A solution for baby boomers

BY ROBERT MULLANEY

“Throughout their lives, baby boomers have been faithful adopters of the latest gadgets that have come along to make life better. New technology will further aid in making in-home care an ideal senior care solution.”

Baby boomers will start reaching retirement age in 2011. With 78 million of them in total, they’ll make a significant impact in their senior years, as they have at every phase of their lives.

How will baby boomers influence how senior care is delivered? First, consider the general characteristics of baby boomers. They are independent and self-reliant, having grown up in a time of change. Baby boomers are also expected to live longer than previous generations. They are health conscious and physically active, and they are accustomed to technology, having grown up in a time of nonstop technological change.

Because they are independent by nature, baby boomers are likely to look for alternatives to traditional facility-based senior care. In fact, many of the 13 million baby boomers now caring for their aging parents have discovered in-home care. Many are providing at least some of the caregiving themselves, relying on professional caregivers for the rest, as they help their relatives “age in place” in the comfort of their own homes.

A 2006 study at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology reports that baby boomers are more committed to caring for their parents than were their own mothers and fathers. (This research followed two generations of 333 families in the USC Longitudinal Study of Generations.)

As they help their parents, baby boomers are seeing the advantages of aging at home and thus may be more likely to choose in-home care for themselves when the time comes.

However, baby boomers may not be as fortunate as their parents to have children to care for them. A result of their independent nature, many baby boomers have never married and as a whole have had fewer children. For instance, The Urban Institute reported in 2007 (“Meeting the Long-Term Care Needs of the Baby Boomers: How Changing Families Will Affect Paid Helpers and Institutions”) that women born between 1956 and 1960 had only 1.9 children on average, compared with 3.2 children for women born between 1931 and 1935. And between 1980 and 1998, the portion of women ages 40 to 44 without children almost doubled, to 19 percent.

This means baby boomers will have to rely more on professional in-home caregivers, since they may not have family caregivers available.

New technology will further aid in making in-home care the ideal senior care solution for the baby boom generation, and can help bridge the family caregiver gap for those boomers who don’t have children.

These technologies, which are continually being developed and improved, monitor seniors’ movements and vital signs and can alert help in emergencies when caregivers aren’t present in the home. Other examples include medication management systems, which remind seniors to take their medicine as prescribed, and GPS tracking devices that help locate a senior who has become lost.

So, just as they have throughout life, baby boomers will make their own distinctive mark on senior care – and in a big way. ■

Robert Mullaney is local owner of homecare agency Comfort Keepers, serving the South Shore and Cape Cod. He can be reached at (508) 746-4800 or comfortkeepers.com.


Published in Cape & Plymouth Business May 2010