Generational Caregiving: Managing Elderly Parent Expectations
Are generational expectations around caregiving and family habits straining your care relationships with elderly parents and siblings? Family caregiving and complicated relationships can make providing elder care more challenging than it needs to be.
One aspect, known as adverse and positive childhood experiences, ACES and PCES, can have lasting effects on adult children who become caregivers of aging parents. Events young children experience in early relationships with parents or in other life circumstances can negatively impact adult relationships with elderly parents.
Adult children and elderly parents can gain insights and support strategies to help current and younger generations break free from family beliefs and habits around generational caregiving. These family beliefs and habits might include challenging family dynamics, co-dependent behaviors, and complicated relationships, which can translate into emotionally draining elder care situations.
Childhood Experiences
Let’s start by examining adverse childhood experiences. There are two types: interpersonal, between you and another person, and non-interpersonal, which could be related to an accident, an illness, or death.
The interpersonal experiences with parents include physical abuse, emotional abuse, a lack of emotional support, domestic violence, neglectful, critical, or demanding behaviors.
All of these have lifelong effects on parent-child relationships. They can also affect multigenerational caregiving relationships in which an adult child cares for elderly parents while raising young children.
I remember my mother taking me to see my grandfather at the funeral home when I was five years old. This memory, although not negative, sticks in my mind.
I recall standing on the kneeler and touching grandpa’s hand, as he lay in a casket. His hand was cold. It wasn’t a scary situation, probably because he looked like he was sleeping. My mom made the experience seem like it was normal, nothing to be afraid of.
I remember watching my mother kiss my grandfather goodbye. You may have similar or different memories from your childhood.
The Impact of Parental Habits and Behaviors on Children
According to caregiving
research about racial differences, people from non-white ethnic backgrounds—Latinos and blacks—are more likely to experience trauma and adverse childhood events.
These traumas can include witnessing violence, experiencing bullying, living in poverty, or
experiencing material hardships when parents have difficulty paying for housing, food, medical care, utilities, or other expenses. Growing up in a single-parent, single-income family can increase the likelihood of hardships.
Childhood experiences can transfer to learning or educational difficulties, behavioral or emotional challenges like anger, physical aggression, anxiety, or depression, and establishing social relationships. For example, controlling one’s moods, maintaining attention and focus, and self-regulating behaviors.
Generational and Cultural Caregiving Expectations
What happens when an adult child who experienced trauma or adverse events becomes the primary caregiver for an elderly parent? This may be due to birth order, sex, cultural beliefs, or the expectation that caregiving is this child’s role.
If you are the caregiver in these circumstances, you may be drowning in
generational family caregiving expectations and trying to find a way out.
What if you want more from life than being a caregiver who is denied the opportunity to live independently and become financially self-sufficient because of family expectations to care for elderly parents?
The result is that you will—as your parents did—have children and depend on them for your care. This then becomes a generational pattern that supports ongoing dependency.
The Effects of Generational Caregiving Expectations in Families
If you are the primary family caregiver, your siblings may not offer support because they expect you to do it all. Maybe you make caring for elderly parents look easy.
Cultural beliefs about caregiving and ingrained generational expectations affect a primary caregiver’s life. You may feel stuck and unable to escape a care situation.
You may worry about becoming estranged from your family. Or feel that your family will hate you if you remove yourself from the role of caregiver.
Yet, while family is important to you, self-preservation may become even more critical. What happens when career, marriage, health, and friendships fail because your aging parents become the sole focus of your life?
The Effects of Parenting Styles on the Next Generation
Research confirms
that fathers’ parenting styles are highly related to the parenting style in which they were raised. Which means if your grandfather was a strict, uncaring person who emotionally or physically abused your father or your grandmother, then your grandfather’s behavior molded your father’s behavior.
The adverse effects on young children resulting from relationship challenges between a mother and a grandmother can be significant. There can be a trickle-down effect—and not in a positive way—if harmful behaviors, limiting cultural beliefs, and set-in-stone expectations are part of these relationships.
In families where generational issues are complex,
navigating family caregiver relationships and disagreements can be challenging. This happens because of Isolation, distancing, and family members’ refusal to discuss changes around generational caregiving expectations, habits, and beliefs.
Isolation: The Gateway to Elder Abuse
Isolation, caregiver burnout, exhaustion, frustration, and unintentional elder abuse are aspects of caregiving that families rarely discuss. For the caregiver and the person who needs help, life can become increasingly narrow, isolated, and lonely.
Others go on with their lives and rarely notice signs that things may not be going well.
If you are the primary caregiver, there is no time for things you used to do that you loved. There’s probably not even time for you to take care of yourself. You may still be holding down a full-time job – or trying to hold down a full-time job and care for an elderly parent.
If you are an older adult in a care situation experiencing isolation or loneliness due to advancing age, health problems, or income limitations, you may have given up activities that brought you joy.
