Care-giving expectations and challenges among elders and their adult children in Southern Sri Lanka

Watt, Melissa H.; Perera, Bilesha; Østbye, Truls; Ranabahu, Shyama; Rajapakse, Harshini; Maselko, Joanna

doi:10.1017/s0144686x12001365

Cited by 36 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Religious reasons were also cited in more recent papers for voluntarily providing care (Watt et al, 2014;Wezel et al, 2016;Friedmann & Buckwalter, 2014). There is a legal responsibility on families to provide elder care in Sri Lanka and other Asian countries (Watt et al, 2014;SEARO, 2012) within multigenerational households. Family care is seen in some cultural contexts to be superior to professional care as it is more loving and secure (Flores et al, 2009;Gray et al, 2009;Wezel et al, 2016).…”

Section: Cultural Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Mothers needing care from their daughters wanted to keep some degree of control and independence over the caregiving relationship (Watt et al, 2014), and maintain their dignity (WardGriffin et al, 2006;Dunham & Cannon, 2008).…”

Section: Maintaining Independencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reasons for becoming a caregiver included feeling a complex mix of expectation and obligation, along with love, and gratitude for the person with dementia, repaying the care they received as children (Flores et al, 2009;Price, 2011;WardGriffin et al, 2006;Dunham & Cannon, 2008;Toribio-Díaz, 2013). Religious reasons were also cited in more recent papers for voluntarily providing care (Watt et al, 2014;Wezel et al, 2016;Friedmann & Buckwalter, 2014). There is a legal responsibility on families to provide elder care in Sri Lanka and other Asian countries (Watt et al, 2014;SEARO, 2012) within multigenerational households.…”

Section: Cultural Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While there are positive factors associated with becoming a caregiver, namely pride and satisfaction (Watt et al, 2014), providing care to a person with dementia is a long-term commitment with a potential negative health impact on the caregiver. Women provide care for a longer period of time than men (Shriver & Alzheimer's Association, 2010) and spend more hours per day undertaking caregiving tasks (Kim et al, 2011).…”

Section: Impact Of Caregivingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

The impact of dementia on women internationally: An integrative review

Erol

Brooker

Peel

2016

Health Care for Women International

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Women are disproportionately affected by dementia, both in terms of developing dementia and becoming caregivers. We conducted an integrative review of English language literature of the issues affecting women in relation to dementia from an international perspective. The majority of relevant studies were conducted in high income countries, and none were from low-income countries. The effects of caregiving on health, wellbeing and finances are greater for women; issues facing women, particularly in low and middle-income countries need to be better understood.Research should focus on building resilience to help people adjust and cope long term.Dementia is a global public health issue that disproportionately affects women, either through developing the condition themselves, or as a carer for someone with dementia. The effects on women of living with or caring for someone with dementia from an international perspective needs to be more fully understood. In our review of the published literature, we explore the impact of dementia on changing roles, identity, wellbeing and finances for women in both high-income and low-and middle income countries. An improved understanding of these factors can support research, and policy developments, that address the issues specifically relevant to women.As age is the greatest risk factor for dementia, and women have a greater life expectancy worldwide than men, a larger number of people with dementia are women (Alzheimer's Association, 2014).There are also clinical differences between genders in disease risk and severity, especially in relation to dementia and cognition (Carter et al., 2012). There is a significant association between age, gender, and dementia in many areas of the world, with women showing a higher prevalence rate for dementia than men (Bamford, 2011;Takeda et al., 2011; Alzheimer's Disease International, 2015) expectation that women will assume caregiving roles (Godfrey & Warshaw, 2009;Lantz, 2009;Gibbons et al., 2014). In many studies of dementia caregivers, all or most participants are women, reflecting the disproportionate extent to which women are relied upon as carers, although few reports focus on gender specifically (Robinson et al., 2014). Therefore the assumption that women provide informal care to people with dementia is embedded (often implicitly) in much of the existing research.The financial impact of providing dementia care on family caregivers is substantial; caregivers in the United States reported that they were reluctant to take time off work to provide care, or took on additional work to cover caregiving costs, which had increased because of the recent economic downturn (Evercare, 2009). Women may also have the responsibility of caring for young children alongside caring for a parent with dementia -referred to as the 'sandwich generation' (Solberg et 3 al., 2014). Despite this (often dual) caring responsibility, families often prefer , for a variety of cultural, obligational and practical reasons to continue to provide care at ho...

