British families should take elderly relatives to live with them - like in Asia

[juneau]

According to Jeremy Hunt anyway.

So, could you see yourself doing this? Would your elderly relatives actually WANT you to? Do you have the space.

I would rather kill myself than have my DM living with me. I could possibly cope with my dad, although he's terribly dithery and likes things done his way. As for my step-parents and in-laws - again, death (either theirs or mine), would be preferable

Both my Mum and my DH's care or have cared for their mothers. Both have said that they do not want us under any circumstances to look after them in their old age because of what they went through. It made my Mum ill.

My Gran has dementia and has to have someone sitting in her room all night to make sure she doesn't get out of bed as she has broken her leg twice falling in the middle of the night. She is in a ward with several other patients who need round the clock supervision.

How could a family cope with providing that level of care?

"My parents would not want to be a burden to anyone so would not want to live with any of us. "

This an other posts tells me it's not in UK cultural dna to look after parents in their old age For sure, many UK cultural parents may not want this either.

Right now I'd love to live with my eldery mother as I love her and so does my ds. She wouldn't be a 'burden' but rather we'd be a source of mutual support. More than my h.

We all feel that our kids are growing up so quicky and their early lives are slipping through our hands. I feel the same way about the older generation and also want to enjoy and give support and get support.

Difficulty is there are two sets of ageing parents and we could not cope.

Both BIL/SIL and dh?I were considering it when MIL became ill and we were worried about not being able to afford a care home suited to her needs.

The truth is, it would have been hell on earth for MIL and she almost certainly would not have lived very long.

She is paralysed from the waist downwards from cancer and needs lifting onto the commode and into bed, which dh and I are not strong enough to do.

Our only bathroom is upstairs- stairs not wide enough to take a lift that she would fit in. So she could never have a bath.

She can manoueuvre her own wheelchair, but our hall is not big enough for the kind of wheelchair she needs so she would have to stay in the living room 24/7. In fact, she would have to stay in bed as the space is too cramped for both a bed and a hoist.

She could not get through our front door in her wheelchair so would have to be carried- she is very heavy and dh and I could not manage it on our own without the risk of dropping her; it would require specialist equipment and extra man power every time she had to go for a hospital appointment.

She would not be able to get out of the house in case of fire, even if dh or I were home.

She would never be safe in the house on her own as she has no ability to move if she falls out of the chair or out of bed.

Dh is at work all day and I have had to spend a great deal of the last few years taking our (also disabled) dd to hospital appointments. She would be left alone for hours on end with the knowledge that if anything happened nobody could come.

Under those circumstances I imagine she would have committed suicide by now. Unless dh and I had managed to kill her by dropping her first.

Instead she is in a lovely care home which has the facilities to give her the best quality of life she can have: qualified staff to help with her medical issues, equipment to get her in and out of bed, allow her to go around the home, out into the garden and even on trips to the outside world, somebody on hand for emergencies 24/7, people around to talk to.

Should add that MIL did live in her own home with carers for a time after her paralysis. And spent those days in a state of terror that they would drop her when helping her onto the commode. They nearly did once or twice.

there's a definite pretense about what caring for old people means in this isn't there? as if it were just a case of needing somewhere to live and a bit of company when in reality when you get to the point you can't live alone it is generally because you have very, very significant care needs and to be in a different physical environment that is equipped for those needs.

this government has eradicated the right to even stay home to care for your children beyond the age of 5 (not saying that's wrong, just a fact) and made it possible to put mothers who can't find a job in school hours or which will cover necessary childcare on sanctions such as cuts in housing benefit or being sent on workfare. so caring and the restrictions it puts on ones time are not seen as important enough to merit special treatment or flexibility of the rules. that's their stance. then you get this supposedly saying oh we value caring, we should all care for our elderly.

honestly they must think we are utterly stupid to spin such contradictory values and policies at us and expect us not to just laugh in their faces.

I was browsing an article other day about elder abuse in... Japan? Korea? One of them. A proper academic peer-reviewed lots of case studies article. Bit silly to think that elders are always appreciated in those cultures.

JH has a Chinese wife. I would imagine it is a pretty sexist set up although I would love to learn she earns double his income and he does a lot of the washing at home.

'Difficulty is there are two sets of ageing parents and we could not cope.'

Well, exactly, howrude - everyone has their limit. You, the culturally British, everyone.

If my df and dm both need care, I'm not sure how that would work - they have been in the same room 3 times in 20 years and thank God for that. Them and their partners? DF's partner already has early stage dementia. DM's partner provides a lot of care for some of his own relatives, and she lives where she does so that she can see him more often. She would be miserable living away from him.

We have a two-bed terrace with no hallway, we could barely fit one single bed downstairs, never mind a full-scale hospital bed and hoist. The bathroom is downstairs though.

The solution will have to be dm selling her house and us all buying a larger place halfway between dm and df's current places. I just have to hope they all cope until ds has left school - they only have to hang on another 9 years, but that will bring my df to age 90. And I'm the breadwinner and periodically care for my own husband - it won't help any of us if I've got no income, though I suppose JH would say that's just selfish, unless I suddenly claim benefits or something.

Then my DM lives quite close to her own brother, who is mentally sharp but physically frail, and whose wife has - you guessed it - middle stage dementia. DM spends a lot of time with her in order to help her brother. My uncle and aunt have children, two of whom are already caring for their grandchildren...

I would like it, really, if JH would actually acknowledge how much caring actually does go on in supposedly shithole Britain, where the AVERAGE age of a person in hospital is 82. Life gets very very complicated when people live a long time. Didn't they show some time ago that an awful lot of people who had been listed as living to an enormous age in Japan were, er, dead... but had not been visited by their families, the latter just kept saying 'yes, they're 102, isn't it fantastic?'

After 15 years of being ill, the last five of which needed full time supervision, lifting, continence issues, nearly 20 tablets daily to be administered on a complicated timetable, my father died. We received no assistance at any point with caring for him, bar a 6 week stay in a community hospital at the end. Fortunately my mother used to be a nurse before leaving to care for my father full time. There is no way I could provide that level of care and dedication to anyone whilst raising my two children and working part time. No would I have had anywhere to put him. Mr Hunt is an idiot.

I had my DF here living with us in the last few months of his life. I'm glad I was able to do it, but he was relatively well, heart disease, so he didn't require nursing until the very end. It was a huge strain though.

My DM has Alzheimer's and is now in a nursing home. There is no way I could cope. She is incontinent, has fallen and fractured bones twice, can become extremely agitated and a danger to herself. She would need someone alert and checking her 24/7. Some days I feel guilty at being unable to offer her her last weeks/months/maybe years here with us, but the reality is that I would not be able to do it.

PMSL at people claiming their relatives are 167 when they just haven't noticed they're dead yet.

DM has lived in a 'granny flat' with us for the last 10 years. My DC love having her here, and it's made them more considerate than they might have been. DM is VERY sensitive and does not intrude in any way. She's also a great cook! In her late 80's, she is in relatively good health, but it gives her huge comfort knowing someone is pretty well always around, and I love being able to do that for her.

For us it's worked very well, but we have the space. I can see that it could have been an issue otherwise.