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The ties that bind families As parents live longer, they can be both blessing and challenge to adult children December 16, 1998 The longer people live, the more opportunity they have to enjoy, annoy, love, exasperate, worry, give to and take from their families. Extended life span can mean more time to lavish affection on grandchildren. Or it can mean unwittingly competing with them for the attention and resources of their parents. Seniors help younger family members with finances, child care and advice. They also worry them by insisting on staying put in the face of declining health, especially when distance makes it harder for their offspring — who may be nearing senior status themselves — to help them. Whatever the particulars, a wide-ranging national survey of people 70 and older shows that children continue to stay engaged with their parents to the fullest extent they can manage, and vice versa, over the long haul. Take the case of Carol DeAndrea, of Scott, and her 74-year-old mother. When the older woman needed to get out of her wheelchair, the younger one would leave her sleeping infant locked in the house, dash across the street to her mother’s with a toddler clinging to her leg, assist her mom and then dash back home before the baby awakened.
Or Rita and Sidney Drescher, both in their 90s. After living most of their lives in New York City, they moved to a senior citizens high rise in Squirrel Hill, even though they knew no one in town but their son, who wanted them to be close-by. Or Athene Wade, 91, who lives with her daughter and granddaughter in Lincoln-Lemington. In her lucid moments, she looks at her adult child and her face lights up. "That’s my baby!" she proudly announces. But most days, the daughter feels as if her mother is the baby. Or Jean Paladino, of Mt. Lebanon. Every third weekend she packs up her youngest child for the two-hour drive to Portage, Cambria County, where she cares for her fragile mother, cleans, shops and cooks for the coming week. Love’s not all you need Love is rarely the issue when aging parents require increasing assistance from their grown children. In many cases, there’s love to spare. Other things, however, are finite: the number of hours in a day; the limits of physical strength; the number of miles between parent and child; and the extent of family resources, measured in terms of money, time and living space. In general, there doesn’t seem to be a pressing need for the elderly to live with relatives. Among those who are widowed or single, 90 percent of men and 80 percent of women maintain their own homes. Only one out of eight live with their children or other relatives, and fewer than 5 percent are in nursing homes. This independence is enabled in part by relative good health. It also reflects the fact that seniors are often in better financial shape than younger people. In 1995, the median net worth (how much a person owns rather than earns) of householders age 75 and older was $95,000, but only $48,000 for those age 35 to 44. The best-off age group was 55 to 64, at $110,000. The worst-off was under age 35, at $11,400. This helps explain why seniors contribute more to their children than the other way around. Beth Soldo, a demographer at Georgetown University who has studied transfers of wealth to and from those age 70 and older, said she’s found one universal norm. "Regardless of age and need, resources flowed from parent to child," Soldo said. "It didn’t matter if it was an elderly parent with a mid-life child, or mid-life parent with adolescent or younger child. " But at some point — usually when an elderly spouse dies or gets sick — the flow begins to reverse. And with the oldest-old making up the fastest-growing segment of the population, that reverse flow is lasting longer than ever. It’s also distributed among fewer people, as today’s families spread more vertically than horizontally – that is, there are more living generations but fewer children at each younger level. So one day, the mother who was baby-sitting on Saturday nights begins to need some care of her own. Maybe she has trouble with the stairs, or driving. Maybe her medical insurance doesn’t cover all of her pills. She might have a fall and not be able to return home from the hospital. As this happens, Soldo said, children give support to their parents in addition to their children. And because that so-called "sandwich" generation’s resources are limited, something’s got to give. "In order to add their parents without subtracting their children, they end up reducing their own savings or consumption," Soldo said. One place the money goes is toward health care. Out-of-pocket medical expenses for the elderly are higher today in constant dollars than they were in the 1960s, even with Medicare covering 99 percent of those 65 and older. Those expenses are also likely to be incurred for a longer period of time. This helps explain why the boomers are saving at a lower rate than they should be for their own retirement. Add the fact that they are having fewer children to help them in older age and some serious repercussions loom 30 years down the line. How will public policy address the baby boomers’ needs when they become the aged ones? "We’re going to need to develop more formal resources as the informal ones shrink," said Rick Morycz, administrator of geriatrics at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. "If we can’t do it here then shame on us, because we are seeing now what the rest of the nation will be seeing down the road. We should become a laboratory for developing community-based resources."
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