For several years, Nicole Straight and Patricia Wood, who lived across the street from each other in Sausalito, California, were more neighbors than friends, exchanging sociable greetings and occasionally having coffee.<\/p>\n
Then, last October, Wood took a fall, broke her neck, and spent three months in rehabilitation. When she returned to the house she shares with her niece, she couldn\u2019t walk without assistance. \u201cI still don\u2019t dare go up and down stairs unless someone is with me,\u201d said Wood, 93.<\/p>\n
That has redefined their neighborly relationship. Straight, 53, a retired chef, now visits weekly, bringing lattes and cookies, and often leftovers from dinners she has made. Her husband installed a grab bar in Wood\u2019s bathroom, put up shelves, and changed her light bulbs and smoke detector batteries. The texts fly back and forth.<\/p>\n
Straight calls to say I\u2019m going to the grocery store. Do you need anything?<\/em> Wood, who no longer drives, provides a shopping list.<\/p>\n \u201cShe is a gift from heaven,\u201d said Wood, a retired insurance executive. \u201cWe talk and talk. Sometimes we shed a few tears, but mostly we laugh. I never thought I\u2019d have a new best friend at this time of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n Eldercare, typically considered a family obligation, is evolving to adapt to demographic shifts that make reliance on spouses and children less assured.<\/p>\n \u201cThe number of older adults who have never married or are divorced has been increasing, so we have more people aging alone,\u201d said Deborah Carr, a sociologist at Boston University who has investigated these trends.<\/p>\n \u201cThe proportion who are childless, by choice or not, is also growing,\u201d she added, and families with children have fewer of them than in past generations.<\/p>\n Geographic distances or family estrangements<\/a> also fuel the need for other kinds of caregivers \u2014 roles that friends or neighbors can fill.<\/p>\n How commonly do friends step into caregiving gaps? A recently published study in JAMA Network Open, led by researchers at the University of Michigan, looked into friends and neighbors serving as caregivers<\/a>, usually in supplementary roles.<\/p>\n They used data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study, in which more than 2,600 older people with health limitations (average age: 79) identified friends and family members who provided help. Family members were most likely to care for aging relatives, but about 14% of participants identified friends (including neighbors) in that role. That represents 2.4 million caregiving friends nationally, the authors estimated.<\/p>\n Last year, a national survey<\/a> by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving put the proportion of caregivers supporting nonrelatives at 11%.<\/p>\n \u201cFriends are among the auxiliary caregivers who have not been acknowledged,\u201d said Karen Fingerman, a gerontologist at the University of Texas-Austin and co-author of a commentary accompanying<\/a> the study. \u201cWe neglect the sacrifices they make.\u201d<\/p>\n The study, believed to be the first nationwide look at caregiving friends, found they functioned differently from relatives. They\u2019re unlikely to live with the person they\u2019re helping, for example, and rarely serve as the sole caregiver.<\/p>\n \u201cThey provide fewer care hours,\u201d said Yee To Ng, a gerontologist and lead author of the study, which found that friends supplied 18 hours of help a month on average, compared with about 67 hours from family.<\/p>\n They assist in different ways, too. \u201cFriends are more likely to provide transportation,\u201d Ng said. Two-thirds of caregiving friends drive their friends around; shopping, helping people go outside, preparing meals, and accompanying patients to medical appointments round out the top five tasks.<\/p>\n Sometimes they do more. Czes Ferrino, 82, is widowed and lives alone in Westerly, Rhode Island. She has no disabling health problems, but when her car died recently, her next-door neighbor went with her to several Subaru dealers to find a used replacement. \u201cHe walked me through it like a son would for a mother or grandmother,\u201d Ferrino said.<\/p>\n On the other hand, \u201cthere are some tasks friends might not be well equipped to provide or be comfortable with,\u201d Ng said. Personal care, like bathing and dressing, remains largely the province of family members.<\/p>\n \u201cThose can infringe on people\u2019s self-esteem,\u201d Ng said. \u201cWith family, we accept that when you\u2019re really ill, they step up with intimate activities. It\u2019s embarrassing to have your friends help you use the toilet.\u201d<\/p>\n The researchers also found that respondents who named friends as caregivers were younger than those with only relatives in that role, and more apt to have college degrees. People with higher education levels have larger social networks, Fingerman said.<\/p>\n Those assisted by friends were also, unsurprisingly, less likely to be married and more apt to live alone \u2014 like Ann Greenwater, 84, who lives in a mobile home park in rural Humboldt County, California.<\/p>\n She managed independently until a few years ago, when severe back pain rendered her bedridden for nearly three months. Although she\u2019s up and about now and can handle housekeeping, cooking, and personal care, \u201cI\u2019ve never really fully recovered,\u201d Greenwater said.<\/p>\n She is single, with no family beyond a distant nephew she barely knows, and has stopped driving. But a cadre of friends she knows from a nearby Zen Buddhist center stepped in.<\/p>\n Milli Quam, 86, does her laundry and drops it off, sometimes picking up prescriptions en route. A 73-year-old helped Greenwater with her computer and, along with several others, takes her grocery shopping or shops for her. Members of a local volunteer organization drive her to medical appointments.<\/p>\n \u201cI love Ann, and I\u2019m happy there\u2019s something concrete I can do,\u201d Quam said. \u201cI hope I can keep doing it for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n Friends have some advantages as caregivers. \u201cOur friends are our own age and understand what we\u2019re going through,\u201d Carr said. \u201cThey may have more empathy and sometimes real knowledge they\u2019ve acquired.\u201d When family caregivers are on the job, friends\u2019 efforts can reduce their burden.<\/p>\n But nonrelatives may also prove less stable as a source of help. Neighbors move. Strains can develop if the person needing care becomes too demanding or feels guilty about accepting help, challenging the egalitarian expectations for friendships. These strains can intensify depression<\/a> in those with physical limitations, a study led by Carr found.<\/p>\n Nor is there much policy support for these caregiving relationships. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act, for instance, \u201cwith rare exceptions does not provide job-protected leave from work to care for a friend with a serious health condition,\u201d Laura Lawless, a labor and employment lawyer with Squire Patton Boggs, said in an email.<\/p>\n \u201cFor family, \u2018through thick and thin\u2019 is the expectation,\u201d Carr said. \u201cThere\u2019s huge stigma to being estranged from your family, but it\u2019s kind of normal for some friendships to just fall away.\u201d<\/p>\n In Sausalito, Wood tells Straight that \u201cshe\u2019s not allowed to move until I die.\u201d She\u2019s joking, sort of.<\/p>\n Greenwater\u2019s friends in Humboldt County, to her gratitude, have not fallen away either. But they are aging along with her; at 86, Quam pointed out, she may stop driving before long, too.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m wondering what will happen when these friends aren\u2019t able to come to me,\u201d Greenwater said. \u201cI guess we\u2019ll deal with it when it comes.\u201d<\/p>\n The New Old Age is produced through a partnership with <\/em>The New York Times<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n KFF Health News<\/a> is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF\u2014an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n This article<\/a> first appeared on KFF Health News<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For several years, Nicole Straight and Patricia Wood, who lived across the street from each other in Sausalito, California, were more neighbors than friends, exchanging sociable greetings and occasionally having coffee. Then, last October, Wood took a fall, broke her neck, and spent three months in rehabilitation. When she returned to the house she shares…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":15448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15447"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}