Keeping your career vs. caring for aging parents
Company policies and families’ realities are clashing, and people’s careers are suffering as they struggle to handle it all
MINNEAPOLIS – Christian Fritzberg’s life was in chaos.
Just a month into a new job, he moved his 74-yearold mother out of assisted living and into his home.
Fritzberg, 35, worked nights and weekends to get his work done as he juggled his new caregiving duties. His mother was frail and in a wheelchair, and could no longer cook, bathe or get herself dressed.
He believed he was managing; his bosses felt otherwise. Within the year, he was out of work, with four weeks’ severance.
“I was pulled in two directions,” Fritzberg said. “At the beginning, they said they’d be flexible and would accommodate whatever time I needed. It went quickly to becoming an issue.”
Growing numbers of American workers will confront this dilemma as the baby boom generation ages: how to take care of an aging parent and still hold a job.
Surveys show that more than two-thirds of those caring for their frail loved ones suffer job-related difficulties. They cut back on hours, take unpaid time off, retire early or receive a warning about performance or attendance.
The U.S. is one of the few industrialized countries that doesn’t guarantee workers paid leave to care for family members, and most employers do not offer it. This leaves many without guaranteed job security, flexibility or a financial safety net.
“We are still using caregiving policies from the 1950s, when many more families were composed of one breadwinner and one stay-at-home parent providing unpaid family care. Families today are overwhelmed by the physical, emotional and financial costs of both child care and elder care.”
Sarita Gupta
Co-director of the national advocacy group Caring Across Generations
“We are still using caregiving policies from the 1950s, when many more families were composed of one breadwinner and one stay-at-home parent providing unpaid family care,” said Sarita Gupta, co-director of the national advocacy group Caring Across Generations. “Families today are overwhelmed by the physical, emotional and financial costs of both child care and elder care.”
A drain on productivity
With an unprecedented age boom unfolding, the need for workplace policies to support the nation’s 25 million family caregivers has never been more pressing — for the workers, the nation’s elders and the economy.
Informal caregiving costs U.S. businesses as much as $33 billion in lost productivity each year, according to the National Alliance for Caregiving. That includes the costs of absenteeism as well as the expenses of replacing workers, shifting them from full- to part-time positions and making workday adjustments.
Meanwhile, those who drop out of the labor force or reduce hours put their current and future financial security at risk to avoid the high cost of home care, assisted living or nursing homes.
“These are folks who are struggling,” said Vicki Shabo, vice president of the National Partnership for Women and Families. “Without income when they need to take time off of work, they face falling deeper into a financial hole. They may need to rely on public assistance. They may need to go into debt.”
Wisconsin was one of the nation’s first states to pass a medical leave law, in 1988. Congress followed five years later with the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA).
The law provides eligible workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave a year for their own medical emergencies and to care for sick family members, without fear of getting fired.
But in Wisconsin, 63 percent of workers don’t have access to FMLA protections, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families. That’s because they work part-time or for a small business with fewer than 50 employees, or they’re caring for a relative who isn’t included, such as a grandparent, sibling or domestic partner.
Also, because FMLA leave is unpaid, most low-wage workers can’t afford to take it.
“Anyone can become a caregiver at any time,” said Tay McNamara, codirector at the Center on Aging & Work at Boston College. “And a lot of people will face this at a time when they should be making peak money. If your employer doesn’t offer it, your recourse is to get another job or leave your job.”
A few companies offer leave
With a tightening job market, a small but growing number of large companies have established paid-leave policies or expanded existing coverage to attract and hold on to skilled workers.
Still, a mere 13 percent of the nation’s privatesector workforce is offered paid family leave, and the benefits are two to three times more likely to be given to managers and professional workers than to lower-wage workers. Companies also are much more apt to provide paid time off to bond with a baby than to care for an aging parent with unpredictable and ongoing medical needs.
Deloitte, the global accounting and consulting firm, launched one of the nation’s most comprehensive and generous paid-leave policies in September 2016. Employees are fully compensated for medical and family leave for up to 16 weeks a year.
Michelle Weaver, a Deloitte consultant now in Atlanta, was among the first to take advantage of the program.
Weaver’s father is a disabled Vietnam veteran who doesn’t drive, and her mother is his main caregiver. When Weaver’s mother needed surgery on both knees simultaneously, Weaver knew her parents couldn’t cope alone.
She took two weeks of paid leave and moved into their home in Beloit where she did all the driving, grocery shopping, cooking and laundry. Weaver helped her mom with personal needs, managed her pain pills and kept her on task with physical therapy exercises.
Then her father got hurt falling off a step.
“I ended up taking care of my dad a lot more than we were planning on,” she said.
Weaver, 42, enjoyed being there for her parents, but said the work was all-consuming.
“It was pretty much 24/7,” she said. “If I’d had to be online, attending meetings and e-mailing, it wouldn’t have worked.”
Jen Fisher, Deloitte’s national manager for well-being said the program is flexible.
“It’s an effort to say, we’ve got your back whatever your life situation is,” she said. “We want you to be able to take care of those things and those people that matter the most to you, but also to have a meaningful and valuable career.”
How to pay for leave
Paid family and medical leave has bipartisan support both in Congress and among the public. But figuring out how to pay for it has long been a partisan sticking point.
