Adult Daughter Caregivers

As part of the discussion on resource allocation for the aged, it is 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 in the United States are abandoned by their families and "warehoused" in nursing homes is a myth.[1] Only 5 percent of the elderly in the U.S. are institutionalized. Nine in ten of the disabled elderly not in 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 is 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 is 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 is at the very least enforced in sociological, cultural, and religious traditions. Parents are not equally esteemed in 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 in the Christian and Jewish traditions), though she may also be expected to assist in 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 in Classical Greece and Imperial China.[6] The focus of filial obligations in the written historical texts is on what sons owe to their parents, with emphasis on what sons owe to fathers. In the patriarchal traditions listed above, women in 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 expected 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 in favor of egalitarian gender roles.[8] Interestingly, the study revealed that those in the youngest generation were strongly in favor of family caregiving and yet at the same time they "expected to work much longer than their mothers and grandmothers had expected to work when they were young women even though the grand-daughters expected to marry and to have as many children as their mothers and grandmothers. …