Last week, I wrote about the gray wave cresting rightnow in the U.S. I showed the statistics from Kaiser Family Foundation about how confident people are about this influx and massive change in demographic. The respondents were pretty evenly split about who should be responsible for the costs and needs of an aging populace. Let’s look a little more closely at those answers about the individual and family being responsible for that care.
An overwhelming majority, three-quarters, of respondents think that it is a natural duty of children to care for their parents as they age. (Although only 58% of those who are aged 65+ believe their children have a duty to care for them.) Almost as many people who stated they believed it was a child’s duty to take care of their parents – 71% – reported they wanted to die at home. (It is assumed from the natural decline of old age.)
Traditionally, we did live together, intergenerationally under the same roof, or next door or down the street, and it is comforting to believe that we will age the same way. But in today’s society where more and more of us must work more and more hours for more and more years, this idyllic arrangement is inconvenient and unrealistic for most of us. The truth is we, as individuals and families are not ready for getting older. Few of us have made plans to address how to care for our spouse or parent or how much that care will cost.
Studies and statistics about long-term care show that about 95% of the population of those aged 65+ do live at home in the community. Of those, 54% live with a spouse and 16% live with a child. The remaining amount, about 30%, live alone, and the number of those living alone increases as they age and spouses die. The most recent numbers show that about 2.4% of senior adults live in nursing homes (not counting the over 900,000 in assisted living facilities.)
According to the most recent statistics, about 70% of those aged 65+ will require some type of long-term care – skilled nursing facility, assisted living or in their own home – during their lifetime. This care mostly consists of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and can include someone who needs help consistently with grooming, bathing, toileting, preparing or eating meals, taking medications correctly and other things. Help with those activities may be provided by a family member, especially early in the care recipient’s decline, but may eventually result in more than the spouse, child or other family member can provide.
- 64% of seniors receiving help with ADL need help bathing
- 57% need help walking
- 48% need help dressing
- 40% need help with going to the bathroom
- 29% need help with bed transfer
- 19% need help eating
The average person receiving some sort of ADL assisted living long-term care needs this increasingly complex care for about three years before dying. However, the length of time needed for assistance with ADL for some diseases, such as people living with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, can be 10 – 20 years in some instances. While many of us make the assumption that we will care of our spouse or our parent, we often do not have a realistic expectation of what that care costs us financially and holistically over the course of many years. This unpaid and often unassisted care by family caregivers leads to detrimental health affects as caregivers develop “Caregivers Syndrome,” a crisis arriving hand-in-hand with the aging population boom. Check back for more on that next time.
*All quotes are from participants in a caregiver support forum on Facebook from the last two weeks.
