Client Education

Care Giving and Caregivers

Caregivers: Who They Are and What They Do

By: Denise Hamilton, Special to AccentCare

The average caretaker is a 57-year-old woman who is caring for a relative, often a husband, according to the Southern Caregiver Resource Center, which serves family and caregivers of brain-impaired adults in the San Diego, Calif., area.

Using statistics based on research from think tanks, specialty publications and universities, the resource center found that 85 percent of caretaking is done by relatives and that spouses account for 62 percent of primary caregivers while adult children provide 26 percent of the care.

According to the center, nearly one in every four U.S. households cares for a person 50 or older and 15 percent of U.S. adults provide care for seriously ill or disabled relatives. Not all of these are elderly. The 14.7 million American adults with brain disorders include young and middle-aged people injured in accidents. And not all caretakers are family members - more than 7 million Americans provide unpaid help to disabled older adults in their community.

Most typically, caregiving involves helping someone with ADLs - the activities of daily living - such as bathing, dressing and eating. But caregiving can also include paying bills, making dentist appointments and simply being there to provide emotional sustenance.

Caregivers live in the home, down the block or 2,000 miles away, although fully one-third take on the responsibility because they live closer to the patient than other family members. Still, nearly 7 million Americans travel an hour or more to give care and many do so long-distance.

Caregiving breaks down into two categories: Informal caregivers are family members or friends who provide assistance without pay, and formal caregivers are volunteers or paid care providers associated with a service system. They can include social workers, nursing home orderlies, nurses and case managers at public and private facilities.

The type of caregiving you choose may depend on your ethnicity and acculturation, studies have found. For instance, first-generation Americans are more likely to provide caregiving at home than second or third-generation Americans. Ditto for people of color.

"Black and Latino families, by virtue of lifestyles and cultural upbringing, tend to provide more care, " says Lynn Carter-Barnard, a family consultant at the Southern Caregiver Resource Center in San Diego, Calif. "But it's not based so much on ethnicity as demographics. The less acculturated you are, the closer you are. Families tend to disperse after two to three generations."

The center quotes statistics showing that adult children in black and Latino families comprise about 75 percent of caregivers compared to 40 percent to 60 percent in white families, and Carter-Barnard says her anecdotal experience with families supports this data.

Experts say that in general, non-whites have a stronger aversion to putting parents in nursing homes than whites, although that is starting to break down. A 1996 report on California nursing home demographics found they were 76.7 percent white, 9 percent Latino, 8.5 percent black, 4.8 percent Asian and Pacific Islander and 1.1 percent Native American or other, which hardly reflects the general population.