increased closeness from caring for a parent. And knowing you are doing the right thing is reaffirming.
Nevertheless, it is an expansion of an already complicated role as a grown child.
Sandwich Generation or Pizza Slice?
We often hear the term “sandwich generation” tossed around. This term implies that midlife adults are caring for aging parents and young children simultaneously. But only about a quarter of midlife adults caring for parents have a child under the age of 18.
Caregiving Essential Reads
More commonly, midlife adults have young adult children who can assist with the caregiving, providing companionship and monitoring, and filling in when their parents cannot. A student in my course requested an excused absence to care for a grandparent because their parent (the primary caregiver) needed a medical procedure. Likewise, when my father had Parkinson’s disease, my nephew Tommy watched Jeopardy with him every afternoon. Caregiving is often a network, with the tasks sliced up among parties.
Respect Your Parent and Yourself
Caregiving for a parent can reopen old wounds and bring forth new ones.
Almost everyone’s aging parents are stubborn. In one study, 66 percent of aging parents themselves reported being stubborn. Offspring are trying to help, and parents are trying to resist.
That’s the fundamental dilemma: Maintaining dignity while providing help. When my father had Parkinson’s disease, he wore shoes with the laces untied. I bought him new loafers without laces. When I saw him next, he was still wearing shoes with laces untied. He explained that he didn’t need loafers; he already had shoes he liked. It was only then that I realized: I never asked if he wanted new shoes. To paraphrase your high-school writing teacher: Ask, don’t tell.
Sibling dynamics can be problematic. For example, a nearby sibling might carry the burden of care, and a sibling living far away may visit periodically. The parent rallies for those visits, which leads the distant sibling to oppose increasing care. Or the distant sibling notices declines and wants to place the parent in long-term care even though the nearby family has adapted care to those changes. Regardless, if you are a sibling, avoid being the long-distance one who swoops in periodically and gives unwanted input.
Caregivers are talented at self-deprecation. No matter how much you love your parent, caregiving is relentless and objectively demanding. No one can do it with emotional equanimity or infinite patience. If you are a grown child caregiver and are doing the best you can, it is OK to feel frustrated and lonely, and to wish the situation were better. You deserve admiration, not guilt.
If you know a grown child supporting a parent, reach out and say “thank you.” Even better, ask what you can do to help.