Caregivers and care receivers spend time together in a not-so-great situation. The parent relies on a single child to provide care. The other children are away, living their lives.
This level of isolation may not result in the best care situation, even if it meets generational caregiving expectations. Family care situations can become unintentionally neglectful or abusive when caregivers become exhausted, burned out, and have difficulty focusing
Unexpected Consequences of Caregiving
The caregiver may not even realize that he or she is neglecting an elderly parent’s health care or social care needs. This lack of recognition may be due to life experiences.
A parent may not have had money for healthcare when the child was young. So today, the adult is unaware of beneficial programs, lacks an understanding of preventive care, and does not know how to navigate the healthcare system.
What parents do not teach their children, their children may never learn unless they are exposed to new information and education at another time in life.
With respect to caregiving, exposure to health, health care, medical and social care, financial planning, and legal planning—all components of caregiving.
It can be hard to see a different way of life if there is no one to discuss the possibilities, and if one does not choose to create a different way of life. This is one impact of generational beliefs.
Caregiving and Dementia
If a caregiver is responsible for an elderly parent or a loved one’s care who is diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s, the time committed can grow to be a 24-hour-a-day and 7-day-a-week job with no end in sight.
People with memory loss can live another 5 to 25 or 30 years. During this time, due to the stress and time involved, the caregiver’s health declines.
Some caregivers die before the people they care for. These are risks that must be discussed with families so that alternative plans can be put in place.
Caregiving: How to Deal With Strained Caregiver Relationships Between Siblings and Elderly Parents
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Watch More Videos About Caregiving, Aging, Health and Healthcare, Financial and Legal Planning on
Pamela’s YouTube ChannelManaging Elderly Parents’ Care Expectations
Caring for elderly parents with dementia or Alzheimer’s and raising children at the same time can have unintended effects on young children. Watching the interaction between a parent and a grandparent who may not get along can leave a young child with memories that last forever.
The question to ask your family is-why pass down expectations, beliefs, habits, and behaviors that no one in the family benefits from family relationships or life opportunities?
Why hold your children back from accomplishing the most they can during their lifetime because you expect them to give up their hopes and dreams to care for you?
While I understand this is the way of many cultures, the younger adults that I counsel want their lives to be different. They are not ready to give up everything to follow cultural expectations, so there may come a point when older generations must recognize this and become more flexible in their expectations and beliefs.
Many families take the easy way out, excusing generational habits by saying, “This is just the way it is” or “This is just the way it was” – rather than considering positive change. Some elderly parents make no effort to change their harmful behaviors, because their parents “were always this way.” Parents find ways to justify destructive life behaviors.
If this is the way of your family, is it time to think differently? To plan differently?
Generational Caregiving: Being Open to Change
Let’s say you are the youngest woman in your family or a son, You want to go to college and have a career rather than getting married and taking care of your elderly parent for the rest of their lives. Why can’t you do this?
There are challenges for family caregivers who want to disrupt family habits and expectations. For example, family caregivers who do it all can find themselves in a losing situation, with family members taking sides.
As a child and today as an adult, do you feel constantly criticized, made to feel guilty for your efforts, and generally unappreciated? While you care for an elderly parent, you dream of having a loving parent.
But you don’t have a parent who loves you the way you want to be loved. This relationship gap in your heart makes you sad. You also may not have close relationships with your siblings who moved out of the house as soon as they could to get away from Mom or Dad.
As the primary caregiver, you’ve made life easier on everyone else in the family – everyone but yourself.
Generational Limitations: When No One Rises Above
A caregiver I know relates generational family habits and caregiving to a bucket of crabs. As one crab struggles to climb out of the bucket, all the other crabs pull the crab back down into the bucket so it cannot free itself.
No one in the family gets to rise above the others.
The problem with being the only crab who tries to escape the family bucket of generational beliefs or habits is that you are continually exposed to behaviors that reinforce habits that hold you back from your hopes, wishes, and dreams.
Your siblings don’t want you to improve your life because they don’t know how or want to make the effort to improve their lives. Your parents may be envious because their parents, your grandparents, held them back. So, they limit your opportunities.
As a caregiver, it can be a struggle to change your life when you know everyone else does not want you to. They want you to remain on familiar ground with relationships that may be unsupportive, toxic, co-dependent, or generationally irrelevant.
Elderly Parents’ Care Assumptions
One of the more common issues families face in generational caregiving is managing interpersonal relationships, resolving family conflict, and navigating change.
In my meetings with caregiver families, many focus on the past rather than exploring possibilities for the future. Some siblings worry more about themselves, their inheritance, and competing with other siblings. Spouses can be in denial about the health problems of their husband or wife.
Elderly parents were not planners. So they don’t want to plan today.
Parents say, “My kids can deal with it when I’m sick.” Which can be a recipe for disaster. What happens when your children refuse to be your caregiver because you never asked them?
These stories, beliefs, and expectations are your family’s identity. They become the caregiver’s identity, limiting future potential and opportunities.
