Should children take care of aging parents?

It's a mystery. Where did we get the idea that aging parents need to be shipped off to retirement homes, assisted living and nursing homes instead of living with their children? Will this one day be regarded as a mistake? A recent blog in the Wall Street Journal argued that nearly a quarter of the adult population in the U.S. already provide long hours of voluntary care for family members and friends. That figure seems high to me. Still, many children in their Twenties are returning home because of the economy; will the same thing happen with elderly parents? Probably not.

Of course it's easy to say and harder to do. Many elderly spent their lives browbeating their kids (and vice versa) and incontinence and health crises can wear out anyone's patience. Still, other countries manage to do this successfully as do many families here. In fact it's an obligation. Family cohesion truly creates healthier lives. So it deserves a second look.

Many children choose to put their parents into assisted living, often because they feel they have no choice, and perhaps they are right and perhaps they are not, because they eliminated the choices. We should be seeking out alternatives that make in-home care more practical and more affordable, rather than turning it over to corporate providers with their smiling websites and glossy brochures. As the WSJ article points out, an increasingly popular way to do this is for family members to pool together to pay modest salaries to those family members who are the care-givers (caregiver contracts are optional).

If we do not think this through, then we are entitled to feel guilty for adding to our parents' loneliness. Are we the children foreseeing our own future in a generation or so? To quote Atul Gawande in 2007: "People are putting aside less in savings for old age now than they have in any decade since the Great Depression. More than half of the very old now live without a spouse, and we have fewer children than ever before—yet we give virtually no thought to how we will live out our later years alone."