"In Helping Yourself Help Others, former first lady Rosalynn Carter draws upon her own experiences and those of hundreds of others to offer reassuring, practical advice to caregivers. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic inspired national conversations about the vast undervaluing of unpaid caregiving, the dangers of burnout, and the merits of self-care for relief, Rosalynn Carter was shining a light on these matters and everything else that caregivers confront"--

Most scholars do not consider the long-term nature of caregiving, but rather focus on a specific developmental period (e.g., old age) or a specific disability (e.g., cancer). Yet the most important lessons about caregiving may occur at any age, regardless of disabilities or other limitations. Caregiving is a lifelong process. It begins in a mother’s womb, continues throughout the lifespan, and ends after death. Caregiving Across the Lifespan emphasizes caregiving as a process that occurs throughout one’s life. It discusses infant care, the developmental needs of children and adolescents, the many caregiving issues in adulthood and mid-life, and finally end-of-life care and bereavement. Key coverage includes: Examining caregiving issues across a developmental perspective. Caregiving from infancy through early childhood through end of life. Mid-life and multigenerational bonds and responsibilities. Caregiver identity in older adults. Family caregiving at the end of life. This must-have volume offers a wealth of insights and ideas for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students across the caregiving fields, including psychology, social work, public health, geriatrics and gerontology, and medicine as well as public and education policy makers.

How does caregiving affect health and well-being and what resources help caregivers? This book provides a synthesis of psychological research on caregiver stress and brings attention to the personal, social and structural factors that affect caregivers' well-being and as well as recent behavioral interventions to enhance health.

“The hardest thing is dealing with the rest of the world. And we kind of accommodate our lives around that. But the rest of the world doesn’t.” These poignant words were spoken by Charlotte, a mother and primary caregiver of a five-year-old autistic boy, and her words reference the structural arrangements of our world that shape autism carework today. This book features the voices of fifty primary caregivers of autistic and neurodivergent children who illuminate the process through which laywomen become expert caregivers to provide the best care for their children. Expert caregiving captures an intensification of traditional family carework – meeting dependents’ financial, emotional, and physical needs – that transcends the walls of one’s private home and family and challenges the strict boundaries between many worlds: lay and professional, family and work, private and public, medical and social, and individual and society. The process of becoming an expert caregiver spotlights several interesting paradoxes in sociological literature, particularly regarding gender, family, and medicalization, and often forgotten structural flaws in “the rest of the world.” Throughout the chapters in this book, the expert caregiver is one person who faces unbelievably daunting tasks of filling or reforming persistent institutional gaps, primarily in education and health care, and subverting ableist cultural norms. Without institutional support, answers to their questions, or pragmatic avenues to access resources, lay caregivers become the experts. Their trials and tribulations, especially when navigating the boundaries of professional/lay and private/public worlds, illuminate a type of carework that is increasingly relevant to a growing number of young families caring for neurodivergent, disabled, medically fragile, and/or chronically ill children. These stories offer a vivid picture of the often invisible complex challenges and structural forces that drive individuals to become expert caregivers in the first place.

Family Caregiving in the New Normal discusses how the drastic economic changes that have occurred over the past few years have precipitated a new conversation on how family care for older adults will evolve in the future. This text summarizes the challenges and potential solutions scientists, policy makers, and clinical providers must address as they grapple with these changes, with a primary focus given to the elements that may impact how family caregiving is organized and addressed in subsequent decades, including sociodemographic trends like divorce, increased participation of women in the workforce, geographic mobility, fewer children in post-baby boom families, chronic illness trends, economic stressors, and the current policy environment. A section on the support of caregivers includes technology-based solutions that examine existing models, personal health records, and mobile applications, big data issues, decision-making support, person-centered approaches, crowd-sourced caregiving such as blogs and personal websites that have galvanized caregivers, and new methods to combine paid and unpaid forms of care. - Provides a concise "roadmap" of the demographic, economic, health trends, and policy challenges facing family caregivers - Presents potential solutions to caregiving so that scientists, policymakers, and clinical providers can best meet the needs of families and communities in the upcoming decades - Includes in-depth, diverse stories of caregivers of persons with different diseases who share perspectives - Covers person-centered care approaches to family caregiving that summarize effective community-based services of psychosocial intervention models - Examines how existing efficacious models can more effectively reach and serve individual families

The vast majority of care provided to adults and elders with chronic illness is given in the home, most often by family members. The caregiver's role is daunting; caregiving is often referred to as a 'career,' requiring long hours and arduous tasks. Primary caregivers show higher rates of morbidity and mortality, and caregiving is a major source of stress and burden to caregiving families. Presently, very little support is available to caregivers from either State or Federal agencies. However, awareness of this worsening problem is growing among health professionals and policy makers. The Spectrum of Family Caregiving for Adults and Elders with Chronic Illness is written for individuals in the helping professions who are in roles that interface with or serve family caregivers who are supporting an adult or elder with a chronic condition. The volume includes eight disease-specific chapters written by experts from various disciplines. Each discusses the caregiving role and includes a thorough review of the literature on the characteristics of caregivers and care-recipients, including related care needs, issues, and challenges unique to that chronic illness. Chapters also review the extant literature on caregiver interventions. An Evidence Table is included in each of these chapters so that the reader can easily judge the quality of evidence supporting the intervention studies. Finally, each chapter includes two case studies describing common problems encountered by caregivers, along with descriptions of interventions used to address these problems. The final chapter summarizes the state of the science on caregiving roles and caregiver interventions and discusses the most relevant challenges and barriers faced by today's caregivers and caregiver advocates. This book will be valuable to clinicians and those in the helping professions, as well as academics and researchers with an interest in the study of family caregiving and caregiver interventions, and to health administrators, public officials, and policy makers concerned with chronic illness care and management.