Few have siblings to help out (31 percent believe that caregiving has increased
family tension).
They are “squeezed from all sides,” negotiating with doctors, outside special-
ists, part-time caregivers, and their own family, coordinating their own lives and
everyone else’s lives, feeling guilt and stress over their loved one’s decline, and wor-
rying that their loved one is receiving inadequate care. Half of the family caregivers
surveyed report that their care recipient had missed meals or suffered poor nutri-
tion, a third were involved in accidents that required emergency room care, and
22 percent were home alone when an emergency occurred. Half of the surveyed
caregivers believed that their care recipient needed 10 or more hours of extra care
per week.
Most caregivers also have full-time jobs, and so they must “outsource” caregiv-
ing while they work. Of those with full-time jobs, 43 percent spend more than $500
per week for that extra care, and 20 percent spend more than $1,000 per week. And
since Medicare covers less than 20 percent of elder care costs, they often subsidize
the additional care themselves, with enormous economic consequences: Women who
assume caregiver roles are more than 2.5 times more likely to live in poverty than
noncaregivers, and the proportion increases dramatically when they are non-White
(Donato and Wakabayashi, 2006).
Other economic consequences are more subtle: Caregiving limits the types of out-
side jobs one can take and the opportunities for advancement. Thirty-seven percent
of women caregivers must go from full-time to part-time work, and 35 percent give
up working entirely in order to meet their caregiving responsibilities (National
Alliance for Caregiving, 2004). This absence from wage work affects not only
current earnings but also Social Security and pension benefits down the road.
Boomers, Busters, and Boomlets:
The Generations of Youth
Many GIs returning from World War II took advantage of low-interest student
loans, cheap suburban housing, and a hugely expanding economy to enter the mid-
dle class, marry, and have children—lots of children. A postwar baby boom, last-
ing from 1945 to about 1964, created a big bulge in the populations of Europe and
North America. This created the biggest age cohort in our history—77 million in
the United States. As the baby boomerspassed through childhood, America became
a nation wholeheartedly dedicated to child rearing, with new schools and libraries,
a surge in children’s television and other forms of mass media, and new techniques
of child rearing: Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care,first published in 1946, sold more
than 50 million copies, putting it in almost as many homes as the Bible (CNN,
1998).
As the first wave of baby boomers, born in the late 1940s through the early 1950s,
passed through their adolescence beginning around 1960, America shifted its empha-
sis from childhood to adolescence. There was a surge in youth-oriented magazines,
movies, television programs, and songs. College attendance soared. The “now”
generation, the counterculture, was wholeheartedly dedicated to social and political
change, transforming norms, expectations, and ideas. It was an era of expansion—
an expanding economy, expanding social rights, and expanding consciousness. The
Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay/lesbian movement all
started or increased their momentum while the baby boomers were college students
and young adults.
BOOMERS, BUSTERS, AND BOOMLETS: THE GENERATIONS OF YOUTH 367