Siblings as Caregivers of Elderly Parents

Abstract

One of the developmental tasks of a sibling group in midlife is the care of aging parents during the parents’ decline and death (Goetting, 1986). The usual trajectory involving an aging parent is that the spouse provides needed help for as long as possible, with occasional help from adult children and others. With increasing frailty, illness, or death of the spouse, one or more adult children provide added help needed to maintain the parent in his or her own home. As the parent continues to decline, a pattern of regular caregiving by adult children is established. When the parent’s care needs become too great to be met in this manner, one of the adult children takes the parent into his or her home for care or the parent enters some kind of formal long-term care facility.