Publisher Description

Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.

Seeking to assist professionals and care providers looking to develop culturally-based techniques for the care of dementia-afflicted elders, this book first presents the need for culturally sensitive care, and then describes how this method of care may be utilized, developed, approved, and evaluated. The book includes numerous case studies, and highlights the authors' model.; Dealing with facets of intercultural practice, Part 1 of the text centres around the professional or provider already engaged or seeking to engage in day-to-day contact with ethnically diverse clientele. The emphasis is on highlighting those skills which serve the practitioner to establish intercultural rapport on their daily cross- ethnic assignments. The central tenet of this section is that the worker's attention has to be on maintaining both the dementia-affected elders' and the ethnic family members' cultural dignity.

"This volume represents a major step forward in the literature by placing its focus squarely on the caregiving context, its dimensions and how it shapes the process and outcomes of family care. The chapters locate care within the family, rather than a single individual....The family, in turn, in embedded within a larger cultural, community, and social context....These explorations of context will give us a broader view of how caregiving occurs. It will help us improve our theories about care and about the family's role in contemporary society....Care of our elders is an enduring and yet evolving part of life. The focus on context will help us understand, support and learn from the ways that families meet the challenges involved."--from the foreword by Steve H. Zarit, PhD, Professor and Head, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Pennsylvania State University Here, in Caregiving Contexts, the editors and their chapter authors explore the ways in which demographic change will influence the availability of caregivers and how divergent welfare and ideological systems will affect care among family members and between family and formal care systems. They also discuss the differences in experience between spousal and adult child caregivers, special circumstances such as child or adolescent caregivers, and government and workplace policies that are available to support caregivers in the United States and in some European countries. No other volume is available on caregiving which explores the sociocultural, familial, and sociopolitical contexts that effect both care decisions and outcomes.

Global inequalities make it difficult for parents in developing nations to provide for their children. Some determine that migration in search of higher wages is their only hope. Many studies have looked at how migration transforms the child–parent relationship. But what happens to other generational relationships when mothers migrate? Care Across Generations takes a close look at grandmother care in Nicaraguan transnational families, examining both the structural and gendered inequalities that motivate migration and caregiving as well as the cultural values that sustain intergenerational care. Kristin E. Yarris broadens the transnational migrant story beyond the parent–child relationship, situating care across generations and embedded within the kin networks in sending countries. Rather than casting the consequences of women's migration in migrant sending countries solely in terms of a "care deficit," Yarris shows how intergenerational reconfigurations of care serve as a resource for the wellbeing of children and other family members who stay behind after transnational migration. Moving our perspective across borders and over generations, Care Across Generations shows the social and moral value of intergenerational care for contemporary transnational families.

A moving, intimate, and compassionate book that chronicles the experiences of a group of long-term caregivers—spouses, parents, and friends of the elderly and ill—illuminating critical issues of old age, end-of-life care, medical reform, and social policy—and “providing comfort in the time-honored form of shared experience” (The Minneapolis Star-Tribune). In 2010, journalist Nell Lake began sitting in on the weekly meetings of a local hospital’s caregivers support group. Soon members invited her into their lives. For two years, she brought empathy, insight, and an eye for detail to understanding Penny, a fifty-year-old botanist caring for her aging mother; Daniel, a survivor of Nazi Germany who tends his ailing wife; William, whose wife suffers from Alzheimer’s; and others with whom all caregivers will identify. Witnessing acts of devotion and frustration, lessons in patience and in letting go, Lake illuminates the intimate exchanges of caregiving and care-receiving and considers important and timely social issues: How can we care for the aging, ill, and dying with skill and compassion, even as the costs and labors of care increase? How might the medical profession take into account the needs of caregivers as well as patients? In The Caregivers Nell Lake shares a thoughtful and tenderly reported depiction of the real-life predicaments that evoke these crucial questions. With more and more people spending their late years ill and frail, and 43 million Americans already caring for family members over age fifty, this is an important chronicle of a widely shared experience and a public concern. “The Caregivers is as elegantly constructed as a novel, but more than that, Lake writes about these people with such warmth and vividness that they feel as memorable as our favorite fictional characters. It is a beautifully written account” (The Boston Globe).

Known for a tradition of Confucian filial piety, East Asian societies have some of the oldest and most rapidly aging populations on earth. Today these societies are experiencing unprecedented social challenges to the filial tradition of adult children caring for aging parents at home. Marshalling mixed methods data, this volume explores the complexities of aging and caregiving in contemporary East Asia. Questioning romantic visions of a senior’s paradise, chapters examine emerging cultural meanings of and social responses to population aging, including caregiving both for and by the elderly. Themes include traditional ideals versus contemporary realities, the role of the state, patterns of familial and non-familial care, social stratification, and intersections of caregiving and death. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Korea.