The Politics of the Personal in Feminist Family Therapy: International Examinations of Family Policy by Anne Prouty Lyness

Author:Anne Prouty Lyness [Lyness, Anne Prouty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780789034007
Google: M9bswAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 7607601
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-09-06T12:38:47+00:00

The Challenge of Family Care in the U.S.

With the baby-boom population aging, the demand for family care will increase and companies will be pressured by employees for release time to assist aging parents. Signs of this conflict became visible within the last decade. In a 1997 study of 1,509 people conducted for Metropolitan Life by the National Alliance for Caregiving and the American Association for Retired Persons (AARP), surveyors found that one in four families had at least one adult who had provided care for an elderly relative or friend in the previous 12 months. On average, the caregivers surveyed were 45 years of age or older and provided about eight years of care (National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP, 1997).

In a follow-up study two years later, it was learned that 62 percent of 55 individuals surveyed indicated that they had asked supervisors, co-workers, or management for some kind of help or support with their caregiving responsibilities at home (MetLife, 1999). However, only 23 percent of companies with 100 or more employees have programs in place to support elder care (Families and Work Institute, 1997). “Elder care is to the twenty-first century what child care has been for the last few decades,” contends Joyce Ruddock, head of the Long-Term Care Group at Metropolitan Life (New York Times, 1999d, 1). Indeed, a more recent study funded by MetLife Foundation concluded that 44.4 million Americans serve as caregivers, a service valued at $257 billion a year (National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP, 2005).

Today, nearly 70 percent of women work full-time in the United States and most of them assume a variety of caregiving responsibilities that are in direct conflict with their work schedules. Although the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 allows for employees to take time off to care for a child as well as an elderly parent, the law provides no wage replacement, limits leave to 12 weeks per year, applies only to six percent of corporations and covers only 60 percent of the work force. Between 2000 and 2004 about 28 states put forth initiatives to provide paid leave, but only five of those states included elder care; the remaining 23 chose to limit their proposals to “baby care.” However, California, the only state to pass paid family leave, did include elder care coverage.

Whether or not working women will be able and willing to provide informal care as they have been expected to do in the past, remains an unknown, as does the role that government will play in addressing both the current and future needs of family caregivers. How the government responds to this challenge may ultimately depend on the particular perspectives of those in power. But regardless of what the private or public sector does in the future to address the challenge of family care, we may still be haunted by two very challenging questions posed by Shirley Burggraf in The Feminine Economy and Economic Man. First, “How can society get women's work done when women

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