Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Family and Care

Here's a discussion about obliging people to care for aging parents.  

I think this is a bad idea, because elder care requires skills  that not everyone has or can learn.  That's a practical limitation, aside from moral issues.  Mandating a specific care arrangement like this means trapping a lot of elders with inadequate care.  It also traps adult offspring in a situation they may be wholly unfit for.  This can lead to problems such as murder, suicide, abandonment, neglect, depression, etc. which already plague elders and their caregivers.  

Surely senior citizens need to be supported if they can no longer meet all their own needs.  Ideally, family will take on at least some of that.  But it doesn't always work that way, and people need flexible options so as not to create human wreckage unnecessarily.
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  • 4 comments
e_scapism101

e_scapism101

July 15 2013, 14:15:39 UTC 7 years ago

I just finished a CNA course and am waiting to take my state boards to become a Geriatric Nursing Assistant, specifically to care for the elderly. It definitely requires skills and there are things that you should know before caring for the elderly. The need to be aware of skin breakdown alone is vital. Forcing unskilled - and, in many cases, unwilling - people to care for the elderly is just such a bad idea. Dealing with your relatives can be so fraught to begin with, adding the extra stresses of physical deterioration and possibly mental deterioration? Putting such a vulnerable population in that situation just makes me shudder.
ysabetwordsmith

Thank you!

ysabetwordsmith

July 15 2013, 18:47:04 UTC 7 years ago

I appreciate the professional perspective. Those are good points.

One thing that bothers me is the "have your cake and eat it too" approach that society takes more often these days. When people need something and take alternative approaches to get it, making their own decisions, there's a charge of "practicing medicine without a license." But when they're pressured or forced to care for themselves or family members, somehow that ceases to apply -- even though the technical level of care demanded of them is often far greater.

Deleted comment

ysabetwordsmith

Yes...

ysabetwordsmith

July 15 2013, 18:37:40 UTC 7 years ago

... and on women, who already shoulder the vast majority of this work, unpaid more often than paid.

Basically, if people are forced to do work they can't refuse, that is slavery and it is not okay.
cissa

cissa

July 24 2013, 20:31:13 UTC 7 years ago

There is no way I am going to do squat for my aged and abusive mother, who said explicitly that she refused to treat me with basic civility. Hells, no.