If your parents are alive what will happen to them in their old age? What will happen to YOU in your old age? Do you think we've got it right in our culture?

[WideWebWitch]

Following on from a discussion on another thread about my ILS, we were talking about how the resf of the world looks after its elderly people.

So, if your parents are alive, what do you think will happen when they're infirm/older? Will you put them into a home? How will you/they pay for it?

What about when you're old? Do you expect your children to look after you?

And do you think we've got it right, this business of how we look after our elderly parents in the UK? My ex dh is Indian and when I look at the way the extended family is important and involved it's a great model imo.

Interested to hear views on this.

My DH's grandma is very ill at the moment and needs round the clock care. She is very old school and does not want anyone except family helping so the family has rallied round and they have a rota, someone is always there to help get her up and put her to bed, most nights someone sleeps over with a baby monitor to hear her or my MIL is 2 minutes walk away so they put a phone next to her. They do have socail care round twice a day so they can have breaks but 70% of the time it is family with her.

Unfortunately we are 250 miles away so can't help but I am really impressed with DH's cousins and aunts for helping out as they all have jobs and don't live that close. This is how it should be IMO but practically I think they are just lucky that they can do it.

My mother is in a psychogeriatric hospital and has been for the last 5 years. She is doubly incontinent, cannot walk or feed herself, recognises no-one, has no meaningful speech. She is also very violent.

I could not look after her as I would have to devote myself 24/7/365 and have no family on hand to help. And that would mean I would have no time for my children.

I would put a bullet through my head rather than have my children care for me in that situation, I would far rather tham remember me full of like and vibrant, rather than the sad shell my mother is. And I know that, were she in her right mind, she would say the exact same thing.

In response to OP (sorry, got carried away!) I live miles from my mum and so do most of my other siblings so I don't know what we would do, it's worth asking her about actually.

A subject I worry about, WWW! I'm an only & although my mum & stepdad have an excellent pension & some solid investments, my mum has begged me never to put her in a "home"! She's not an easy person - she & dh do not get on very well and I could never live with her.

One of the reasons that dh & I had a 2nd dc was because we didn't want dd to have to shoulder the sole responsability of caring for 2 ancient parents! (I had dd at 37 & ds at 40 - dh is 13 yrs older than I am & has 2 dds from previous marriage). My mum is an only, my dad is an only, my stepdad is an only & I have seen them all struggle with ageing, sickening parents alone. Horrific.

my parents are dead so thats irrelevant to me.

However dh's parents are alive they are 67 and 76. They live in Spain. Dh and I have discussed what will happen when the time comes. Neither of us want them living with us so I guess they will either go into sheltered accomodation or a home presumably paid for by selling their house in Spain. That said they aren't in a position where they would need that at the moment. I think they are angling to live with us though and certainly if FIL pops his clogs then MIL would certainly expect a room at the house.

When we are old I would expect my children to do whatever they saw fit to do at that time in their lives. I wouldnt expect to be a burden on them.

And no I dont think we've got it right. I think the extended family is a good model but possibly more of a community as opposed to all living togehter.

my mil is nearly 80 and and still going strong. when she needs extra help she'll come to live with us. it's only natural.

my dad is in his 70s too and as there are 4 of us i'm sure we'll come to some arrangement there too, but he only lives a few doors down.

when i'm older who knows.

I worry about this too www.

When I was little my maternal grandmother lived with us, it was awful really - and as she and my mum were very close I got seriously pushed out of the circle. As a result, I believe, my mother and I have a rubbish relationship and I would be suicidal within days if she came to live with us. I could not do it to my dd, my dh or me. Yet - I have always said I could not put her in a home. Bothe my parents are now pretty ancient and getting doddery - so it does worry me. They live 150 miles away and do not want to move closer. We can't move as our jobs are here.

In principle I love the extended family idea, but I really don't think it would work for us sadly. I hope that when the time comes I could find sheltered housing close to me for them, but who knows !

This is a very interesting topic. My cousin gave me a very hard time when my mother was commited. She felt that I should look after my mother, as she was helping her mother at the time.

The difference was that her mother was frail and capable of looking after herself with a little assistance. My mother was demeted and needed 24/7 care. Also my cousin's children were in their 30s and mine were 5 and 2.

