Children who care for their parents: how much sacrifice is right?

Have you ever met a child caregiverHave you ever come into contact with these extraordinary creatures who, without compensation and with many risks, give back, after years, something of what they received from their parents? We are talking about a people of 1 million ItaliansEuropean record. One million men and women entirely dedicated to an elderly relative, not self-sufficient, which becomes 9 million if we go to calculate those who instead offer, as caregiver (the Anglo-Saxon tradition of carers) some hours of their day.

Caring children

Child caregivers do exactly the same work as professional caregivers. But with a few added elements. They spend hours and hours with their parents, perhaps lying on the bed or sitting in an armchair. They accompany them to the bathroom. They take them for a short walk, even just on the terrace. They check and administer medications. They help them wash and dress. They cook for them. All of this happens in a psychological role exchange mechanism carved into the architecture of the family.

Children caring for their parents

Practically: yesterday's parents become today's children, becoming children again. And today's children take on the role of today's parents, exercising the responsibilities of an adult. The difference between a caregiver professional and a child carer is just one word: involvement. Starting from the principle of the return and from the love of a child for a parent or a close relative, this million very generous Italians run some risk. Until put your life on the line, and waste it compared to individual expectations that have evaporated in order to dedicate oneself full time to assistance.

Often the carer son ends up depressed. He absorbs so much pain and so much effort from his activity that he slips, without even being aware of it, into a gray area of ​​congenital bad mood, with a psychological and physical decline. The situation is worsened if the same person is a "sandwich caregiver" who must simultaneously care for elderly and non-self-sufficient parents and their own children.

The physical and emotional burden

In two out of three cases the carer child has some symptoms of chronic fatigue, insomnia, tantrums, and crying spells. Here too, as with depression, it's the price she's paying for her emotional involvement in a job that a caregiver performs like any other professional activity. The Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, elizabeth blackburn, he calculated that the caring relatives have a life expectancy between 9 and 17 years lower than average.

Avoiding these risks, which then have a lasting impact on our health, is possible by starting with a few small precautions. The caring child should have neither modesty nor reticence in involve other family members in this support network as well, in the do-it-yourself welfare we have built in our homes. The workload from caregiver It can't all fall on the shoulders of one person., which, among other things, spoils his brothers and sisters, for example. And the caregiver child can't feel entrusted with a special mission to accomplish: sharing helps make everything more effective and saves just one person from the abyss of the harm we mentioned.

Guilt towards elderly parents

Assisting a non-self-sufficient parent is not can it ever become an obsessionIt's not helpful either to the caregiver or to the patient. It's one thing to always be generous with your attention and availability, it's another thing entirely. flatten one's existence in the role of carer child. This simply means to tear life to the windThis is neither helpful nor fair. Italians are among the most affected by this obsessive risk, as demonstrated by a secondary but very significant statistic: telephone involvement with patients. Forty-one percent of adult children speak to their parents on the phone several times a day, even just to say hello. This percentage drops to 16 percent in France and 21 percent in England.

How should one accept help from others, in a family network logic, so the carer child must find space for his own free time, his leisure activities, his mental and physical freedom. He can never, for any reason whatsoever, be reduced to the status of prisoner of the person he is assistingAnd woe betide anyone who hides behind feelings of guilt or the presumed primacy of responsibility: if you do, you're already depressed and need medical help to get out of the tunnel.

TAKING CARE OF PARENTS

The same goes for the economic side of the issue. 43 percent of disabled Italians have a caregivers, the cost of which, if things are done properly, is around 15 thousand euros a year. In exchange for this expense, there is a possible income from an attendance allowance that the disabled person can collect, equal to approximately 600 euros per month. A good idea could be to use this money to recruit, a few hours a week, a professional caregiver, and free up space for your own life, away from the illness.

Finally, the caregiver child must learn to understand their parent's illness thoroughly. This is to avoid overdramatizing the caregiver's situation and instead be responsive when things don't go as usual. Knowing the disease it also means raise the level of our awareness, create a new channel of communication with the person we're assisting, feel closer to them. Always with one fixed idea in mind: we're doing something beautiful, let's not waste it by canceling our life.

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