Is this really what children are for???

I think people chage as they get older. At 70 my Mum was flying to the Uk and back to Saudi Arabia on her own, as she lived there for 6 years because her husband was a sea pilot in Jedda. He has since died and she is now 90 and has moved to live near my brother. She still lives on her own and is happy to do so, but she is very needy and my brother has to take her to so mny appointments, do her shopping and every day there are so many things to do for her, so 20 years makes a huge difference! He doesn't mind, but doesn't have a lot of time to himself. I don't think he envisaged what it would be like as she got older, but she is adamant that she doesn't want care or to move into sheltered housing.

I'd hate to become a burden. I certainly wouldn't demand anything from my children - or my grandchildren - they've got their own issues to deal with.

Who would go through all that just to get some help in their declining years

I wanted my children and grandchildren to lead independent lives and they have done this. I now expect to be independent of them that's fair. I agree some other cultures have a totally different approach to family life and I've seen lovely instances of this. Our lives are different but not necessarily better.

Good grief, the last people I want looking after me is my children!

More seriously, I saw the toll caring for aged parents took on my mother and indeed on us as a family, and my Dh had a similar situation in his childhood. It’s not fun.

I think that in societies where it is the norm for the elders to be looked after at home the responsibility doesn’t usually fall on one person, it’s more likely to be shared between siblings. When I lived in W Africa the culture was that it was shameful to put an elder into a home but there, the average life expectancy was 58 so there were very few frail people around. The other side of that was that elders were very much respected as erudite and wise and not considered a burden.

When I was in Bangladesh I was asked if I had children. I said that I had a son and a daughter. They then asked if my son was married. When I said that he wasn't there was consternation,
'But who will look after you when you are old if you have no daughter in law?'
Obviously my own daughter was expected to have her hands full with her own MiL!

In many countries, poorer people may well not have the option of a care home, anyway - they just have to manage. In many cultures there will often be extended family nearby to help, but it’s nearly always the women who are expected to do elderly care, isn’t it? Whether it’s for their own relatives or not.

A dd working in Cambodia witnessed the care of a grandmother with dementia in a poor, rural village.

The woman was strapped to a chair outside all day, to stop her a) wandering off, and b) messing in the house, since she was incontinent.
She was hosed down once a day.

OTOH we used to have Indian friends (in Mumbai, sadly no,longer with us) who used to visit the U.K. every year. I told the woman how often we in the U.K. are told how callous and uncaring we are, to ever put elderly parents into care homes, when in ‘other cultures’ people are only too glad to look after their own.

She said that was rubbish, at least for anyone of merely moderate means in India. She herself had a mother with dementia living 100 miles away, who was looked after by two live-in carers.

She said that sort of arrangement was quite usual, while adding that of course such things were a great deal easier and cheaper to organise in India, than they would be in the U.K.

It always falls to the women, it seems, Witzend. Another aspect of some cultures is that disabled people are shunned and cast out from families and have to survive as best they can. Sometimes they are regarded as witches and almost hunted down by others who blame them for misfortunes that befall them.

I have no such expectations of my sons though they support me in so many ways. I'm sure my parents did not expect me and my sisters to be at their beck and call, though, sadly, neither lived long enought to need us.

My father said he has only kids so we would take care of him and mother when they were old and give them grandkids

His look of disbelief when I laughed in his face was legendary

My son has told me not to worry, he’ll buy me a one way ticket to Dignitas is Switzerland. His cousins have offered to chip in! ?

A BiL had an aunt, an only daughter, whose sole role, according to her parents, was to look after them as they aged.

They actively prevented her from marrying. Once, when a serviceman she’d met and evidently liked very much during the war, returned afterwards to find her.

She was out at the time, and found out later that they’d told him she was already married.

There was a similar incident involving a doctor - I forget the details but they somehow put the kybosh on that, too - as she later found out.

She was a lovely, sunny-natured person, who’d have loved to have a husband and children, but the family lived in a small village in a more remote part of Scotland, so the chance of meeting anyone else was poor.

BiL thought it significant that her parents’ gravestones had just bare names and dates, not a word about ‘loving’, or ‘missed’, let alone ‘beloved’.
She did manage to enjoy life once they were gone, though - thank goodness.

That's awful. Z
I'm glad she got to live it up a bit, eventually.

WxcusexthecZ

I certainly did not have my DDs to have a secure safe old age.
After seeing what old age can do to people and how they can change the prime example being my mother. I have told them to put me into good care to make sure I smell good, have new clothes, and show up now and again when THEY want to.

We don’t have children to help us, not nowadays anyway, but I am often shocked when I see friends struggling and their children don’t try to help.

Obviously it depends on physical distance but where possible surely you would give a hand with gardening, shopping or giving a carer a break?

I couldn’t bear the indignity of having my children wash me, take me to the toilet or worse. They’ve been told that if I get to that stage they must take me on a cliff top walk and let me go ahead with my Zimmer frame.

There is, as has been said, a big difference between a lively 70 yr old and a frail 95yr old.
My DMiL is 97 and has outlived one DS (my DH) and the others are looking a little weary. They take turns to live with her because during the pandemic, she lost her DH (their dad) to covid and the care package stopped. Now this is admirable and she has no dementia just a willingness to do what she is told rather than be the one to make the decisions.
They badly don't want her to go into a care home though she enjoys trips to a day centre and visits from family.

There is no precedent of this caring. In fact her own mother ended up in a care-home. I wouldn't want my DC to have to look after me and I don't think they will although they are helpful when they visit but that is infrequent.

That story is particularly awful Witzend but it was normal at one time to expect the eldest girl to step in if mother died (in childbirth), and the youngest girl to stay home, not marry and care for aged parents.
In 2 of my DGP families this happened.
My gt aunt Jane at 18 as the eldest girl had to be "mother" to her 8 younger siblings.

LauraNorderr

I couldn’t bear the indignity of having my children wash me, take me to the toilet or worse. They’ve been told that if I get to that stage they must take me on a cliff top walk and let me go ahead with my Zimmer frame.

Me neither LauraNorderr

As FannyCornforth says surely a tongue-in-cheek comment?
I would have thought so too.

I have had a conversation with my daughter saying that if I need looking after then I shall go into a home, I do not want her to have to look after me.

This has reminded me. As a child, we had elderly neighbours who were childless (1950s).
My mother told me later that she had been the eldest of 9 and had made a pledge to her young dying mother that she would stay at home to care for them all until the youngest left home and married.
Her fiancé, as he became, honoured her pledge and waited for her - by which time she was too old to have her own children.

DD was driving me home after my recent stay in hospital. We passed a care home and I suggested she should just drop me off there. She said "This one's no good the CQC say it's Good, I'm looking for a really inadequate one for you"

I’m having a bout of cystitis and if you’ve had this awful affliction, you know you just want to be on your bed, near the loo.
Anyway, because I dare not leave, I asked my daughter to pick up some cystitis relief sachets from Tesco. Very, very rarely do I ask her to do anything for me. She works, has children and has enough on her plate. So have my daughters-in-law.
Will try to be as independent as I can for as long as I can.

When people are making babies, I would think old age and mobility issues are the last things on their minds.