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Showing posts with label Caregiver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Caregiver. Show all posts

Monday, August 11, 2014

Addressing Caregivers’ Loss of Retirement Income

Today's post was shared by The New Old Age and comes from newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com
Earlier this month Representative Nita M. Lowey, Democrat of New York, introduced what she’s calling the Social Security Caregiver Credit Act, intended to increase retirement income for middle-class citizens who must reduce their work hours or leave the work force because of caregiving duties.
It’s hard to feel optimistic about its passage in this political environment. I’m braced, even here, for a chorus of “How can we possibly afford that?” But you can’t really argue with the problem it tries to address.
Representative Nita M. Lowey
Representative Nita M. Lowey
Representative Nita M. LoweyCredit Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

The toll that family caregiving can take isn’t only emotional and physical; it’s also financial, but not always in obvious ways.
The groceries you pick up on the way to see your mother, the utility bills you quietly pay for your aunt — you’re aware of those. If you cut back your hours, turn down promotions or leave your job, as some caregivers feel forced to, you’re keenly conscious of your lost income.
But I wonder how many people consider the ways that their own retirements, years down the road, may suffer. The pressures of caring for a disabled or dependent family member can reduce Social Security income for the rest of the caregiver’s life.
And not by peanuts.
A MetLife study in 2011, based on data from the national Health and Retirement Study, estimated that men who reduced work hours to...
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Friday, November 22, 2013

Work, Women and Caregiving

Today's post was shared by The New Old Age and comes from newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com

Robert Lang/Getty Images

Trying to hold onto a job while caring for a family member is a tough juggling act. Caregivers sometimes have to arrive late or leave early, cut back to part-time work, and decline travel or promotions.

For women, these competing responsibilities may prove particularly perilous, a study recently published in the Journal of Applied Gerontology suggests. Women who are caregivers are also significantly less likely to be in the labor force, compared to women who are not caregivers.

Yet for men, caregiving has no impact on employment status.
The authors, two professors of social work, unearthed these patterns in national data gathered in 2004 in the Health and Retirement Study. They looked at participants aged 50 to 61, more than 5,100 people, roughly a third of them family caregivers. About 4 percent were caring for a spouse, 15 percent for a grandchild and about 20 percent for a parent; some took care of more than one relative.
(Every study seems to use a different definition of caregiving. In this case, the researchers defined it as caring for parents or grandchildren for at least 100 hours over two years; spousal caregivers had no minimum time requirement.)

As in virtually every other study, women were more likely to care for parents. Seven percent of the total sample assisted with parents’ personal needs, compared to 3.6 percent of men. Close to 16 percent of men helped parents with chores, errands and transportation, while more than 20 percent of...
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Saturday, November 2, 2013

Are Caregivers Healthier?

Today's post was shared by The New Old Age and comes from newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com


The idea that caring for a chronically ailing or disabled family member might be good for you is so startling, so counterintuitive, that it sends researchers rummaging through their data to see where they went wrong.

“There are hundreds of studies about how caregiving is stressful and bad for your health,” said David Roth. As director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health, and someone who has spent 15 years compiling caregiving data, he has probably read most of them.

But his recent study in The American Journal of Epidemiology is the most recent to lend support to an emerging counter perspective, dubbed the “healthy caregiver hypothesis.”

Inserting a few key questions into a large national stroke study, his team was able to compare about 3,500 family caregivers older than 45 with noncaregivers of the same age, gender, education level and self-reported health. The researchers also matched caregivers and noncaregivers for cognitive status and for health behaviors like smoking and drinking — 15 variables in all. The caregivers included spouses (about 22 percent of the 3,500 followed), adult children caring for parents (about a third), and people caring for other family members.

After an average six-year follow-up, he and his colleagues found that the noncaregivers had 
significantly higher mortality rates. Nine percent of them had died, compared with 7.5 percent of caregivers, who were 18 percent less likely to die during the six-year...
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