Identity And Informal Caregiving

The job of the caregiver is a very tolling one. This person needs to totally devote him of her self to the job. Shenk (2001 p. 15) interviewed a caregiver, who stated, “She needs to be watched every second, as she wants to go home and has attempted to walk there many times. Of course ‘home’ is always in a different place, depending on where her memory of her

From the moment of conception, people face an array of changes both physically and psychologically until death. Lifespan development is the name psychologists have given to the physical and cognitive changes that occur throughout a person’s life and one important issue in the field of Life-Span Development is the topic of the elderly and the struggles that they face. This following issue affects me personally because I see it every day at an acute care hospital where I work. I have observed how their family members treat some of them. How they ultimately become a heavy responsibility to their family members, making them feel melancholy about their age and life. Some families are caring to their elderly family member while others begin to

With advancing age dependency increases and family is the primary contact an individual turn to for assistance.It is reported that 36 million adults provide care to a family member aged 65 or older. (National Alliance for Caregiving, 2009).Similarly, the family members will also have higher degree of involvement in caregiving for an individual in later years and it’s degree of caregiving totally depends on the need of care recipients.Family caregiver role is not an easy task as it brings responsibility and dedication which requires a great amount of energy and time.

Anyone can become a carer and for numerous reasons, yet adult care is predominantly undertaken by family members during later life. Although some may relish and find this role rewarding, others may not on account of the sacrifices and massive changes which occur in their own life. The pressures attributed to care can overwhelm carers, leaving them physically, emotionally and mentally drained and too ill to continue caring. Consequently, The Care Act 2014 has been introduced to address this issue and give recognition to the valuable service provided by unpaid carers as

Therefore, it would be a reasonable assumption that if formal eldercare providers display empathy, and an interest regarding informal elder caregivers’ well-being, their caregiver responsibilities and offer caregiver training, perhaps African American informal elder caregivers and other minority elder caregivers would experience a sense of empowerment and a high sense of caregiver self-efficacy. Marshall and Gerstl-Pepin state (as cited in Gerstl-Pepin, Killeen & Hasazi, 2006, p. 252) that leaders who “care” about social justice would need to understand cultural and social inequities such as racism, sexism, heterosexism, poverty and disability to address these comprehensive issues.

Equally as important, the care recipients who are often left out of the conversation are the informal elder caregivers themselves, especially when their self-care is imperative to be successful in their caregiver roles. Reinhard, Given, Petlick and Bemis (2008) propose research supporting assisting informal elder caregivers in becoming competent in their role as caregiver, to become aware of self-care and for the safety of their care recipients.

Reminiscence can be used to help older adults restore their own sense of identity by reminiscing and thinking about relationships and roles that had an important impact on their lives. By reminiscing, individuals can reflect and find meaning in their lives (Ashford and Lecroy, 2013). In an effort to discover my grandmother’s own sense of identity, I inquired about the roles or relationships that brought meaning to her life. She replied “I loved staying with the kids and raising the children. It was just fun to watch them develop into human begins with skills and interests. It brought a lot of fulfillment. Also, helping your granddaddy with his practice and making it more successful. Your granddaddy was great with veterinary medicine but he wasn’t too good with money, so I took care of the money and made all the investments.” She further went on to talk about the impact that he had on her life and how her identity was defined largely by what he did. She stated, “I think I’m a lot like a lot of women of my generation. I think women today have a more sense of identity than in my generation. A lot of us identified with our husbands but not by our careers. I was a teacher, but like many women, I stopped teaching once I married.” She went on to mention that there was a balancing of roles and leadership within their marriage. “He had all the

In this assignment, the class was to focus on the implications of family caregiving. This was done by discussing how caregiving can affect the caregiver’s identity, and his or her social, economic and psychological structure. Each student was expected to complete the assignment individually. Throughout the investigation process, I gathered all the information from recent statistics, along with what was studied in the unit to structure the assignment. With this investigation, I was able to relate my research back to the caregiver identity theory that was studied in the course. Furthermore, the data collected has taught me that family caregiving is very tedious for many. In conclusion, I was able to analyze the impact of the current social trends

In this article, Zarit and Reamy examine the future directions in family and professional caregiving for the elderly. They use two perspectives, caregiving, and professional caregiving, in order to identify the major issues that will come up about in the future. They looked in depth of where the problems could arise and came to a conclusion. They believe we need to expand the approaches others have taken for this topic and use “more dynamic approaches

The kinship network model, collectivist structure, continues to exist in African American informal eldercare in the present-day. This configuration has several positions based on caregiver responsibilities, which may be composed of family members and fictive kin that was adopted during slavery (Apesoa-Varano et al., 2015; Dilworth-Anderson, Williams, & Cooper, 1999). According to Dilworth-Anderson et al. (1999) the five possible eldercare caregiver configurations, are the primary caregiver as sole caregiver, the primary and secondary caregivers’ relationship, the primary, secondary and tertiary caregivers’ relationship, the primary and tertiary caregivers’ relationship and the tertiary caregiver as sole caregiver. The authors found that

The number of aging people is increasing at unprecedented rate. People seem to understand one another mostly when they are raised within same period of time since their perception of world and values rhyme. There is a need to bridge the gap between young and old generation. According to Harwood (2007) parents and caregivers should accomplish this by helping these generations to learn from each other. The quality of visits between the two generations matters a lot. To build a strong society, there must be a good intergenerational relationship between old adults, friends, grandchildren, grand parents, and adult children (Harwood, 2007).

Initially, we discovered that the topic we searched for was too broad so as a group we reflected and administered how to refine our searches. We evaluated the differences between formal and informal caregivers. Next we decided on the term informal caregiver of

living. The goal of this interactive talk is to start a new conversation that reframes elderhood as an

For informal caregivers, self-identifying can be viewed as a complicated chapter to undertake due to the issues that may arise along the way (Dobrof & Ebenstein, 2003). The authors state that many are slow to accept the title of caregiver because it may signal a change of self-perception and that of their care recipient, and in their own daily activities (Dobrof & Ebenstein, 2003). Ebaugh posits (as cited in Dobrof & Ebenstein, 2003, p. 35) that a person’s social roles induce hesitation because those roles affect people’s conception of self and self-identity. The author states that “when there is role change,” the integrity of the self is jeopardized to some degree” according to Ebaugh (as cited in Dobrof & Ebenstein, 2003, p. 35). Another

Eifert et al. (2015) state examining caregiving as an identity is a shift from considering it as a function. The authors explained that it is important when one is a caregiver to identify as one, if not, there may be dire consequences. They assert an individual’s identity is changed and evolves as people accumulate life experiences and lessons, and during this transformation, one is motivated to assess one’s identity (Eifert et al., 2015). When an individual becomes a caregiver, there will be a caregiving progression in which many informal elder caregivers begin to experience caregiver’s fatigue, role engulfment occurs, and they lose their self-identity and the caregiver may gain a dominate identity as caregiver emerges (Eifert et al., 2015).