Unit 1 Care: A family affair

1.1 What do family carers do?
1. "The word 'carer' means someone who looks after a freidn, relative or neighbour who needs support because of their sickness, age or disability. (Directgov, 2006)
2. There are 6 million unpaid family carers in the UK, saving us £57 billion each year.
3. Some family members have no choice in providing care for others.
1.2 Who counts as a carer?
1. Parker and Lawton (1994) said you're a carer if you provide personal hygiene services, physical labour, medicine and social interaction. These are not normal family member jobs, but it can be hard to consider yourself as a carer.
2. Whether you are a carer or not matters to those who need to plan carer support services, to organisations like 'Carers UK', to employers who have to acknowledge care responsibilities and to the carer if they want to seek financial support.
3. To qualify for carers allowance they must be caring for 35 plus hours a week, be aged over 16 and not a student, earn less than £95 per week and be caring for someone over the age of 65 or that qualifies as disabled.
4. Complicating factors.
  1. Duration and frequency. It's difficult to calculate how much time people spend caring, some need more care one day than others.
  2. Labelling and identity. People must "give up" the role of mother/daughter etc. and adopt the role of a carer in order to get support. The person recieving care also has to acknowledge themselves as a 'cared for person'.
  3. Interdependence. Some people may reciprocate the care they recieve in alternative ways, and other family members may chip in every now and again to help with the care.
  4. Networks. A family member that chooses to help out a lot may interfere with the primary care giver's chance of receiving carer's allowance.
2.1 What is it like to care?
1. Can be hard work, demanding of skill, restricting, stressful, isolated, emotionally demanding, guilt provoking, trapped, obligation, frightening. physically demanding and rewarding.
2. Care is not always a negative experience.
3. Care is often described as a love of labour.
2.2 What affects care relationships?
1. Quality of relationship (Jane Lewis and Barbara Meredith, 1988). They studied daughters that were caring for their mother's and found that the relationship they had prior to care was very important.
2. Quality of relationship (Liz Forbat, 2005) She interviews 6 pairs of family carer/care reciever relationships. She found that the past history of the relationship must be considered before a carer is selected as it is easier to care well for those you get along with.
3. Choice. In the survey "You can take him home now" in 2001, 70% surveys were not told about alternative services.
4. Choice. The idea that parents have earned the right to be cared for through raising their children is widely held within families (Finch, 1989) and in different cultures. (Jones and Rupp, 2000)
5. Support. The amount of informal support received from family and friends and that amount of formal support received from external agencies.
2.3 Wife, mother, daughter, carer.
1. Family carers are never just carers and have lots of other roles too.
2. A carer is often seen as "a woman's role" in society.
3. Although many men are carers, this is often later on in life so they don't have the stress of juggling caring for an adult with caring for children. (Evandrau, 1990)
2.4 The other side of the relationship: what is it like to be cared for?
1. The government make heroes of carers, but forget those being cared for. (Forbat, 2005)
2. "Carers play a vital role, looking after those who are sick, disabled, vulnerable or frail." (National Strategy for Carers)
3. There is no "Cared For UK."
4. Those receiving care feel a loss or power and control, feel a burden, are fearful, isolated and a lack of choice.
5. There are around half a million cases of abuse of the elderly each year. Most of these are in their own home at the hands of family members or paid carers.
2.5 Asking for help.
1. It usually takes a crisis to prompt someone to realise they aren't coping and to seek help. (Cavaye, 2007)
2. People don't want to admit they aren't coping.
3.1 Carers: some facts.
1. In 2001, 6 million people in the UK were unpaid family carers. 68% of these cared for up to 19 hours per week. 11% cared for 20 - 49 hours per week. 21% cared for over 50 hours per week.
2. 58% of carers are women, 42% are men.
3. The peak age for becoming a carer is between 50 - 59.
4. 175,000 under 18's are carers and 13,029 care for over 50 hours per week.
5. 51% of carers provide personal care. 57% provide help with mobility. 22% give medicine. 71% provide 'other help'.
6. 70% of carers are age 65+. 38% care for one of their parents. 18% care for spouses or partners.
3.2 Experiencing care as a younger person.
1. Often feel a burden, fearful, isolated and that they have no choice.
2. Unlike the elderly, they rely on someone for the majority of their lives and also have to face the possibility that their family won't always be there to care for them.
3. Many family carers feel that caring about someone means you must care for them, that they would be negatively viewed if they didn't provide care and that they have a family duty to provide care.
4.1 Changing families: family life in the 1950's.
1. Peter Townsend studied Bethnal Green in 1957.
2. Bethnal Green was the home to 54,000 people at the time, 200 of which he studied in depth.
3. Shared care was possible between family members because 46% of those interviewed lived with younger relatives, between the 200 interviews there was 2,700 relatives within a mile, 85% of those with children had one of them living within a mile, 78% saw a son or daughter every day and older woman could reciprocate care until they were very ill.
4. If these family members didn't provide care, the demands on services would be enormous.
5. Most care is done by female relatives.
6. Providing care was a normal feature of family life.
7. Care was made a lot easier by living so close by.
4.2 Families and caring: Bethnal Green in the late 20th century.
1. Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young revisited in 1990.
2. The biggest change that they found was the 1/3 of the population were Bangladeshi and filled 3/5 of school places.
3. From the 530 people surveyed 177 had no relatives near by, 198 had one or two relatives close by and 155 had 3+ relatives close by.
4. Families are now more geographically scattered than in the past due to changes in the economy, housing policy and individual wealth.
4.3 Do families still care?
1. Hazel Qureshi and Alan Walker (1989) looked at whether families still cared 30 years later in the 1950's. They found no evidence to suggest that families no longer care.
2. They came up with the term "normative pressures" meaning that there is a strong expectation by others that families should provide care for relatives.
3. Most family members accept that elderly relatives are their responsibility.
4. Some struggle to meet these responsibilities due to geographical scattering, which is why interest in carers has grown in recent years.

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