Coping With Stress While Caring for Elders
Caregivers cope with stress, mixed emotions about aging parents
June 26, 2007 — -- It's the little things that keep Betty Seckinger going when her day-to-day responsibilities caring for her 84-year-old mother-in-law, overseeing her 86-year-old mother and babysitting grandkids get to be a bit much.
To Seckinger of Winter Haven, Fla., once- or twice-a-year gambling trips, travels with her husband, Ralph, and sometimes overindulging on food are stress relievers for a routine filled with taking care of family members.
"You deal with a lot of ups and downs. You get frustrated," she says. "You want to be able to help your parents, but you don't want your own health to go downhill."
Experts say adults coping with an aged parent struggle with a range of emotions. Ambivalence is common -- even a good relationship doesn't prevent mixed feelings. There's often some anger and resentment as unresolved family issues resurface. And there's plenty of guilt.
"No matter how much you love your parents, it's going to disrupt your life," says Roberta Satow, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College.
A USA TODAY/ABC News/Gallup poll of 500 boomers with living parents found that 31 percent of them are providing financial or personal care assistance to a parent. Slightly less than half of those providing help say it has caused them some stress or a great deal of stress, show the poll, conducted May 24-June 3.
Gail Gibson Hunt, president of the National Alliance for Caregiving, a non-profit group in Bethesda, Md., says caregivers seem to feel they're not doing enough. "Lots of times they will sacrifice their job, their other family members, sometimes their own kids or their spouses to take on this responsibility for their parents," she says.
Whether adult children have day-to-day caregiving tasks or periodically swoop in from afar, the ever-mounting difficulties faced by their elderly parents keep life out of balance. Emergencies and interruptions become commonplace as this legion of empty nesters, retirees and the sandwich generation still raising kids navigates the uncharted waters of today's increased longevity. Seckinger and millions of others like her are baby boomers finding themselves as direct or indirect caregivers for an aging parent in various stages of need.
