Your ageing parents

 

Over the next 30 to 40 years, Australia will face one of the most profound demographic changes in its history — the greying of a large part of the population. Are you ready to look after your ageing parents?Thanks to modern medicine’s ability to keep us alive, looking after ageing parents has become a very likely scenario for many middle-aged couples. Couples who, we might add, are often also busy raising young children.

If you’ve noticed your parents getting a little wrinklier around the edges, it might be time to have a think about what your future is going to look like. Once your parents are no longer able to look after themselves will they move into a nursing home? Or will they relocate to your family home? If, like many post-GFC retirees their savings have been decimated, who is going to pay the bills that come faster than the years tick by? Are you ready to become part of the sandwich generation?

The sandwich generation
If you are currently raising young children and thinking about the possibility of providing care to an elderly parent you’re about to become part of a generation that finds itself in the unique position of playing caregiver to two vastly different dependants.This generation has been fondly dubbed the “sandwich generation” — a generation of folk who are simultaneously looking after small children and ageing parents at the same time.Carol Abaya, the journalist who got the term accepted into the Oxford English and Merriam Webster dictionaries, says it’s not easy to become elderly or a parent to your parents. “Our society says adults should be able to take care of themselves,” explains Carol. “But, as more live well into their 80s and 90s and families are dispersed across the country, everyone is going to be involved somehow, some way, in elder care,” she counters.

Living in
Findings from a 2012 survey, conducted by Just Better Care, show that 31 per cent of people from New South Wales would prefer to quit any job and commitments to provide full-time care for their parents over arranging for them to be cared for in a nursing home.“I see that as a very positive thing that so many people would want to look after a family member,” says founder and director of Just Better Care, Trish Noakes.