Written by Caregiving Expert Pamela D. Wilson
Are generational expectations around caregiving and family habits straining your care relationships with elderly parents and siblings?
Family caregiving and complicated relationships can make providing elder care more challenging than it needs to be. One aspect, known as adverse and positive childhood experiences, ACES and PCES, can have lasting effects on adult children who become caregivers of aging parents. Events young children experience in early relationships with parents or in other life circumstances can negatively impact adult relationships with elderly parents. Adult children and elderly parents can gain insights and support strategies to help current and younger generations break free from family beliefs and habits around generational caregiving. These family beliefs and habits might include challenging family dynamics, co-dependent behaviors, and complicated relationships, which can translate into emotionally draining elder care situations.
Childhood Experience
Let’s start by examining adverse childhood experiences. There are two types: interpersonal, between you and another person, and non-interpersonal, which could be related to an accident, an illness, or death. The interpersonal experiences with parents include physical abuse, emotional abuse, a lack of emotional support, domestic violence, neglectful, critical, or demanding behaviors. All of these have lifelong effects on parent-child relationships. They can also affect multigenerational caregiving relationships in which an adult child cares for elderly parents while raising young children.
I remember my mother taking me to see my grandfather at the funeral home when I was five years old. This memory, although not negative, sticks in my mind. I recall standing on the kneeler and touching grandpa’s hand, as he lay in a casket. His hand was cold. It wasn’t a scary situation, probably because he looked like he was sleeping. My mom made the experience seem like it was normal, nothing to be afraid of. I remember watching my mother kiss my grandfather goodbye. You may have similar or different memories from your childhood.
The Impact of Parental Habits and Behaviors on Children
According to caregiving research about racial differences, people from non-white ethnic backgrounds—Latinos and blacks—are more likely to experience trauma and adverse childhood events. These traumas can include witnessing violence, experiencing bullying, living in poverty, or experiencing material hardships when parents have difficulty paying for housing, food, medical care, utilities, or other expenses. Growing up in a single-parent, single-income family can increase the likelihood of hardships.
Childhood experiences can transfer to learning or educational difficulties, behavioral or emotional challenges like anger, physical aggression, anxiety, or depression, and establishing social relationships. For example, controlling one’s moods, maintaining attention and focus, and self-regulating behaviors.
Generational and Cultural Caregiving Expectations
What happens when an adult child who experienced trauma or adverse events becomes the primary caregiver for an elderly parent? This may be due to birth order, sex, cultural beliefs, or the expectation that caregiving is this child’s role. If you are the caregiver in these circumstances, you may be drowning in generational family caregiving expectations and trying to find a way out. What if you want more from life than being a caregiver who is denied the opportunity to live independently and become financially self-sufficient because of family expectations to care for elderly parents?
The result is that you will—as your parents did—have children and depend on them for your care. This then becomes a generational pattern that supports ongoing dependency.
The Effects of Generational Caregiving Expectations in Families
family generational expectationsIf you are the primary family caregiver, your siblings may not offer support because they expect you to do it all. Maybe you make caring for elderly parents look easy. Cultural beliefs about caregiving and ingrained generational expectations affect a primary caregiver’s life. You may feel stuck and unable to escape a care situation. You may worry about becoming estranged from your family. Or feel that your family will hate you if you remove yourself from the role of caregiver.
Yet, while family is important to you, self-preservation may become even more critical. What happens when career, marriage, health, and friendships fail because your aging parents become the sole focus of your life?
The Effects of Parenting Styles on the Next Generation
Research confirms that fathers’ parenting styles are highly related to the parenting style in which they were raised. Which means if your grandfather was a strict, uncaring person who emotionally or physically abused your father or your grandmother, then your grandfather’s behavior molded your father’s behavior. The adverse effects on young children resulting from relationship challenges between a mother and a grandmother can be significant. There can be a trickle-down effect—and not in a positive way—if harmful behaviors, limiting cultural beliefs, and set-in-stone expectations are part of these relationships.
In families where generational issues are complex, navigating family caregiver relationships and disagreements can be challenging. This happens because of Isolation, distancing, and family members’ refusal to discuss changes around generational caregiving expectations, habits, and beliefs.
Isolation: The Gateway to Elder Abuse
Isolation, caregiver burnout, exhaustion, frustration, and unintentional elder abuse are aspects of caregiving that families rarely discuss. For the caregiver and the person who needs help, life can become increasingly narrow, isolated, and lonely. Others go on with their lives and rarely notice signs that things may not be going well.
If you are the primary caregiver, there is no time for things you used to do that you loved. There’s probably not even time for you to take care of yourself. You may still be holding down a full-time job – or trying to hold down a full-time job and care for an elderly parent. If you are an older adult in a care situation experiencing isolation or loneliness due to advancing age, health problems, or income limitations, you may have given up activities that brought you joy.
Caregivers and care receivers spend time together in a not-so-great situation. The parent relies on a single child to provide care. The other children are away, living their lives. This level of isolation may not result in the best care situation, even if it meets generational caregiving expectations. Family care situations can become unintentionally neglectful or abusive when caregivers become exhausted, burned out, and have difficulty focusing
Unexpected Consequences of Caregiving
The caregiver may not even realize that he or she is neglecting an elderly parent’s health care or social care needs. This lack of recognition may be due to life experiences. A parent may not have had money for healthcare when the child was young. So today, the adult is unaware of beneficial programs, lacks an understanding of preventive care, and does not know how to navigate the healthcare system. What parents do not teach their children, their children may never learn unless they are exposed to new information and education at another time in life. With respect to caregiving, exposure to health, health care, medical and social care, financial planning, and legal planning—all components of caregiving.
It can be hard to see a different way of life if there is no one to discuss the possibilities, and if one does not choose to create a different way of life. This is one impact of generational beliefs.
Caregiving and Dementia
If a caregiver is responsible for an elderly parent or a loved one’s care who is diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s, the time committed can grow to be a 24-hour-a-day and 7-day-a-week job with no end in sight. People with memory loss can live another 5 to 25 or 30 years. During this time, due to the stress and time involved, the caregiver’s health declines. Some caregivers die before the people they care for. These are risks that must be discussed with families so that alternative plans can be put in place.
We hope this information is helpful to you in the important work you do as a family caregiver.
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