elder living arrangements

Dear Reader,

Please take a minute to answer these four questions:

1. Have you thought about the possibility that you may need senior care as you grow older?

2. If yes, are you aware of the various senior care options that you may need and that are available to you?

3. If yes again, have you begun planning for your and your family members’ senior care?

4. Do you know what these options may cost you (and your older adult parents) as you both get older and, hopefully not, become infirm?

If you answered YES to just one of these questions, consider yourself in a minority.
According to a 2009 study carried out by the Boomer Project* for Home Instead** a majority of the respondentsqueried queried (a whopping 73 per cent of the adult children, i.e., Baby Boomers) said they have neither thought about nor planned for the kinds of the care they may need as they grow older.

More disturbing: 50% of the seniors surveyed indicated that they have neither thought about nor planned for their own future care needs.

The survey revealed that most respondents:
• Knew little about the care options available to them,
• Were ‘misguided’ about the cost of these options, and
• Were ‘poorly informed’ about how they will pay foror how much these options will cost them.

Most believe that their social security and Medicare benefits will be sufficient to cover these expenses. Only 18 per cent of the adult children cited long-term care insurance as a possible source for financing their future care needs. And only 21 per cent of the seniors surveyed could name long-term care as a potential financial resource.

These findings were so alarming (to us, at least) that we plan to devote the next two blog posts to information that emerged from this survey. Stay tuned.

Sig Cohen

* The Boomer Project provides market research and strategic consulting to corporations, industry associations, civic and non-profit organizations.

** Home Instead Senior Care is a U.S. based international franchise network that provides high quality non-medical senior home care. It consists of more than 875 locally owned and operated offices that help seniors and their families through the home care stage of aging.

Several of our new neighbors are grandparents (like us) who moved to our community to be nearer their adult children and grandchildren.
I asked one couple how they and their adult children were handling this closer proximity. (They live just a few blocks from their two sons and their families.)
“Great!” they replied.
Now this is something, I thought. Usually families co-exist better when separated by distance. How is it that this family is faring so well?
Our new friends explained that the ‘conversation’ or better, the process, started several years earlier with periodic weekend visits to their then newlywed children. Stays of three – four days followed. When one of their kids had a child, the new mother asked her grandmother-in-law to spend a few weeks with her and the new baby to help out.
From time to time conversations would center on ‘what-if’s.’ ‘What if’ we lived closer to you? ‘What if’ we even lived in your city? Fortunately our friends’ jobs allowed them to pick up and move easily.
One son, however, initially worried that moving closer might result in their parents becoming a “burden on them.” Our friends thought that their son meant that he and his wife would have to be their parents’ caregivers. On the contrary, their son meant a social burden. He was concerned that he and his wife would feel obliged to keep their parents entertained and make sure they were occupied with things to do. Our friends quickly disabused their children of that. They told them they looked forward to making new friends on their own and establishing their own social life.
Open, candid conversations like that – over a period of a few years – increased everyone’s comfort zone and made the eventual move much easier.
What impressed me most is that their relatively painless relocation resulted from an open and candid relationship between parents and children thoughout the family’s formative years.
Sig Cohen

202-359-6141

“It’s (always) the process,…”