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Sometimes it starts with a few simple tasks. You, the adult child agree to help Mom or Dad get to doctors’ appointments. Then you have to step in so they can keep their medications straight and take them on time. It’s supervision. But gradually your responsibilities increase as your aging loved ones decline. You need to hire caregivers and they need your oversight. Over a number of months or even a few years, you find yourself in charge of round-the-clock care management. The gradual increase in your duties takes its toll.
Caring for an aging parent
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Dutiful adult children want to do what is right for their parents. They take on parent-related tasks that occupy a lot of time. This leads to stresses that may remain unaddressed, as the caregiving adult child also must balance their own life responsibilities at home, at work and elsewhere. Health experts uniformly advise that if we don’t manage our life stresses adequately we will pay the price in our bodies and our mental health. If this sounds like you, consider these things:
The Size of the Problem
Nearly 48 million Americans currently provide unpaid care to an adult family member, with the majority caring for aging parents. As the U.S. population ages—with adults over 65 projected to number 80 million by 2040—this figure is expected to rise dramatically.
The responsibilities of caregiving can be very broad, including a lot more than transportation to medical appointments and doing laundry. As we see in the example below, it also can require help with all the things an assisted living or home care agency may not provide. If the person is living at home, it can include handling finances and household maintenance. And then there is the elders’ emotional need for support and companionship, which the stressed-out caregiver may make every effort to also give them on top of everything else.
These tasks, particularly when they accumulate over time, invariably create ongoing pressure on the one in charge. Sometimes, additional stress arises from the feeling that the primary caregiver adult child is unfairly burdened while other siblings fail to assist. Anger and resentment complicate the picture. That is yet another thing the caregiver may be unprepared or ill equipped to manage!
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