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How to Confront the Elder Care Challenge

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1. 10 Steps for Creating a Work Environment That Supports Caregivers
Companies that want to retain valued workers who are responsible for caring for an elderly parent can use these steps to create a workplace culture that supports them.

2. Caregiver Resources for Employees
This list is aimed at helping employees find the assistance they need in caring for an elderly parent.

3. Caregiver Resources for Employers
These links and phone numbers provide employers with useful information on elder care.

4. The Costs of Caregiving
Total estimated annual costs to employers for all full-time employed caregivers according to the MetLife Caregiving Cost Study: Productivity Losses to U.S. Business, 2006, U.S. MetLife Mature Market Institute

5. Why Child Care and Elder Care Are So Different

Why Child Care and Elder Care Are So Different

Unlike child care, elder care is an unpredictable, variable event that can occur suddenly during a loved one’s health crisis, or creep up slowly as a relative’s health and functioning decline.
By Leah Dobkin

lder care has begun to rival child care as a workplace issue, but there are important differences between the two. While some employees have children, others don’t. But most employees have living parents, and so elder care has the potential to affect more employees than child care does. Unlike child care, elder care is an unpredictable, variable event that can occur suddenly during a loved one’s health crisis, or creep up slowly as a relative’s health and functioning decline. It requires flexibility and responsiveness from both the employer and employee caregivers as well as supervisors and co-workers.

Child care focuses primarily on healthy children who live with the employee, but elder care involves a variety of services to respond complex financial, housing, health and legal issues that often need to be delivered at a distance from the employee. The relationship between caregiver and the person being cared for is adult to adult, long term and often involves an emotionally potent and uncomfortable role reversal. Unlike child care, elder care does not necessarily have a positive outcome. The care receiver becomes more and more dependent, and the process involves a number of siblings and other relatives and friends in ways that child care usually does not.

While child care and elder care have their differences, more and more employers are realizing that they need a holistic approach to human resource offerings involving all of an employee’s life stages and all generations at work.

Workforce Management Online, April 2007 -- Register Now!

Leah Dobkin is a freelance writer based in Shorewood, Wisconsin. She has more than 30 years' experience working in the field of aging. She has prepared educational materials and articles for family caregivers, businesses and nonprofit organizations on this subject, has spoken at conferences and has conducted training for employees, employers and community service providers throughout the U.S. E-mail editors@workforce.com to comment.

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