If you’re not familiar with it, The New York Times has a well-written blog column in the health section called The New Old Age. The column often features topics of caring and coping with stories of people who are being full-time family caregivers either for a spouse, a parent of other loved one. There are often senior health related topics as well.
Home Instead CEO Paul Hogan quoted in The New York Times’s New Old Age Blog
Last week, writer Paula Span featured a caregiver column entitled, “Will Boomers be any Different?” In the column, she says that “…the the No. 1 question I encounter when I speak to family caregivers is how to cajole old people into adapting to increasing disability when they are, to be a tad euphemistic, “fiercely independent.”
“In 20 or so years, when we baby boomers enter the ranks of the “old-old” ourselves, will we be any different?,” she asks.
She interviewed our very own Home Instead CEO, Paul Hogan, who was in Richmond, VA, last week meeting with the Boomer Project, a market research firm specializing in marketing to Boomers.
“We’ll see more seniors coming directly to us for help in the next 10 years, versus the past 10 when it was a daughter or son calling us and tearing their hair out,” says Hogan.
With the Depression generation…agreeing to home care “takes a doctor’s ultimatum: ‘You’re not going home from the hospital unless you get help, because you’ll break that other hip.’” But Mr. Hogan’s own mother, a businesswoman in her 70s, has long paid financial advisers, child care workers and housekeepers. “She sees getting help when she’s older as just another in the long line of services she’s taken advantage of throughout her career,” Mr. Hogan reported.
For boomers, though,“the concept of reaching a certain age, leaving work, and disengaging from our lives and social networks is anathema,” said Matt Thornhill, president of the Boomer Project. “We get a lot of our self-fulfillment from work – and we’re going to need the income,” Mr. Thornhill said. So we may not be so amenable to leaving our homes, either — or giving up our cars.
Whether Boomers will really be any different than our parents in the next 20 years is yet to be seen. But we certainly are more willing to outsource and pay for services that are parents didn’t. And, as Ms. Span points out,
”In fact, we’ll probably have to accept hired help. As a generation, we’ve had far fewer children than our parents, and we’re less likely to be married. Even if we prefer to rely on unpaid care when we’re sick or frail, our smaller families may be stretched too thin to provide it.”
”The reputation of older people is that they get stuck in their ways,” Mr. Thornhill mused. But that may not pertain to boomers. “We’ve always been so adaptive. Life for us has been change.”
If you’d like to read the full blog post and the comments, you can simply click on this link: NYTimes New Old Age Blog – Will Boomers Be Any Different?
And if you would like more information about Home Instead Senior Care, please call our Rohnert Park home care office at 707.586.1516.
