The Availability of Care for Late-Middle-Aged Adults With Chronic ...

State and federally funded services can clearly help those who have access to them.

Summary

As we have previously mentioned, most of what the research community knows about the care networks of individuals with limitations in function comes from research on the elderly population. The aforementioned descriptions demonstrate, however, that the life courses of those in late middle age and their older counterparts at the beginning of the 21st century were quite distinct. Researchers cannot assume that the care networks of these groups function similarly.

Within the life course perspective, requiring help in midlife versus late life involves an entirely different set of circumstances. One basic premise of this study is that there are life stage differences, not only between the young and older respondents with ADL and/or IADL difficulties, but also between the members of the respondents’ support networks that limit the number of hours of care received by individuals in late middle age with functional limitations compared with those who are young old or older old. In the analyses to follow, life stage differences were quantified primarily by examining differences in the characteristics of members of the respondents’ social support groups and more narrowly defined care networks. For example, considering Litwak’s proximity dimension, we expected to find that the spouses of those in late middle age compared with those of their older counterparts were more likely to be working outside of the home and have competing care responsibilities for parents and/or dependent children. These characteristics would make them less available to provide large amounts of care compared with their older counterparts. Potential child caregivers for late-middle-aged adults, likewise, were likely to be younger, have younger children of their own to care for, and be in a less secure financial state (as measured in part by home ownership and hours of work) than the child caregivers of older old adults.