PBS has done a good job summarizing the cost of caring for your mom or dad at home with their article, which is provocatively titled, “What working a part-time job for five years – for free – looks like”.  (There is also an interesting graphic that goes with it that you can find here.)  Here are a couple of the stats pulled out of the article:

– This will impact a lot of us, 40 percent of all women 18 or older and 37 percent of all men 18 or older provide care for someone.

– On average, a long-term health care caregiver is a 49 year-old woman caring for her widowed mother.

= ….a 50 year old or older family caregiver who leave the workforce to care for a parent forgoes, on average, $304,000 in lost salary and benefits over their lifetime.

– Women who are family caregivers are 2.5 times more likely than non-caregivers to live in poverty and five times more likely to receive Supplemental Security Income.

Most of our In-home Care clients started with a family caregiver, and many of them still have a family caregiver.  Much of the Family In-home care work that we do is to supplement care that is being provided by family members.  An easy example of this is when we work 9-5 caring for a senior adult with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.  The client’s daughter is usually there in the evenings taking care of her parents and often taking care of her children also.  In these instances, we are a supplement, but the family is still doing a whole lot of caring.  We have other elder care clients where we only work a few hours just to give a break to the family caregiver.  The cost to a family of missed work and increased stress is immense.  Our company exists to try to help reduce this burden on the family caregiver and give them the peace of mind of knowing that their parents are going to be well taken care of while the caregiver/daughter takes care of herself.