Who is caring for the caregivers?

Recently, families in one Canadian city faced the terrible choice of either paying huge fees or having an elderly parent in long-term care in hospital moved hundreds of miles away. Kingston General Hospital had such a serious bed shortage that it began charging long-term care patients $800 a day if they refused to accept a similar bed elsewhere in the province.

Negotiating placing a parent into long-term care permanently is probably the most difficult step adult children make. And often it’s a decision that must be made quickly and during a crisis. Sherri Auger, as an only child, had no one to turn to when both her parents became sick at the same time. First, her 80-year-old father was hospitalized with liver problems, then her mother, 78, with heart disease, which would prove fatal. Although the two of them had been managing quite well at home together, her dad couldn’t carry on alone.

“One day, I had to make the decision to put my dad into long-term care. The next morning, I had to make the decision to take my mother off life support,” she remembers. Her experiences led Auger to start her own business helping families manage eldercare decisions. She counsels her clients to let go of their guilt, which can be overwhelming. There comes a time when “you have to take responsibility for your parents,” she says.

Adult children dealing with these kinds of eldercare issues will find little support from their employers. However, other kinds of help may be on the way. The first backup eldercare program launched in Canada in January when daycare provider Kids & Company opened its site in Calgary. The program offers eldercare by the day, week or month. CEO Victoria Sopik says the idea came from the human resources people she meets with regularly to discuss daycare trends who told her their employees needed help caring for their parents too. Kids & Company partnered with an assisted living centre that is home to 170 seniors. The seniors who attend the eldercare program have access to the hair salon, craft room, Internet café. The program will benefit employees who need a break. One senior executive whose elderly mother lives with her and her young family was thrilled at the prospect of the service. She wanted to plan a holiday with her kids to Disney World but couldn’t leave her mother alone or take her with the family.

“Now, her mom will come to the program while the family is away,” Sopik says.

While we’re often quick to make the leap from child care to eldercare, the two responsibilities are very different. “The end point of caring for an elderly parent is that they may become more demented and they eventually die. Hope is not there,” says Robert Glossop. One of the hallmarks of eldercare is its unpredictability. While the needs of children can be linked to their age, the same is not true for the elderly. Most two-year-olds have similar needs, but the same can’t be said for 82-year-olds. And while children live with their parents, an elderly parent may live in the same home, nearby or halfway around the world. And then there’s the elderly parent-adult child relationship itself, which is often fraught with tension. Usually, it’s the adult child offering help and the aging parent resisting. In a society where we put a high premium on autonomy and individuality, “it’s very difficult and emotional to acknowledge any kind of dependency,” Glossop says.