Issues — Caregiving
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ShareHelp Wanted: Home Care Aides
The need for personal care providers is great—and growing. By helping elders eat, dress, bathe and so on, they make it possible for many to age in place. These aides are almost always women, many are 55 and older, and they live on the verge of poverty, according to an article in Pacific Standard magazine.
Coordinating Elder Care Just Got Easier
In a crisis, family and friends may be eager to help but don’t know how. This Wall Street Journal article evaluates several care-management websites that can be used to organize helpers, schedule rides for the patient, post progress updates and even find ways to help pay medical costs.
Sticker Shock: The Cost of Caregiving
In his Caring for our Parents blog, author Howard Gleckman writes about ways family caregivers forfeit their own financial security to attend to the needs of older loved ones who are losing their independence. The high price of caregiving may surprise you.
Your Marriage or Your Mom?
How do you cope when sharing life with both a spouse and an aging parent? In an article in Aging Well magazine, a geriatric care manager reveals strategies to keep caregiving from undermining a marriage.
A Son Struggles with His Father's Decline
In this Atlantic essay, an adult son candidly shares his struggle to honor and care for his aging father. He wonders if today's overwhelmed caregivers might organize to demand better support services, the way the women's movement organized for equality in the 1960s.
Three Mothers, Three Countries, Three Different Endings
In a Washington Post article, Sara Mansfield Taber compares notes with friends whose aging mothers live in England and France, contrasting their lives with her own mother's experience in the United States. All were retired on government pensions. How do you imagine each fared?
Bittersweet Experiences
Jane Gross reflects on her role as caregiver to her mother in a series of four New Old Age blogs taken from her book, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for our Aging Parents and Ourselves (2011). Published in the New York Times, the excerpts reveal the pain she felt as she accepted her mother's decline and describe an emotional visit to the emergency room, her mother's ordeal during an MRI, and the decision to place her mother in a nursing home.
The Daughters’ Dilemma
Relationships can become difficult between parents and the adult children who are their caregivers. When that happens, daughters take it much harder than sons, according to a study reported by HealthDay, published in U.S. News & World Report.
Who Are the Caregivers?
Who needs long-term care in this country, who provides it, and where does that happen, at home or in an institutional setting? The Family Caregiver Alliance has compiled a fascinating fact sheet that is a portrait of our nation’s long-term caregivers. Hint: They are women.
Decision Time with an Aging Parent
You have realized that mom or dad can no longer live independently, but where do you get information on how to manage their emotional, financial and medical needs? This Patient Money column in the New York Times offers guidelines.
Caregivers, Caring for Each Other
In this New York Times article, Alix Kates Shulman introduces a support group of a dozen women and men whose spouses or partners have dementia. During meetings, they speak of feelings, of being deserted by friends, of missing companionship and sex, and other matters they can’t talk about elsewhere. Shulman wrote a memoir about her husband's dementia, To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed (2009).
After-School Caregivers
In the most heartbreaking stories of role reversal, an article for CNN.com reports that kids as young as 6 are caring for parents with Alzheimer's and other types of dementia.
Caregivers to Clone
In the Family pages of Readers Digest, Camille Peri tells of four amazing caregivers who went the distance to assist friends and loved ones. Muhammad Ali's wife is one who shares her inspirational story.
It's Complicated
Adult children whose parents divorced and remarried may be doing double the amount of caregiving as aging parents and stepparents require assistance, notes this New Old Age blog in the New York Times.
Our Mission
The Silver Century Foundation promotes a positive view of aging. The Foundation challenges entrenched and harmful stereotypes, encourages dialogue between generations, advocates planning for the second half of life, and raises awareness to educate and inspire everyone to live long, healthy, empowered lives.
"It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment; in these qualities old age is usually not poorer, but is even richer."
Cicero (106-43 BC)