Family Caregiving or Caregiving Alone: Who Helps the Helper?

Family caregiving in dementia.

There are 5.3 million people with Alzheimer’s disease in the US—a number expected to grow as the baby-boomer generation enters old age, with estimates that 7.7 million people will be affected by 2030. From 65 to 75% of dementia patients are cared for at home by family members. According to the 2010 Alzheimer’s Association Facts and Figures report, 10.9 million Americans provide 12.5 billion hou...

Grandmothers, caregiving, and family functioning.

OBJECTIVES We used McCubbin's Resiliency Model of Family Stress, Adjustment and Adaptation ( McCubbin, Thompson, & McCubbin, 2001) to examine how demographic factors, family stress, grandmother resourcefulness, support, and role reward affect perceptions of family functioning for grandmothers raising grandchildren, grandmothers living in multigenerational households, and grandmothers not caregi...

Family caregiving: benefits and burdens.

Staying the Course: Trends in Family Caregiving

The AARP Public Policy Institute, formed in 1985, is part of the Policy and Strategy group at AARP. One of the missions of the Institute is to foster research and strategy on public policy issues of importance to mid-life and older Americans. This publication represents part of that effort. The views expressed herein are for information, debate, and discussion and do not necessarily represent o...

Family caregiving at the end of life.

A caregiver, defined as “a person who provides direct care (to children, elderly people or the chronically ill),” can be either formal (a trained health care worker) or informal (family or friend). In any given year, an estimated 29% of the United States population, or 65 million people, are caregivers. In Rhode Island, approximately 110,000 people were caregivers in 2004, 10% of the state’s po...