She made it clear that I was in the wrong. And that she would never 'put her mother in a home'.

Her mother is now sadly in the same state as my mother and is in the same hospital as my mother.

I think that this choice is a hard one to make, and decisions may need to change as the situation changes

My dad is 97 and still lives alone in his own bungalow, 200 miles from the nearest of his 4 children. He is very independent-minded and he is adamant that he will not move in with any of us, and has told me that he has put aside some money in case he needs care later on - whether it will be enough, I don't know.
My FIL died last year, while we were in the process of looking into care for him - after a fall when he broke his femur, he had become very confused and unable to look after himself, and my MIL nearly killed herself trying to look after him, even with carers coming in twice a day and DH and SIL going down there as often as they could.

We are currently in the process of trying to help MIL sell her house at the top of a remote hill on the Welsh border, with the idea that she will move into retirement accomodation near either us or SIL, but she still wants to stay in the area she has been in for over 50 years. I can see her point, and if she was in the sme physical & mental state as my dad, I'd agree with her, but since her stroke nearly 2 years ago, she has communication & memory problems & really needs to be closer - DH has been down there almost every weekend, and has used up a lot of his holiday since my FIL became ill last August & if she stays in that area, I can't see any end to it.

My dad will go into residential care at some point. He is pretty much bedridden at home atm and has a full care package but my mum is not going to be able to cope for ever, and once his mind goes (it is going already) he will need more care than she can provide. I hate to say it, but if anything happened to mum before that time, he would go straight into care because I couldn't do it.

With the other 3 (mum, MIL and FIL), I think it will depend on their health tbh and what is best for them. What I really want for my mum when my dad goes is to come and live with or at least near us. My brother has done a lot for them over the last few years and I feel I want to do something too. I would do the same for MIL and FIL, but I don't think they would move - they have both always lived in the town they were born in and I genuinely don't think they would leave. SIL lives there too so there is close family nearby.

Somehow when thinking of myself in the future, I wouldn't judge my children at all if they couldn't care for me if I was old and infirm - certainly not like I judge myself over my own parents.

A good friend of mine's mum is deeply lost to Alzheimer's. Although my friend has 2 sisters living close by, they do nothing to help. Very strange. My friend is close to breaking point.

I will, in an ideal world, build mum a bungalow or annex where I live when she is older. Never a home though, she has worked in them for years and I think it's her biggest fear. Not sure about my dad, depends if I hear from him again I guess!

My grandfather developed alzehimers and parkinsons disease and needed a lot of care. I remember my uncle making my mum cry on the phone because he insisted that as the daughter she should look after him, despite the fact that she could barely lift him in and out of bed. My mum stood firm and he eventually went into a home. He didn't remember any of us soon after. It was interesting that my uncle thought it was the women in the family who had a duty to care for him.

To take up the second part of the OP, I really wouldn't want my children to care for me.

I wouldn't want them to see me as I have seen my mother. To have to hold her hands to stop her scratching her face until it bleeds, or stop her from eating the wrapping paper instead of the chocolate. Ir the most ghastly of all, to watch her make sexual advances to mt brother (who closly resembles my late father).

I know I would rather be dead than have my children see me like that. I also know that my mother thought the same thing when she was in her right mind.

No I don't think we have it right. But I think so much is about the busy lives we live now and the fact that families are fragmented.

I live a five hour drive from my mum. She comes to us a lot and I go up to visit her two or three times a year. I have thought about her moving down here - we have talked about it. But it would mean her leaving her friends, a town she likes, her own home where she has lived for 40 years. She would be completely dependent on us to help her build a new life. We both work, have little time and I think it would place a great strain on all of us.

If we already lived in the same town and had other family around - aunts,cousins etc I would be much more likely to think it would be a good idea to have my mum living with is with us. And, ironically, there would be less need to do it as she would have a bigger circle of people to support and help her.

My mother was adamant that she would not have my grandfather living with us when he became frail and old. She preferred to spend every weekend visiting him (a three hour trip each way) and talking endlessly to him by phone, than actually having him in her home all the time.

She has told me she does not want to live with me, but the thought of what will happen as she gets older is a constant worry in her mind - how to decide when to move somewhere smaller and more manageable? Should she look at sheltered accomodation? It's hard to advise her as none of us know what the future holds.

