[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.