Unpaid care for children, seniors on the rise in Canada
Frances Bula, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Louise Holm and her family didn't plan to create a complex network to take care of their 87-year-old father.
But that's what ended up happening anyway.
Holm and her family are becoming more typical every day, as census statistics show that Canadians are all doing more unpaid work all the time at home, both taking care of children and, increasingly, taking care of seniors.
In the Holm family, the sons-in-law do any home-repair jobs needed on Nels Holm's False Creek condo, along with driving him to his regular chelation-therapy sessions and taking him to the racetrack for entertainment.
Louise's older sister, Joanne, takes him to major medical appointments. And Louise spends four hours a week every Friday paying bills, taking him to pick up the prepared meals he gets from a veteran's association, shopping for groceries, ironing, and maybe doing a little cleaning on top of what the paid cleaner already does.
"My dad wants to live on his own and I'd say this just evolved," Holm says.
Holm is a court reporter who has a busy life with her husband, son, daughter, dog and job, aside from caring for her father.
Census statistics released Tuesday show that 18.4 per cent of Canadians said in the 2006 census that they spend time taking care of seniors in their lives, compared to 16.5 per cent in 2001.
People in the field say it's not surprising that has happened for all kinds of reasons.
Seniors are healthier than they used to be, so they stay in their own homes longer. But it means their adult children then chip in more with help to keep things going, says Tammy Watson, the director of a small West Vancouver-based home care service called Home Care West. Her staff often ends up working with the adult children to provide a network of care in cases like that, with the family taking on some chores and assigning others to paid home-care workers.
"Ten years ago, an 85-year-old was less capable," says Watson, who has been involved in private-care nursing for almost 20 years. That meant they had no choice about going to a care home. Now, they're healthier, there's better technology available and there's a trend to staying independent as long as possible. So they stay home and that means the adult children jump in to fill the gaps, says Watson.
That ability to fill in has been encouraged by some workplaces, where companies have policies that allow employees to take days off to care for their parents.
And adult children seem to want to do more.
"In some cases, the kids themselves could be in their 60s and they're winding their careers down so they're more ready to do these things. For others, even though they're very busy people, they still want to be part of that care."
There's another factor that could have led to the jump, says Watson. That was the shift several years ago in B.C. that reduced government home-support services.
"What was withdrawn in some cases was meal preparations and housekeeping. So I think families had to jump in," said Watson.
The cuts to other parts of the system also meant some people didn't want to put their parents in care homes, because the staffing was not as good as it used to be.
It looks as though the trend to caring for seniors is only likely to keep growing.
"It's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better," says University of B.C. sociology professor James White. "The system is not geared up. We're short on doctors, we're short on nurses, facilities are already crowded and the boom hasn't even hit yet. There's no social supports. What in the heck is going to happen?"
The census statistics showed that it's still women doing more of the seniors' care than men, although men have shown significant increases in the amount they spend on both senior and child care.
About one-fifth, almost 21 per cent, of women spent some time looking after seniors in 2006. The share of men providing care increased at a slightly faster pace, from 13.6 in 1996 to 15.7 in 2006.
In B.C., the numbers were slightly lower for 2006 than the national average, with 20 per cent of women spending some time looking after seniors and 14.7 per cent of men.
fbula@png.canwest.com
