ADULT CHILDREN'S UNDERSTANDING OF THEIR PARENT-CARING EXPERIENCES.
Contributors: University Of Rochester School Of Nursing.
Published: 1995
Number of pages: 239
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Gerontology.; Sociology, Individual and Family Studies.
Description: Changes in advanced technological societies have created an emphasis on people's responsibility for their own health and their own care. This emphasis is taking place in a socio-cultural context where caring is invisible and undervalued. The purpose of this research was to gain further insight into the experience of being a family carer in the present socio-cultural context. Using a focused ethnographic process, this research is an interpretive analysis of adult children's understanding of caring for a parent over 65 years of age who has a chronic pulmonary disease. Guided by a holistic perspective, the parent carers' experiences were understood in the context of their lives and within the present socio-cultural context.

The data consisted mainly of transcribed interviews with, and observations of, 15 adults who presented a variety of caring situations. The interpretive analysis revealed the rapport that parent-carers experience with caring as reflected by the theme experiencing parent caring on a day-to-day basis as a movement from embracing to resisting caring. Three sub-themes describe the movement from embracing to resisting caring: (1) a sense of being the only one who cares for a parent, in a context of poor caring alternatives; (2) a sense that no one (including health-care professionals) knows how to deal with the parent's suffering, in a context of focusing on the physical aspects of the disease; and (3) a sense of having no freedom, no life of one's own, in a context where caring is not a primary value. The theme reflects the participants' intentions and difficulties in integrating parent caring into their lives in a socio-cultural context that isolates caring in families and institutions and does not support its carers.

Further exploration of the parent-caring experiences in relation to becoming involved with parent caring revealed the following themes: opening up to parent caring as a choice or a response in context; and giving form to parent caring according to one's own understanding and possibilities. Finally, the themes evolving through parent caring, preparing for a parent's death, and recreating one's own life address the experience of personal power in parent caring.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-12, Section: B, page: 6674.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER SCHOOL OF NURSING, 1995.

School code: 1242.