My in-laws have sensibly downsized to a small house in a small town where everything they need is in walking distance and they are near friends.

As I've only got one brother, I guess my parents will live out their dotage in their own home which my brother will eventually inherit.

However realistically, having lived with my grandmother, I'd think the four of us will prolly split the resonsibility, and have our parents with us each for one month at a time, that way each sibling gets a three month break.

However my dad wants to retire to India eventually, and as non of us are going to follow them, if one or both of our parents ever end up in a position where they cannot live alone, they'll have to come back and we'll do as above.

This is such an interesting thread. I think there's actually a clear distinction for most people between the elderly infirm in a physical sense and dementia. Martianbishop makes the point very clearly with respect to her mother, but even in the middle-ish stages of dementia you have people who are incapable of looking after themselves but who are not really compatible with children IMHO. I have a physically frail mother and a father with dementia (mercifully extremely well controlled with medication at the moment) but I worry a lot about the future. I do know, though, that I am not a nice enough person to be willing to provide 24 hour care, and I also subscribe to mb's view that I would not want my children to be caring for me when I am in that state (and I say that having faced the fact that there's a fairly strong possibility that I will be). Far better to have professional carers do it, but wouldn't it be great if homes were generally pleasant places.

I think it is still seen in this country as a daughter's duty to care for parents, i have all brothers they see my father maybe once a year, I have him staying with me most weekends. Yes sometimes it annoys me I get the usual excuses they are busy, jobs, children younger than mine etc.
I dont do it as a 'duty' i do it because I love my Pops.

My own DS was emigrating, with his SA wife back to SA, as I have new been diagnosed with a debilitating disease they have decided to stay in England. IDO NOT EXPECT THEM TO CARE FOR ME, it has been entirely their decision, (more DDIL's I think). Hopefully they will never have to actually physically look after me (I married a guy 10 years younger than me to do that )
But it will be nice to know they are close at hand.

My dad says if he hangs on he will come and live in Australia, not actually with me but you can bet I'll be caring for him with meals and cleaning and then it will step up towards the end, I imagine. Gawd, it's awful when you come to write it out innit?

If my mum hangs in then she says she wants to be cared for in her own place, so she will either use her savings or downsize I should imagine and pay for live in care. Didn't know she was actually loaded, but hey -ho. She is a complete bibliophile and has over 14000 books and she says she will just read them all in alphabetical order til she keels over. And she will too.

It's funny, ds2, 3.5yrs, is doing a modern contemporary dance - The Superhero Dance - and he is launching himself off FIL's special chair, the chair in which he was confined for the last 18 months of his life in a specialist residential home until he died from Alzheimer's at the age of 67. So you never can tell, can you

Given that all my aunts have gone the same way as Mum, I suppose I stand a strong chance of going the same way too!

TBH it is the unpredictable nature of the situation that also would have made it impossible for me to cope.

When mum was fist comitted I felt guilty, I thought that I should try to look after her, feeling that she probably only had a few months to live.

That was over 5 years ago. To have looked after her for 5 years would have killed me, and destroyed my children's childhood.

luckily for us she is in an excellent hospital, really first rate. I realise that other people are not as fortunate as us.

forgot to mention my parents have another daughter living 10 miles away and she invites them to lunch every weekend so I guess her involvement would just increase, although as she is a nurse I hope she wouldn't feel obligated to perform specialist care

Oh, I forgot to say- there was a very interesting article by Richard Hoggart in one of the broadsheets a few months ago, about how he and his wife had sold up there house and moved to be near either Simon or Paul or their sister, can't remember which. He was basically very grateful that they wanted their parents close by, but felt completely disenfranchised by the move and the loss of all familiar surroundings and informal support networks. My parents moved to be near me, but luckily they were still relatively fit and healthy when they did so, and even more luckily they go to church (well, not luck I suppose) and made a lovely circle of friends very quickly.

how sad and hard MB...what is her diagnosis? is it a degenerative thing? (sorry if too intrusive)

mb, I hate to think of you feeling guilty. You absolutely shouldn't, should you. What would it have done to your children's childhoods if you had looked after your mother?

Suzy, have you looked back at the Boden/knitting thread?