Democratic lawmakers generally have favored social insurance programs, such as those in California and a handful of other states, which are funded by a payroll tax on employees and businesses, and are available to all workers.
Republicans tend to oppose publicly funded insurance programs because they raise taxes, create new government programs and limit employers from crafting their own programs to fit the unique needs of their workforce. Republican bills tend to favor tax incentives as a carrot for businesses.
In Wisconsin, the most recent attempt to create a statewide paidleave program came during the 2017 legislative session, but it failed to get a hearing in the GOPcontrolled Legislature. Co-sponsored by state Sen. Janis Ringhand (DEvansville), the bill would have established a trust fund paid entirely out of workers’ paychecks.
Whether by mandate or market force, the landscape is shifting. This year, legislatures in 29 states discussed paidleave bills.
Congress’ new tax law includes a tax break for companies that provide paid family and medical leave for workers earning less than $72,000 a year, though it is a voluntary incentive and will sunset after two years.
Four states — California, New Jersey, Rhode Island and New York — have now implemented paid-leave laws that cover family leave financed through payroll contributions from workers and their employers. Washington state and the District of Columbia will join the list in 2020.
In Hawaii, a measure passed last summer provides a $70 a day stipend for working caregivers to hire help for ailing family members so they don’t have to give up their jobs.
“Paid family leave is one way to help workers take responsibility for this themselves and figure it out,” said Debra Fitzpatrick, co-director of the Center on Women, Gender and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota, who has analyzed various state and national models of paid leave.
“Businesses are concerned that people will be out every other day, given the demographic realities and need for elder care. But in the states with programs, this hasn’t been the case.”
The need for family and medical leave — paid or unpaid — is felt broadly across the U.S. About six in 10 workers say they have taken or are very likely to take time off for family or medical reasons at some point, according to Pew Research.
But nearly 7 million Americans who needed to take a leave didn’t take it last year because they couldn’t afford a hit to the paycheck, according to another study.
Straining to juggle
Working became nearly impossible for Brenda Bryant after she moved her mother into her Milwaukee condo. She was Joyce’s only child and felt dutybound, even as her mother's advancing dementia turned their lives upside down.
Bryant, a licensed practical nurse, stopped taking classes to boost her income and credentials as a licensed practical nurse. The coursework became too overwhelming with the daily routines of cooking, cleaning and managing her mother’s mood swings and occasional public outbursts.
Bryant worked with Employ Milwaukee to apply for jobs she could do from home or at night, after her son got home from his job. At one point, Bryant found what she thought was the perfect work-from-home job.
“The only problem was I needed to go to Eau Claire for a two-week training,” she said. “I can’t be gone for two weeks. My son can’t take care of her by himself for two weeks.”
Research from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Alzheimer’s Association shows that those who care for people with Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementias often experience a different kind of strain and isolation. Their care is more intimate and hands-on, and lasts for a longer period of time — six years, on average. They experience more upheaval at the workplace as well.
A recent survey of Alzheimer’s caregivers found that 54 percent go into work late, leave early or take time off because of their responsibilities. Fifteen percent took a leave of absence, 13 percent took a less demanding job.
After a particularly stressful stretch, Bryant called a crisis line. Through referrals, she found the Interfaith Older Adults Program, which provided a grant to help pay the bills and sent out a volunteer to visit with Joyce so Bryant could get a break. It was a temporary reprieve.
Joyce’s fragile emotional state eventually landed her in the hospital, where it took three weeks to find a nursing home that would accept Medicaid.
With her mother no longer living with her, Bryant, 52, found work as an LPN doing wound care. It eases the financial strain, but Bryant says her heart aches knowing an institution can never live up to the care she’d be providing her 87-year-old mother.
“That’s what keeps me up at night,” she said.
Women’s finances take hardest hit
Americans who provide care for their aging parents lose an estimated $3 trillion in wages, pension and Social Security benefits when they take time off to do so, according to research by MetLife Mature Market Institute, the National Alliance for Caregiving and the Center for LongTerm Care at New York Medical College.
Women, who now are breadwinners in 40 percent of the nation’s families, are hit hardest.
Female caregivers 50 and older who leave the workforce to care for a parent can lose $325,000 in lifetime earnings — 25 percent more than men, the study said.
“Already their situations are way more precarious, financially and economically,” said health care policy expert and consultant Anne Tumlinson, of daughterhood.org. “Women are much more likely to have more difficulty getting back into the workforce and are less prepared for retirement.”
Gail Gibson Hunt, founder of the National Alliance for Caregiving, argues that unless policymakers make it easier in the coming years to balance work and family caregiving, adult children will either continue to reduce hours and drop out of the labor market, or more frail elders will receive insufficient care.
“If you don’t help out the family caregiver,” Hunt said, “they’re going to push this responsibility onto Medicaid. And then the taxpayer is on the hook for a much bigger hit.”
About this report Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Jackie Crosby met with dozens of families and interviewed more than 100 experts to document the burdens on family caregivers as society ages. Her work was supported by a nine-month O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University. The project included contributions from Marquette students Jack Goods, Patrick Thomas and Yiren Yang. To read the full series, go to startribune.com/care.