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Section: Cultural Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Maintaining Independencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Cultural Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Impact Of Caregivingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The impact of dementia on women internationally: An integrative review

Erol

Brooker

Peel

2016

Health Care for Women International

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“…These literature reviews are therefore about the key ideas underlining the studies reviewed here but this dissertation does not engage with the theoretical frameworks and or concepts that these key ideas stem from. Watt et al (2014) *The empirical literature is inspired by and builds on classical theoretical work developed by these scholars.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Men do care! : A gender-aware and masculinity-informed contribution to caregiving scholarship

Wallroth

2016

Linköping Studies in Arts and Sciences

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In caregiving literature, it is often the female gender that has been the focus of attention, and in particular women's unpaid labor. Studies also tend to make comparisons between men's and women's caregiving, using men's caregiving experiences to show not only that women face greater burdens, but also that men's needs can be disregarded. This means that while gender analyses are not uncommon in the caregiving literature, gender tends to be equated with womanhood. The research problem that this dissertation addresses is therefore the gender bias that characterizes caregiving scholarship at present and the fact that this bias is impeding us from moving the debates on care and caregiving forward. The aim of the dissertation is twofold. Firstly, it attempts to contribute to the rectification of the gender bias in question by focusing on men's caregiving and answering the following research questions: What motivates men to provide care for their elderly parents? How do adult sons experience caregiving? What do adult sons think that care and caregiving are, i.e. what are their perspectives on care? Secondly, this dissertation also aims to explore whether a gender-aware and masculinity-informed perspective can be used to enhance our understanding of caregiving. Thus, through a phenomenological analysis of interviews with 19 caregiving adult sons and sons-in-law, this dissertation discusses how motives, experiences and perspectives, which have so far been interpreted as unique to women, are also matters that men talk about and consider important in caregiving. The dissertation argues therefore that much could be gained if we were to rectify the gender bias that characterizes the literature on family caregiving and explore caregiving men in the genderaware and masculinity-informed way that is lacking in this literature at present. Inspired by the debate within studies of masculinity, the dissertation argues that within the debate on care there is a hegemony of care which has so far tended to exclude men's perspectives on caregiving because literature on family caregiving has regarded women as the ideal caregivers. This dissertation shows that a gender-aware and masculinity-informed perspective on care can increase our understanding of family caregiving and contribute to the rectification of the gender bias that care research suffers from. Against this backdrop, it is proposed that caregiving men should not solely be regarded as empirically interesting. This is because they are an unexploited and theoretically profuse source of information about caregiving.

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The care pentagon: Older adults within Sri Lankan‐Australian transnational families and their landscapes of care

Silva

2017

Population Space and Place

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Much of the scholarship on care for older parents within transnational families concentrates on challenges migrants encounter when providing care across transnational space. This paper focuses attention on older adults as transnational care recipients, their agency, and alternative sources of care. Drawing on the experiences of 35 affluent, urban older parents residing in Sri Lanka with at least one adult child who is a skilled, permanent migrant in Australia, I examine how the older parents adapt to the migration of their traditional caregivers, and how the family, community, market and state respond to this care gap to varying degrees. I propose a “care pentagon” as a framework to interrogate older persons' negotiations with these multiple caregivers in the home and host countries, and the manner these agents operate to form a tiered network of caregivers. Through the analysis, I highlight the care‐receiver's tendency to self‐care and the agency they exert within their relationships of care. The paper demonstrates that older persons' landscapes of care change both temporally and spatially as their levels of health and independence vary over time.

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Care-giving expectations and challenges among elders and their adult children in Southern Sri Lanka

Cited by 36 publications

References 37 publications

The impact of dementia on women internationally: An integrative review

The impact of dementia on women internationally: An integrative review

Men do care! : A gender-aware and masculinity-informed contribution to caregiving scholarship

The care pentagon: Older adults within Sri Lankan‐Australian transnational families and their landscapes of care

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