For love, legacy, or pay: legal and pecuniary aspects of family caregiving.

Most caregiving and companionship provided by family members and friends to older individuals in home environments occurs because of the caregiver's feelings of ethical and emotional obligation and attachment. From a legal perspective, though, it might be ill-advised for an informal caregiver to admit such a motivation. Building on a recently published study of relevant litigation, this essay discusses changing cultural and legal aspects of family caregiving when there is some expectation of pay, property, or future financial legacy in return for the caregiver's present work and sacrifices.Keywords: family caregiving; law; pecuniary; financial; compensation; ethicalMtm been provid any older individuals with acute or chronic medical or mental conditions require various kinds of assistance in their daily lives. Historically, much of this assistance has been provided by families (conceived of here both functionally and in terms of blood or marriage relationships; Kane & Penrod, 1995). Family caretaking is a type of management that may take the form of family members paying, hiring, and/or coordinating paid service deliverers who attend to the impaired individual's needs. Family caregiving, on the other hand, ordinarily takes the form of personally providing direct, hands-on long-term care services to one's impaired relative. Besides specific services needed by the impaired person to accomplish activities of daily living, family caregiving frequently has involved the sort of companionship (such as cohabitation and other forms of physical closeness) that older relatives have desired to stave off fears of loneliness and social isolation. Although family care management raises several interesting issues, particularly regarding filial responsibility to contribute financially to purchasing direct, professional care for the older family member (Rickles-Jordan, 2007), this essay focuses instead on some of the implications of caregiving and companionship provided directly to older people by their relatives.More specifically, this essay briefly explores one aspect of the family caregiving relationship-whether it rests on love/guilt or on pecuniary expectations-with special attention to legal connotations and consequences. This discussion builds largely on a recently published study, Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age, in which Princeton legal historian and former property law professor Hendrik Hartog (2012) examined in detail more than 200 New Jersey appellate court decisions (and, in many instances, accompanying trial transcripts) published between the late 1840s and the early 1950s to gain an understanding of family caregiving relationships gone awry.FAMILY CAREGIVING MOTIVATIONSFamily is a place where work occurs. Ordinarily, family caregiving activities are undertaken on a voluntarily chosen basis (Wylie & Brank, 2009). Feelings of indebtedness or reciprocity, gratitude, intimacy, compassion, and guilt may act as compelling psychological, moral, and religious pressures, but such pressures do not change-at least from a legal perspective-the voluntary, gratuitous nature of the caregiving relationship (Funk & Kobayashi, 2009).However, as revealed by Hartog's (2012) descriptions of the human stories underlying the judicial opinions he parses, sometimes characterizing the caregiving relationship simply as a labor of loving devotion paints a very incomplete and potentially unfair picture of the motivations and understandings involved. Care and caring may be paid for not only through love and guilt but also through cash and land. Often, caregiving and related personal sacrifices (such as delaying or foregoing marriage, career, social life, or the privacy of one's own living arrangements) are motivated at least in part by the caregiver's expectation of present or eventual material-as well as ethical and emotional-reward. When such an expectation is disappointed, many caregivers suffer in silence, but others pursue legal remedies and make a matter of public record the kinds of scenarios that Hartog describes in his fascinating, cogent, and copiously referenced volume. …