If you are the caregiver, what can you do?
It may not be easy to navigate generational caregiving expectations if you are the caregiver, swept away by endless demands. Make the time
Investigate Other Options for Care
Find family members or friends to help you investigate care options for elderly parents. These might include hiring caregivers to come to your parents’ home, moving parents to an assisted living facility, or a nursing home.
Then look at your parents’ finances. Is there money to pay for care? If not, investigate the state Medicaid program and figure out how it works.
Have your parents completed their legal documents naming power of attorney agents, an executor, or a trustee? Whom would they want, and who will be willing to serve in these roles?
Identify Generational Expectations
Next, identify generational habits and expectations. Examine the effect on the relationship between your parents, your siblings, and you.
- Is your brother or sister the favored one who can do no wrong? Were they appointed to manage your parents’ finances, yet are overly controlling and potentially inconsiderate of others’ needs?
- Did your father emotionally or physically abuse your mother? Did he have affairs? Did he follow in the footsteps of his father who did the same?
- Are there family secrets that affect family relationships?
- Were your parents so strict that once children became 18, they all moved out of the home? And today, no one wants to return to help.
- Are family gossip and triangulation accepted behaviors?
- As the daughter and primary caregiver, are you expected to do what you were told and never stand up for your rights to go to college, marry the person of your choice, or not marry at all?
No family is perfect. Every family has its challenges. Sometimes these are easier to discuss when children become adults.
How families choose to address or ignore these challenges affects future generations. What is your vision for the next generation?
Agree on a Caregiver’s Right to Choose
Generational challenges affecting caregiving relationships can concern the caregiver’s right to choose. To choose not to be the caregiver. Or to caregive for a defined period and then move on.
As the caregiver doing all the work, mental space and time to think are necessary to overcome generational caregiving expectations and work through family habits and relationships.
This is the area where you need your family’s support. There must be agreement to disagree that all of the care responsibilities fall on one child.
If you have been the caregiver, know that it is likely your parents will resist change. As will your siblings, who do not want their lives to change.
Elderly parents and siblings may not want to confront the elephants in the closet that have been ignored or pushed aside for years. The habits, the expectations, the secrets that keep a tight hold on acceptable behavior.
How to Facilitate Change
So, as the caregiver who recognizes these issues and wants change, what skills do you have to facilitate change? Helpful skills include:
- Conflict resolution skills
- Emotional intelligence to discuss uncomfortable topics
- Follow through and accountability
- Organizational, time-keeping, and facilitation skills for meetings
- Knowledge of healthcare, financial, and legal aspects of care
Do you know where to start?
Specific to caregiving, navigating family relationships, healthcare, financial matters, and legal matters, there are resources and support on over 230 episodes of
The Caring Generation podcast.
There are almost 1000 videos on
Pamela’s YouTube Channel. Blog posts, articles,
a book, three online programs, and a contact form to schedule a 1:1 consultation.
The way forward is to involve your family in conversations about caregiving and the caregiver’s right to choose how they live their life. Being a caregiver doesn’t mean doing all the work. It can mean finding others to caregive while the caregiver goes on with their life.
Schedule family meetings with specific agenda topics to discuss the benefits of change and that you will no longer bear all of the current care responsibilities alone or at all.
If your family has difficulty working together because of personality differences and differing opinions,
find an expert who can navigate caregiving issues.Don’t Let Fear of Change Stop You
Fear of change can prevent progress. Even if everyone is committed to change, there still may be challenges.
Times when family members may avoid conversations or fail to attend meetings. The timing of these discussions may not be right for other family members who are too busy or have other priorities.
If they are too busy, share the information with them anyway so that they cannot show up later and change the direction of the progress that has been accomplished. Learn to work with these difficult personalities in a positive manner.
Family disagreements about generational caregiving expectations can be resolved.
- If you are the only person in the family seeking to drive change, the experience can be challenging because you are trying to crawl out of the crab bucket to live a different life. Keep going. You’ll look back on the experience and the knowledge that you gained.
- Work to help others in the family, consider what you are asking, rather than dismissing your concerns.
- Some family members may be more inflexible than others for their own reasons or stories. They may say they want to be supportive, but fall back into bad habits. Hold them accountable for tasks or progress that were discussed and agreed upon.
- The solutions or options you develop may not be perfect for many reasons beyond your control.
- Do your best to avoid hard feelings or resentment
- Reframe differences as a matter of how you want to live your life versus how others want to live theirs.
- Work to reach a middle ground and an agreement on how to manage caregiving expectations.
Improving family relationships around caregiving can be difficult and exhausting. Put n the effort today so you don’t find yourself one or two years down the road in the same place that you are today. Looking back, I should have done something.
While the family caregiver’s needs are often downplayed or dismissed, do not let this happen to you. Your life is as valuable as that of an elderly parent or your siblings.
Don’t give up, keep moving forward to create the life you want.
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