Eldercare

During the past 20 years, research on eldercare has come to dominate the study of intergenerational family relations. When the term eldercare was first used, it referred specifically to helping people suffering from Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia. Over time, eldercare has come to refer to almost any help that adult children give to their parents. As with any [Page 248]activity that takes place within families, the nature of eldercare varies depending on the gender of both the providers and receivers of assistance. As with widowhood, gender stereotyping has led to women's ways of caring being seen as the standard against which the caring that men give is measured.

This entry discusses the type of research that has been done, explores the gender makeup of those giving and receiving care, discusses the differences in care provided by women and men, summarizes the limited research on the experience of receiving care, discusses the differences in the way women and men experience providing care, and provides a gender analysis of policies related to caregiving.

Until 20 years ago, research on caregiving was almost nonexistent. More recently, there has been an explosion of such literature that encourages an image of old people as infirm care recipients who are dependent. This literature often examines eldercare in situations where the recipient suffers from Alzheimer's disease or other kinds of dementia, emphasizes the stress and burden of caregiving rather than the satisfaction derived from the task, and focuses only on a primary caregiver rather than on the web of carers that may include a spouse, children, friends, and paid home-care workers.

Most literature on eldercare discusses the experience of women carers. It usually ignores the reciprocity involved in family relationships and often sees the care recipient as a passive object rather than an active participant in her or his own life. This literature also often uses the term caregiver to refer to people who do not refer to or think of themselves using that term. Rather, they see their actions as an extension of their roles as family members.

Although the term eldercare may imply that taking care of an older person and child care are similar, there are important differences between the two. Child care has a predictable trajectory, but there are likely to be unpredictable crises as well as improvements in helping older relatives. As well, that someone is old does not tell us much about whether that person needs assistance, whereas we have a good idea, enacted in law, about how much care children need at a particular age. In addition, we do not expect children to be able to make decisions about their own care. Older people, on the other hand, have the right to make decisions about care.

The early literature on caregiving sounded an alarm about the burdens of the “sandwich generation” or “generation in the middle.” This warning envisioned that many women would need to take care of their aging parents at the same time that they were caring for their own small children. Although some women may be in this situation, it is more likely that their children will be grown before their own parents might need care. Therefore, the concept of serial caregiving is more appropriate. As well, many older parents do not require care. Thus, those who have the structural potential to become caregivers, that is who have parents who are old, do not necessarily need to provide care for them.

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