How Caregiver Support Can Combat Rising Stress Levels We all know that caregiving for a loved one can be stressful, but it seems that caregivers may be feeling the strain more than ever before. Nearly two-thirds of family and friend caregivers consider their situation to be moderately-to-highly stressful, according to the recently released Caregiving in the U.S. 2020 report from National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP. Read more
Time is Precious for Family and Friend Caregivers—How Care Coaching Can Help When you consider that 60 percent of family/friend caregivers are employed outside the home, the time drain on daily life can be extraordinary, leading to stress, strain in family relationships and unmet needs for both the caregiver and the older adult needing assistance. That’s why Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging developed BRI Care Consultation™. It’s an evidence-based care-coaching program specifically designed to work with both the family or friend caregiver and the person with a chronic condition to identify ways to better manage ongoing care. Read more
It’s OK to Feel: The Emotional Side of Caregiving The reality is that caregivers experience a wide range of emotions, from ambivalence and resentment to anxiety, grief, loneliness, fear and even joy—often within the same day. We are conditioned to believe, as one family caregiver so eloquently stated, that we “must always smile and never complain…" And yet these emotions are normal, they are healthy, and we need to find ways to name them, to feel them and to express them. Read more
The Need to Add Caregiver Support to Your Employee Benefits Plan: Lessons Learned from COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly exposed gaps in access to needed community-based supports for many people, and terms such as “social isolation” are now a part of the daily vernacular. Families continue to struggle with balancing full-time employment with care for older loved ones and children who are suddenly learning from home. The spotlight now shines brightly on the plight of those who are truly sandwiched in the middle. The questions are: why does it matter and what can we do as employers? Read more
Coping with Challenges as Sandwich Generation Caregivers Sandwich generation caregivers manage multiple responsibilities, including work, childcare, household duties and care tasks for their parents, in-laws or other aging relatives. The COVID-19 pandemic has made these responsibilities far more challenging, as we may be dealing with work, teaching our children at home and managing household duties. At the same time, we may also be doing more distant caregiving due to social distancing recommendations if our loved ones don’t live in the same household, and especially if their immune system is compromised. Read more
Solutions for Millennial Caregivers: Life Doesn’t Always Have to be This Hard In many situations, it is easy to identify problems, but far more difficult to identify possible solutions. The caregiving challenges faced by millennials are no different. We may know the statistics, such as that millennials now represent 10 million of the current caregiver population, with 73 percent juggling their caregiving responsibilities with at least one other job. We may know the impact on their physical, financial, emotional and relational health. Caregivers are forever instructed to “manage their stress.” But what can millennial caregivers actually do to ease the burden that they carry each day? Read more
I’m the Man (and the Caregiver) All of us caring for aging loved ones face unique challenges. Societal expectations about who handles these responsibilities – and how they should be handled – make some of these challenges ever more difficult for male caregivers. After all, when we think and talk about family caregivers, most of us immediately envision a woman, usually a wife or a daughter, and it is with this image in mind that most caregiver support programs have been created. And yet, according to a recent AARP study, 44 percent of family caregivers for older adults—or six million caregivers—are actually men, and 28 percent of these men are millennials Read more
Taking ACTION to Manage Dementia Care Caring for a loved one with dementia can oftentimes go hand-in-hand with challenging situations that may lead us to feel stress and uncertainty about how to manage our loved one’s care. It can become overwhelming, especially for one person, but there are steps we can take to minimize the burden and make progress. Action planning gives us guidance and support to meet our caregiving needs and manage our loved one’s care by breaking down larger goals into small, manageable steps towards solutions to potential challenges. Read more
