Are You Living the Daughter Trap?
Laurel Kennedy, author of The Daughter Trap: Taking Care of Mom, Dad... And You, explains why women are the ones to assume the responsibility of caring for elder parents, and how daughters can get their siblings to help!
Commitment Now.com: In The Daughter Trap, you reveal a disturbing truth, which is that regardless of how many husbands and siblings factor into the equation, it is almost always the daughter who gets handed the primary role in taking care of aging parents. What inspired you to write a book about this phenomenon?
Laurel Kennedy: It was my personal experience that inspired me to write this book, although I didn’t have most of the sibling issues. I wrote it for my friends – and discovered that this is a core and visceral issue to which most people can immediately relate.
CommitmentNow.com: What are some of the cultural factors that result in daughters’ assuming the role of caregivers for aging parents?
Laurel: Women are proactive by nature – we help without thought of financial or personal toll.
We are also socialized to be caregivers. As young girls we play with dolls, which translates into care giving later in life.
Because women act as the primary caregivers for our aging parents, we go in and out of the work force and are often unable to focus on earning promotions. We lose 11.5 years of our careers to care giving, as opposed to the average of 1.3 years men lose! The result? Over the course of a lifetime, a woman forfeits approximately $659,000 in earnings!
CommitmentNow.com: You raise an interesting - and surprising - point: that despite the fact that fifteen million baby boomer women are caring for elderly parents, there is no political action group to lobby businesses or Congress on behalf of the collective interests of care taking boomers! Why do you think this is?
Laurel: That’s a great question! This is actually a relatively new phenomenon, which is in part a result of a new social and economic reality. It used to be that a person worked at one company for his/her entire career, before retiring with a pension. This is no longer the case. People change jobs much more frequently, most companies no longer offer pensions and the stock market is unpredictable. People are not focusing on elder care issues – they’re too busy trying to make ends meet.
CommitmentNow.com: How does caring for an aging parent affect sibling relationships?
Laurel: There is a relatively new phenomenon I refer to as “pigeon siblings” – they fly by once a year!
When there is more than one child in a family, it’s usually a daughter who steps up to take responsibility for caring for a parent – and she usually doesn’t force anyone to share the responsibility. This can lead to a lot of tension and resentment among siblings. Communication is key. I suggest families draft a family contract listing what help is needed, and what it would cost to hire a third party to perform each responsibility. Siblings can divide up the responsibilities and either perform them themselves or pay someone to perform then. By rationing and monetizing their responsibilities, it becomes clear to everyone that eldercare is a job.
CommitmentNow.com: In The Daughter Trap you discuss something many people may be unaware of: that in addition to caring for their own parents, many women become caregivers for their husband or partner’s parents, too! How does that happen?
Laurel: Research shows that when women see a need, they jump in to fulfill it. Men wait and see what happens. This applies even in the care of in laws – and even with women who never got along with their in-laws!
CommitmentNow.com: Caring for an elderly parent can exhaust a woman’s emotional, physical and financial resources. What can a woman do to reduce the hardships of care giving?
Laurel: First, she can ask for help. This seems like a simple idea, but few women do it!
Second, a woman can acknowledge her own limits – financial, physical and emotional. Most of us keep caring until we get sick. We need to take care of ourselves while we take care of others. A little self-care goes a long way.
And third, a woman should keep a list of what each parent needs.
CommitmentNow.com: What can be done to start fixing the inequalities of an elder care situation?
Laurel: Elder care situations usually start with an event, i.e., a parent becomes ill or has an accident. That’s a great time to start a conversation with siblings – set up a meeting or a conference call. You can tell your siblings, “We need to think about Mom and Dad getting older.” Draft a family contract, and set up realistic expectations.
It’s not pleasant – no one wants to think about death, so we avoid it. But it needs to be discussed.
I also suggest consulting with geriatric care managers. They’ve usually social workers, and they can help you navigate the social and medical services available to the elderly.
And you can read The Daughter Trap. It has a lot of useful information.
LAUREL KENNEDY has experienced the "daughter trap" first hand, caring for a mother with dementia and a 90+ year-old father. Her caregiving journey spans almost two decades and runs the gamut from fierce advocate with the medical community to personal chef, chauffeur and concierge for her parents. The Daughter Trap shares the collective wisdom of 200+ caregiving daughters: what they wish they knew going into it; what they learned by doing it; the price they paid because of it; and what's on the horizon to help the next wave of caregivers.
Laurel's opinions and innovative solutions have garnered headlines in a variety of online and print media including USA Today, The Times-Picayune, Irish Times, Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, Hollywood Reporter Advertising Age, Chamber of Commerce Magazine and Consumer Insight, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes.com, MarketWatch.com, Morningstar.com, the Copley News Service, to name a few. She holds the MBA with honors from the world-ranked University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where her honors thesis explored the impact of gender differences on field sales performance.
Visit Laurel at www.thedaughtertrap.com.
To purchase The Daughter Trap, click here.
