The graying of America is now an accepted fact. Social Security and Medicare numbers affirm that is the case. So do the rising numbers of individuals who require assistance or specialized services either at home or in a facility of some sort. There's general agreement, too, that the aging of the population will continue to change U.S. society and economics in ways both predictable and unimagined. What has been unanswerable with any certainty is how many Americans are directly involved in providing unpaid care for someone over 65 "because of a condition related to aging." Now we have an answer: A lot.
According to the recently released 2011 American Time Use Survey, produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 39.8 million people over the age 15 provided such care in a three-month period. The number is revealing, both because it is higher than many Americans might have suspected and because it represents unpaid care. There are, of course, many individuals who are paid for providing similar care in home and specialized settings.
The numbers are instructive in other ways, too. It can hardly be a surprise that women -- traditionally viewed as caregivers -- provided more than half (56 percent) of the unpaid care recorded in the survey. Or that most of the care was provided to a parent, or that about 42 percent of those providing the unpaid eldercare were between 45 and 64. Clearly, those near or in middle age themselves are assisting aging or aged parents, grandparents or other relatives.
Providing unpaid care can be time consuming, according to the survey. About a fifth of the caregivers provide assistance every day. Another quarter provide it several times a week and another fifth about once a week. There is generational overlap in providing care, too. Almost a fourth of the caregivers had at least one child under 18 in their home.
Purists will take exception to the survey because it is more informal than structured. There is no definition, for example, of "caregiver." For the survey's purposes, it could include a grandchild who provides companionship to a relatively healthy grandparent as well as a son or daughter who delivers cooked meals to a housebound parent, or drives them to a medical appointment. A more formal, statistically viable survey, of course, would be valuable, but the message delivered by the current report is undeniable.
The survey is a reminder that demographics is a hard science. As the Baby Boomer population continues to age, the demand for elderly care will increase commensurately. If the United States is to meet that need without major social and economic disruption, public and private entities will have to work cooperatively to design broad-based plans to do so. The fear, of course, is that it already might be to o late to do so.