Many boomers may face old age alone

By: Karen S. Peterson
USA Today, December 12, 2000

Nancy Sheaffer says she will count on God, an extended church family and the kindness of strangers to do for her what she is doing for her 80-year-old mother, Bonnie Lynch: provide care in old age. That's because neither she nor her second husband has children. Her mother, in good health but having "up and down days," lives with them in Richmond, Va. "If I end up in a home," says Sheaffer, 44, "that's the way it goes. I go back to my belief that I will be taken care of when I need to be." She is probably more trusting than most of her boomer generation when it comes to answering the question "Who will take care of me?"

In an aging America, with increasingly fragmented families and the potential for record numbers needing care, most experts say that elder care is a crisis in waiting. Millions of baby boomers could be left with no one around to tend to them when they are old and frail.

The combination of factors will make tomorrow's "caregiving burden the single most devastating social, economic and spiritual sinkhole of the early decades of the 21st century," says Ken Dychtwald, a psychologist, gerontologist and author of Age Power. "It could be a death blow to our thriving culture and economy."

Experts see a convergence of long-term trends:

• America's population is aging. The leading edge of the 78 million baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — are heading toward retirement and becoming the "young old." According to the Census Bureau, the number of people ages 65 to 74 will grow 107% by 2030.

• Boomers have fewer children than their parents, leaving a shortage of adult children to act as caregivers down the line. Like Sheaffer, almost one-fifth (19%) of women in their early 40s have no children.

• Boomers will live longer. The life expectancy for a person born in 1957 — the peak of the baby boom — was about 70 years at birth, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. That's six to 15 years longer than their parents' generation. A huge number will reach an age requiring assistance at the same time, choking the already gasping caregiving system.

• The concept of "family" has changed, creating a powerful societal shift that will alter the face of caregiving. Boomers have chosen to divorce, to cohabit, to remarry and create stepfamilies, to remain single, to marry and not have children. Mounting research shows that divorce and blended families tend to weaken ties between generations. Most at risk are divorced dads who have lost close touch with their children.

Experts are just beginning to study the effects today's restructured families will have on caregiving. So far, they find few answers.

Carol Dawson worries about her 14-year-old son's generation. "These kids have several sets of grandparents," from various step and blood relationships, says Dawson, 44, of Jeffersonville, Ind. "My son will have a mom, a dad, a stepdad and, maybe down the road, a stepmom. These kids will have huge responsibilities."

Boomers just have not done much thinking about their future need for elder care, says Jake Sheaffer, 42, Nancy's husband. "And that is really scary. We live in an increasingly complicated world. The Ozzie-and-Harriet family is pretty much passé."

People in their 80s — the old old — are most likely to fall ill and to need care. And their numbers will burgeon. By 2020, 7 million people will be 85 or older, says the National Institute on Aging. That group will at least double again by 2040.

Although those boomers will live longer than their parents, the prognosis is mixed. Demographer Kenneth Wachter of the University of California, Berkeley, thinks technological advances will lead to fewer people with disabilities among the frail elderly.

But others worry about the future health picture. "The probability that someone will get dementia, Alzheimer's and stroke-related diseases rises dramatically during one's 80s," says Robert Willis of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. "As other causes of disease decline, it is more likely people will end their lives in a demented state."

The Alzheimer's Association says 4 million Americans have the disease now. Without a cure, that number is expected to jump to 14 million by 2050.

The reassembling of families — through divorce, remarriage and cohabitation — is prompting a hot debate: Will the divorced and remarried receive the same support from adult children, particularly stepchildren, as those who stayed in intact families?

Demographer Wachter has developed projections sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and published in the British Royal Society journal Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences:

• Stepchildren. People who are now 70 to 85 have an average of 2.5 living biological children. But that age group in 2030 will have an average of 1.5 children. The mix changes if you add in stepchildren, whose numbers could help make up for the loss.

• Stepgrandchildren. The number of biological grandchildren will drop by 40% for 70- to 85-year-olds, from four grandchildren today to 2.5 in 2030. But the average goes back up to four in 2030 if stepgrandchildren are added in.

Wachter believes the "steps" will step up to the plate and provide elder care, although they do not tend to do so now. In the future, he believes, there will be so many of them that being "stepkin will be commonplace and somewhat normal." The health care system will be so stressed that stepkin will see that "the need is stronger."