Homeward Bound

the long version

As nearly 75 million American Baby Boomers approach old age, their diverse family structures mean that caregiving will fall on a different cast of family members than in the past. Current approaches in the United States are based on a caregiving model that presumes life-long connection between married parents and their offspring, a connection that involves shared norms and implies a valuable safety net for caregiving. However, this model no longer describes the majority of American families. The increasing number of single, non-marital, and remarried families point to the need for new types of support from the religions, medical, legal, and public policy communities. In Homeward Bound, Amy Ziettlow and Naomi Cahn show that as family strucutre becomes more complex, so too does elder care, and existing institutions and legal approaches are not prepared to handle those complexities. Ziettlow and Cahn base their analysis on in-depth, qualitative interviews with surviving grown children and stepchildren whose mother, father, stepparent, or ex-stepparent died. These caregivers' stories illustrate the profound ways that caregiving, mourning, and inheritance processes have changed in ways not adequately reflected in formal legal, medical, and religious tools. Ziettlow and Cahn's solutions center on awareness and preparation: providing more support for individual planning for incapacity and death and, even more importantly, creating legal, political, and social planning for the "graying of America" at a time of increasingly complex familial ties. -- from dust jacket.