[toomuchtodo]

> My spouse and I have spent at least three months of this year helping older relatives, and I worry it'll consume a bigger chunk of next year.

I’m curious about this mindset. Why would you worry about it consuming more time? Isn’t that what family is for?

[jen_h]

Most people want to be independent and to have their children and grandchildren to visit as guests, not full-time caregivers. We are very blessed that we're in the position to be able to easily pop from state to state helping and can work wherever we happen to be, but at the same time, they want to live their lives independently, too.

Also, think about where caregivers might have to relocate and how they might alter their futures by spending it caretaking. I have family members who sacrificed a very significant amount of their adult lives taking care of their parents and missed out on their own lives and wrecked their own health doing it (it's hard mental and physical work, and in some cases can be very thankless).

I also know people who gave up everything to take care of their parents and ended up homeless after their deaths.

[toomuchtodo]

I’ve structured my career (work from home, not management, no on call) and my finances (in my 30s) so when my father needs care (my mother has already passed), we’ll move him in with us and if I need to take time off to care for him, I can. This is an implicit generational contract IMHO. My parents raised and cared for me for a third of their life, it would be unreasonable to not do the same in return.

Why would we expect others to do this work? Or that it would scale to do so?

[jen_h]

Have you also structured your finances so that you can take care of aunts and uncles and in-laws and grandparents? What about older relatives without help that live in different states? I think you're making a lot of assumptions about others here, and it (and all of the edits you're making to your comment) seems kind of silly and unnecessary. Have a nice night.

[toomuchtodo]

Yes, I am willing and able to take in any family necessary, regardless of relation. If they’re unwilling to relocate, we are (I work from home, and we live light).

I’m not saying it’s easy, by any means. I’m saying it’s necessary, unless you’re financially wealthy enough to outsource all of the support services elder care requires, which most people cannot (I am not at that wealth level, but I can take time off to provide care).

My intent is not to poke at you specifically by any means, but to point out these are systemic problems the country will face as an older generation ages and the wealth doesn’t exist to provide them white glove service until death. The solution is not startups, it’s community and family (along with having enough savings, FMLA, and vacation time).

[msteffen]

> the wealth doesn’t exist to provide them white glove service until death. The solution is not startups, it’s community and family (along with having enough savings, FMLA, and vacation time).

The linked article seems to suggest that adult day cares actually work best when resources are limited, because they allow older people to be independent for longer (which is good regardless of the resources available):

> When they both retired in 2004, they tried staying at home, but found it hard to manage on their own due to Beatriz’s bad knees, Guillermo’s health woes, including quintuple bypass surgery, and their youngest son Ray’s schizophrenia and depression. > ... > The prevalence of adult day cares in the Valley, which is 90 percent Hispanic, is part cultural, part economic. Hispanic seniors are more likely than Anglos to live at home with their children or other family members. The Valley also has a persistently high poverty rate and a percentage of seniors with diabetes, heart disease, depression and dementia that is alarmingly higher than the national average. > ... > Adult day cares like those in the Valley can offer a kind of middle way between round-the-clock care by family caregivers — who frequently burn out and experience physical and mental problems themselves — and expensive, sometimes impersonal nursing home care.

[toomuchtodo]

As the article mentions, it works for Hispanic culture. TBD how the rest of aging America handles it.

[DoreenMichele]

There can be gender differences at play. As a guess, jen_h sounds like a female name.

Women tend to be saddled with caretaking work in a way that can easily be abusive. In some cultures, the social contract is that women get taken care of financially for doing the women's work, but that's not universal.

White American culture can be very ugly about treating women like they are all undeserving, lazy mooches who need a paycheck on top of their obligation to provide care for relatives. Not all subcultures do that.

So it's possible that there are both cultural and gender differences that involve a lot of implicit, baked in assumptions that neither of you are explicitly spelling out in comments and are the source of different viewpoints.

Without addressing such, you may be unable to reach some kind of agreement because you can't even effectively communicate.

[toomuchtodo]

These are great points as usual. To be clear, my assumptions are simply that there are not enough available resources where elder care will be cheap and children will not be bothered with their care. Sacrifices will need to be made (but that’s an internal discussion for each family to make), and plans should be made accordingly. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst. Japan is a glimpse of what the future looks like, and technology/startups didn’t fix their elder care issues. People just die old, alone, and forgotten.