there’s an article in The Cut this week that asks: why is eldercare the worst, and why aren’t we talking about it?
the author seems to land on: we need to create a sense of humor about elder care the same way that we created a sense of humor about childcare.
First of all, is laughing about childcare the solution to our childcare woes?! Because last I checked, all I hear from parents is an anguished cry for help.
Like… federal childcare funding is due to expire shortly, which may close 70,000 facilities caring for as many as 3 million children. This hardly seems “haha funny” for the many families it impacts.
Meanwhile, we’re paying childcare providers a poverty wage that leaves them unable to care for their own needs and families properly.
It’s a deeply broken system that no amount of TikToks can fix.
That aside, this approach misses a very vital point: to develop a sense of humor about the difficult work of elder care, many of us need to process a lifetime’s worth of emotional trauma and develop healthy boundaries with our parents (which many of them fight along the way).
even the best of parent-child relationships can run into crisis when the two sides disagree whether it’s time for children to take an active role in managing their parents’ day-to-day lives.
i get it: we all value our independence and the ability to make decisions for ourselves. so anything other than complete control feels like intrusion and tyranny.
but in an increasingly dangerous world for the elderly (financial scams, COVID), refusal to accept a child’s help early often feels like a time bomb. as children, we are constantly balancing insisting on our way and further damaging the fragile relationships with our parents v. dealing with the consequences of failing to engage: do I insist that mom give me access to her accounts now or do I deal with the loss of the savings she planned to use for her end-of-life care later?
and then there’s the “not so good” parent-child relationships.
when you grew up with a parent who was in any way emotionally abusive, even if they don’t see it, *especially* if they don’t see it, how do you find the emotional bandwidth to engage in a supportive, non-reactive way?
it took me many years of therapy, and many very hard reads of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents to get to the place where I can sorta kinda set boundaries with my self-involved Mom. her refusal to do that work herself or even to acknowledge that she has work to do in crafting a better relationship for us looms like a bomb over any future difficult decisions I’m sure will come.
and then there’s the bit that much of that “childcare” humor we see on social media isn’t really possible when you’re making jokes about another adult, who can see/read/understand being made fun of.
it’s one thing to poke fun at your young children (which I personally find hugely problematic), try doing that with a person who *will* take offense at being the butt of your jokes.
what we need is not an attitude shift, but an economic and societal one.
- we need fully funded elder care that pays its employees a living wage so that family carers can get a break.
- we need jobs with geographic and temporal flexibility that allow us to engage in caretaking tasks, instead of employers trying to chase us back into the office.
- we need better, funded childcare, because due to a generational blip, many of us need to start taking care of our parents at the same time as we are taking care of our children. with all the emotional and financial pressures that brings.
- and we need to break the patterns of passing on intergenerational trauma to develop good relationships with children in our care that include conversations about our own aging and making joint end-of-life plans.
we can’t just keep expecting people to deal with gross structural societal inequities by “laughing about it.”
talking about it? yes.
being honest about its challenges? absolutely.
insisting on social change? fuck yeah.
but laughing will have to wait.
