‘Invisible workforce’ of caregivers wearing out as boomers age
O’Brien Fellow Jackie Crosby is documenting a quiet crisis facing a growing number of Americans.
In “Aging Parents, Stressed Families,” published June 3 and 4 in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the 2016–17 fellow revealed a patchwork system of family-based caregiving straining to keep up with increasing demands as baby boomers age into their 80s.
Marquette student journalists Yiren Yang, Patrick Thomas and Jack Goods helped produce these stories on family caregivers as part of the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism.
From the first of two parts:
Social trends and medical progress are working against each other. Half of the 35 million family caregivers who now assist older adults have full-time jobs. Families are more geographically dispersed. Adult children are squeezed between raising their own families and managing a dizzying array of housing needs, health care, insurance, finances and supportive services for their elders.
“We’re dealing with a system that was developed 50 years ago,” said Susan Reinhard, director of AARP’s Public Policy Institute. “This is an army, an invisible workforce that needs to be helped. You need to give them training. You need to support them. And they need a break, as if they were on a job.”
For several years Crosby, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has been writing about the generations, particularly how baby boomers are changing the workplace, housing and the way society ages, she wrote in an essay published with the series.
“But there seemed to be a broader story that needed telling. As in my own life, many of my friends and colleagues were seeing their lives upturned when their aging parents started having health problems,” she wrote.
Her main story concludes that:
No one disputes the need to find better ways to support families in an aging nation. Many agree it will require change on multiple fronts — more flexible workplace policies, financial relief for caregivers, improved health care coordination and more individual responsibility to plan and save.
But Americans today are deeply divided about the size and role of government. Concerns are mounting about the future solvency of taxpayer programs as an aging society taps into them at a faster rate than a diminished workforce can replenish the funds.
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