SOC352H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Married People, Sandwich Generation, Social Reproduction
1
Lecture 5
For Today
• Informal Care
• Elder Care Considerations
• Valuing Formal Childcare
• Feminized Labour – Implications going forward
Building on Caring
• Adding to our understanding of “caring”: Caring about and caring for (Arber and Ginn)
• Caring about = the emotional investment in another person’s well-being
• Caring for = taking action to improve a person’s well-being
• What else can care work be described as
o Nurturing
o Physical / social reproduction
• Arber and Gin look at caring about and caring for someone
o Emotional aspect
o The physical aspect
• Try to explore how both men and women equally care about aging parents but there is differences
in caring for their parents
INFORMAL CARE
• Type of care work that is provided by free
o Usually by someone in the family
o Usually someone with a pre-existing relationship with the recipient
• Focus on informal care in relation to elder care
• Funding cuts and aging population means increase in informal care
o Formal care can be very expensive and the lack of funding means that there are barriers
towards formal care
o As a result there is an increase in informal care
o More family members are taking part or almost all of the carework for aging parents
o Public funding for carework is inadequate when looking at the needs of care recievers
• Changes to demographics in globally can also affect informal care
o Living away from parents that need care
ELDER CARE
• 70% of workers said that they were responsible for the care for a parent and 50% said that they
were responsible for two parents
• How is elder care different from child care?
o Period of time is less certain
▪ With children you know that you will reduce care when the children are 4 years
old and will go to school
▪ With parents you don’t know how long will have to provide care, or whether you
will need to provide more care later time
▪ On average elder care responsibilities last for 6 years, this is often longer than what
people have to take care for an aging relative
o Milestones are less predictable
▪ The milestones for children are pretty stable
▪ With parents the milestones are less stable are negative in nature, as they decline
in health
o Milestones are usually negative
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
2
o Higher emotional impact
▪ Mental capacity may suffer
▪ Disorders like Alzheimer’s can be really tough emotionally
o Etc.
▪ People are having less children which means children will have less people to share
the responsibilities between fewer siblings
▪ Children often have kids of their own and have to care for both dependents
(sandwich generation)
• Factors impacting the likelihood of a person providing care:
o Household status
o Age
o Ethnicity
o Income
o Gender
Factors Impacting Elder Care
• Household Status
o Place of carer relative to care recipient
▪ The closer you live the more able you would be to provide care work
▪ People who live closer often provide more car
o Married people more likely to be carers
▪ Most carers are children or children in law
▪ Married people are more likely to be carers than single people
• Income
o Debate about impact of income level
▪ Some claim that people with lower income will be able to provide more car
• Cannot afford formal care
• People with lower income often have a single income provider which
means the other person can provide care
• It is unclear whether informal care causes lower income or lower income
means that the person will increase in informal care
• Just because someone has a higher income doesn’t mean that they won’t
provide care
o It is difficult to see what extent does income play a role in informal
care
o More important is employment status
▪ Part time workers can provide more informal care than full timers
▪ Places less strain on the caregiver
Gender and Elder Care
• Back to Gerstel and Gallagher: men play a complementary role in caretaking relative to their wives,
rather than substituting this labour
o Men are increasingly caring but still women dominate
o Although men were cited as increasing in care work the type of care work that they
provided was dependent on the type of care work that their spouses did
o The amount of time men spend caring for parents, would depend on how much time their
wives spend
▪ when women would go the men would come with
▪ Referred to as women “drawing men in”
▪ Suggests one of the reason why married people provide more care than women do
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Informal care: elder care considerations, valuing formal childcare, feminized labour implications going forward. It is unclear whether informal care causes lower income or lower income means that the person will increase in informal care. Just because someone has a higher income doesn"t mean that they won"t provide care. It is difficult to see what extent does income play a role in informal care: more important is employment status, part time workers can provide more informal care than full timers, places less strain on the caregiver. Ideological evaluation of emotional labour, in caring about someone and caring for someone: tensions, labour of love, definitions and boundaries of work. Tension 2: boundaries of care work: what work is being done by the child care worker, there is often unclear boundaries, contradictions between ideologies of motherhood and the practices of paid caregiving work.
