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In last week’s thread there was extensive discussion on the retirement home employee shortage in the US. It made me ask myself: is it fair to say that elderly care in the US and Western countries in general is based on the unstated rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn if you have loving, caring children and grandchildren living nearby, visiting you regularly and looking after you if needed? That is, whatever system of care that is set up is not designed and should not be designed to basically prop you up and coddle you otherwise? It may sound cynical or too far-fetched to say it out loud, but looking at this issue from the outside, it’d explain many things. I imagine this is a general rule most Boomers also take as given, as they grew up in an age when childlessness and family dissolution/dislocation was much less normal than today.
With the exception of the infertile (or those whose spouse is infertile) and extremely ugly, I really don’t have much sympathy for people who don’t have children.
The assumption should be that unless you either have children (plural) and raise them well enough that they care about you, or you’re rich enough to get the platinum plan, $40k a month type nursing home, you’re going to have an awful end of life situation. But a lot of people are scared of bringing out the stick when it comes to raising birth rates.
Everything before "you’re going to have an awful end of life situation" is superfluous. Like how are a few kids who occasionally come and pity you, going to make the slow decay and daily pain of old age that much more bearable? It could be worse, they could take care of you, and you'll die knowing you ruined a portion of life of a still functioning human you love. When my grandma was in a retirement home, we made sure never to tell her that the value of her modest house had long ago been consumed by the cost, or she would have eaten the pills.
Why? I enjoyed hanging out with older relatives almost every week until they died, many people in traditional communities actually incorporate the elderly into daily life, they’re at the dinner table, at the park, in the garden, at the tavern having a beer with everyone else. They’re looking after grandchildren, they’re providing sage advice, they’re part of the family and community. I’m not talking about the last six months on your deathbed, I’m talking about what in many cases is the last decade or more of life.
You're describing those elderly that are still in good health, can still walk, have clear and intact minds etc. They aren't really relevant to this discussion. There's a large spectrum between being completely healthy and being on your deathbed.
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The typical case for a whole lot of my relatives seems to be that they just stop doing much of anything. During their working years they worked and watched TV. Once social security kicks in they have enough resources to survive and entertain themselves mostly with TV, and that's what they do. If they wind up in a nursing home, they just have a smaller TV, possibly with headphones so they don't disturb a roommate.
I would like that vibrant multi-generational life, but it's not all up to me. Luckily my wife's family is the complete opposite of this.
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If they're still in good shape, the childless can keep doing what they'd been doing the previous 70 years of their life. I'm talking about the time where they can't look after themselves, let alone grandchildren. When they become a burden, the fact that they can have their children share that burden is not really a plus. Maybe you haven’t experienced old age dementia. People who can’t walk ten paces unassisted without falling, who have no idea what you’re talking about most of the time, and who linger for years in pain and confusion.
As @BurdensomeCount says, in many cases (especially those that don’t involve dementia) there’s a long, slow decline between being old enough to retire, old enough to be elderly, old enough to maybe no longer be fully entirely independent (but also not useless or a vegetable) and old enough to need round the clock care.
‘Assisted living facilities’ in the US (etc) are full of people who could continue to play important, valuable and prosocial roles in their communities and families. That’s obvious in as much as these homes are often full of their own kind of communities, which the elderly recreate after being abandoned by their families.
I find your present idyllic view of our elders difficult to reconcile with your callousness towards them during covid, which was basically, why should society care at all about the economically unproductive?
My view of them during Covid was that sacrificing the entire economy to protect them was both futile and stupid, not that individual families (or nursing homes etc) couldn’t take steps to protect them. Firstly, most elderly people easily survived Covid, including nonagenarians and centenarians. Secondly, to me, life extension (past a point) is less important than quality of life. The failure state isn’t grandma dying during a global pandemic, sad as that is, it’s grandma spending the last decade of her life separated from her family and community. And most old people are pretty reasonable in my experience, they don’t want to see their children and grandchildren suffer to slightly increase their chance of living another handful of years.
I'd argue that lockdowns, in the way they were designed and enforced, didn't even end up protecting the elderly.
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Unfortunately the childless complain if you tell them that they can't retire from their job, and without the money coming in from their job they can't keep doing what they've been doing for the past 70 years of thier life. There is also a period of time where people are perfectly capable of living a decent life in good shape but they wouldn't be able to work their full time jobs any more. This leads to them making less money that needs to be made up from somewhere, and that somewhere in western countries is by and large the state for most people becuase they don't have a proper culture of filial responsibility or didn't have children or even worse (this one boggles me), despite fully knowing they won't have anyone to take care of them in their old age, made absolutely zero efforts to save up extra money to build a buffer to live off of when they are retired.
And when you were a little child, you too were a burden, nothing more than a little shit machine, yet your parents elected to take it on instead of handing you over to CPS so the government could take it instead. In their old age it is now time for you to take care of them, doesn't have to be physically if you can't handle it (like advanced dementia, I wouldn't wish caring for a parent with that onto anyone), you can make monetary contributions to their care too (even in my homeland we do have specialised homes for the small fraction of people who become so senile they need a minder all day instead of dying earlier of the far bigger killers of heart disease and cancer).
Only a small proportion (rising, but still small) of people make it to that age where dementia makes taking care of them a huge burden on their children and our specialist care homes can handle it in the cases where things get to that point (of course how much you are willing to pay influences how good this specialist care home gets, from the most basic fully paid for government shit that probably takes a few years off your already dwindling future life expectancy up to and including having your own private trained servants take care of you in your own home, a distant relative of mine over 90 is getting this treatment right now). However in the large majority of other cases your children can easily take care of your needs at home until you're within a few months of death, at which point most of your costs are to do with the medical system rather than the social care system anyways.
Or they handed you over to the kindergarten and then elementary school + after-school, which is basically the equivalent to the elderly being handed over to retirement homes. And this has been the social norm for many decades.
This is another weird thing about the western schooling system. Back home school ends at around 1pm for elementary+middle years and around 3pm for secondary school. After school activities exist but are rare and only take place a few days a week.
Regardless, even this this handing over of children is only for a few hours each day, in the end the children still live with their parents and spend more time with their parents than anyone else. That's absolutely not true for retirement homes, indeed I wouldn't call a situation where an elderly person was spending more time daily in the care of their children than with professionals to be anything like them being placed in a retirement home.
Placing you in a retirement home is more akin to handing you over to CPS with your parents giving you a visit for a few hours every other week.
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