Adult Daughter Caregivers

Abstract

As part of the discussion on resource allocation for the aged, it crucial to ask not only about who the family caregivers are and whether they need assistance, but also to ask how an understanding of the obligation to give care can contribute to a more just allocation. This work examines only one type of family caregiving--that of adult children to parents--focusing particularly on the experience of adult daughters as caregivers. l offer a conceptual analysis of the basis of filial obligations as a resource for dealing with some of the dilemmas experienced by these caregivers. The stereotype that the elderly the United States are abandoned by their families and warehoused nursing homes a myth.[1] Only 5 percent of the elderly the U.S. are institutionalized. Nine ten of the disabled elderly not nursing homes receive unpaid care from relatives and friends. Up to 7 million Americans are unpaid caregivers to the elderly, with the majority of caregivers being women.[2] Adult daughters and daughters-in-law not only provide the principal help to older people who care for disabled spouses but are also the primary caregivers to the more than 9 million widowed older people who are dependent.[3] The current average caregiver to the elderly forty-five years old, female, and married. Among children who are primary caregivers, daughters outnumber sons three to one.[4] Gender-Specific Filial Caregiving According to Elaine Brody, one of the most dominant and powerful shared themes of women's filial caregiving experience is their fundamental acceptance that parent care a woman's role. Brody goes on to say that in virtually every culture, the nurturing role belongs to women, no matter how it has come about.[5] The predominance of adult daughters and daughters-in-law as caregivers at the very least enforced sociological, cultural, and religious traditions. Parents are not equally esteemed all cultures, of course, and filial obligations for care may vary between duties to one's own or one's spouse's parents. Consider, for example, salient features of several influential Western (and one Eastern) traditions. Some traditions, like the Greek, honor the father above all; others, such as Islam, esteem the mother over the father. And still other cultures expect a daughter to honor both her parents equally (Judeo-Christian) or her in-laws after marriage (Imperial Chinese). So too, a woman's first duties as caregiver may be to her own parents (as the Christian and Jewish traditions), though she may also be to assist caring for her husband's parents. Or duties of filial care to her in-laws may supersede a woman's obligations to her own parents once she has married, as Classical Greece and Imperial China.[6] The focus of filial obligations the written historical texts on what sons owe to their parents, with emphasis on what sons owe to fathers. In the patriarchal traditions listed above, women marriage are necessary helpers to husbands fulfilling their filial obligations. Family caregivers are predominantly female because these societies assign the role to the feminine sphere. In Revolutionary America as well, filial duty was gender-specific, with sons to provide financial contributions and daughters to provide the hands-on care and nurture of aged parents. Women perceived their responsibility as both appropriate and necessary within the prescribed limits of woman's sphere.[7] Current data on the effects of women's changing roles and attitudes toward responsibility for care of elderly adults reflect significant generational differences concerning sharing of parent care and household tasks by men and women. In a study of three generations of women, the youngest generation was most favor of egalitarian gender roles.[8] Interestingly, the study revealed that those the youngest generation were strongly favor of family caregiving and yet at the same time they expected to work much longer than their mothers and grandmothers had to work when they were young women even though the grand-daughters to marry and to have as many children as their mothers and grandmothers. …