As America’s population ages, women shoulder the burden as primary caregivers

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• John Yang:

  America's population is aging. Currently, one in six is older than 65. By 2050, that's projected to be one in four. Women bear the biggest part of the burden of caring for older Americans and their growing need for medical care and other support. Ali Rogin takes a look at the often-unseen costs of caregiving.

• Ali Rogin:

  In the United States, women make up almost 60% of unpaid caregivers and over 80% of paid in-home caregivers for seniors. According to a recent "Wells Fargo" report, taking care of loved ones often takes a financial, physical and emotional toll. We spoke to some women about their caregiving experience.

• Ruth Leal:

  My name is Ruth, and I'm in Virginia, and I take care of my 82-year-old dad. It started about 12 years ago, when he had prostate cancer.

• Kenya Servia:

  Kenya Servia, I'm from Bayboro, North Carolina, and I'm caring for my mom. I've been a caregiver since I was 8 years old. I started taking care of my great-grandma. Then I was taking care of my grandma, and now I take care of my mom.

• Deanza Valencia:

  I'm DeAnza Valencia. I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I am a family caregiver for my mother, Linda Valencia, who is 75 years old. One day, our family learned that she was going to need a liver transplant, and she wasn't going to live much longer without it.

  So at a moment's notice, this responsibility fell on me. I was the one that had, you know, the resources, the ability to leave home for a period of time and take care of my mom.

• Aileen Ruess:

  My name is Aileen Ruess, and I took care of my mother for 15 years, and I'm currently taking care of my husband.

• Ruth Leal:

  My biggest struggles have always been that this kind of also happened at the same time that I was finishing college and entering the workforce.

• Kenya Servia:

  The hardest part is just sort of stepping into that being in charge role when they're, you know, essentially they're your parents, so you're used to them being the person in charge.

• Aileen Ruess:

  You start neglecting your own doctor's appointments, and you neglect your own personal care. It's not good for the person that you are taking care of, and it's not good for yourself.

• Ruth Leal:

  At times I felt like I wasn't doing a good job, and sometimes I still feel like I'm not doing a good enough job. I cannot focus at work because my dad, something happened this morning that really worries me, or I can't really be a good caregiver because my job is really stressing me and it's not really giving me the flexibility to be a good caregiver.

• Deanza Valencia:

  I literally had to leave a business that I had started up. I left the workforce completely to move to another state. I left behind a husband, and my marriage suffered because of it.

• Aileen Ruess:

  It's almost impossible to take care of someone else all by yourself. You really need to surround yourself with a community, a village.

• Kenya Servia:

  Thankfully, I have uncles, cousins, aunts, in-laws, my brother, neighbors, even if they're only able to come long enough to allow me to get a shower.

• Deanza Valencia:

  : I wish that I would have known that there were others out there like me that were still struggling with the same financial issues, struggling with what to do next, and were frankly tired and could have used a little relief.

• Ruth Leal:

  I also try to give myself as much grace as I can because, you know, I think just showing up is already like 50% of the effort.

• Kenya Servia:

  Just take it one day at a time. There'll be times when you'll get frustrated. There'll be times when you'll be overwhelmed. Stop, take as many breaks as you can. Don't be afraid to ask for help. You'd be surprised how willing people are to help.

• Ali Rogin:

  Joining me now is Emily Kenway, author of "Who Cares: The Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve it" and a former caregiver herself.

  Emily, thank you so much for joining us. Can we start with your own caregiving journey? What did you go through and when did you realize that this is indeed a crisis?

  Emily Kenway, Author, "Who Cares": Yes. So I cared for my mother. She was a single mom, which meant I needed to step in as her daughter when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2016.

  And obviously that was incredibly difficult personally. But it also woke me up politically to what's going on with caregiving around the world today. And we know that this is just going to get worse over time as well, right? So we have aging populations around the world. You know, one demographer has called it the greying of America.

  And so we can all expect a greater and greater load of caring responsibilities and to be in the crisis that I was in unless we introduce major changes.

• Ali Rogin:

  And when you talk about who's taking on those responsibilities, it is disproportionately women. Why have you found that to be so?

• Emily Kenway:

  We have this historical heritage whereby around industrialization, we created this cultural norm, right, that the man goes to work and does waged work and the woman stays at home and does unpaid care. And we haven't caught up with today's reality at all, because, of course, today more women are working. Many households need the women to work.

  You know, those wages are not things that can just be tossed aside. And so this idea that we can carry on ascribing to one gender all of the weight of care for our entire species is really outdated.

• Ali Rogin:

  And given all those realities you just laid out, what are some of the challenges that women tend to face when they become caregivers?

• Emily Kenway:

  Of course, there's a financial impact. Most of the time, if you're a caregiver, you'll need to reduce your working days and you may give up your work entirely. In fact, we know in the U.S., on average, women caregivers lose about $320,000 in lost income and lost social security benefits.

  And that doesn't just harm us right now. That means we're going to have a real problem in retirement, right? Our security in old age is harmed just because we stepped in and did the right thing.

  There's also a massive psychological toll. You may be having to constantly monitor and watch your loved one's condition. You're experiencing what we call role reversal.

  So you suddenly become the mother of your mother, right? And you're dealing with that strange dissonance. And then, of course, you're moving through a world that doesn't recognize or support this.

  So your employer may well not accommodate your caring responsibilities. And it bears out in the statistics, too. We know that caregivers have higher rates of depression and anxiety for these reasons.

• Ali Rogin:

  Given the fact that so few resources exist, I would imagine that also comes with a lot of assumptions and misperceptions. What are some of the most pervasive that you've come across when it comes to caregiving?

• Emily Kenway:

  I think one of the most pervasive assumptions is that caregiving is kind of something that doesn't have any costs when it's performed by the family, right? So, yeah, it's free. We're not being paid, but there are enormous costs.

  When you're very elderly or very unwell, you need to be kept warmer. There's higher energy costs. There's mobility aids. There's special diets. There's all of this kind of thing. So there's a material, practical reality there.

  The other misperception I encounter a lot is this idea that some cultures can manage this more naturally than white Western cultures, right? So that would typically be countries in the Global South. And it is very much more normalized that they would perform care, for example, for their parents-in-law, not just their parents.

  But when you actually listen to them, they are struggling in exactly the same ways as I was, the same ways as women everywhere are, because care is hard. So we have to be very careful of making assumptions based on people's culture, ethnicity, nationality, and so on, and instead see that women around the world, we're all in the same fight here together.

• Ali Rogin:

  And Emily, here in the U.S., one in five adults right now are working as caregivers. How can we better prepare to care for these aging populations in the years to come?

• Emily Kenway:

  What we need to do here is really recognize that humans are going to have to provide care. And so we need to embed policies that recognize that. That's things like paid caregivers leave from work, right?

  So at the moment, the Family and Medical Leave Act only provides unpaid leave. And in fact, the Department of Labor found that 41% of private sector employees aren't even covered by it. So there are these fundamental economic policies that we shouldn't even be having to ask for, frankly, because it's so obvious that they're necessary.

  But basically, we've arranged our work world as if we're not actually humans who love people who need us to step in. And that's got to change.

• Ali Rogin:

  Emily Kenway, author of "Who Cares: The Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve it," thank you so much for joining us.

• Emily Kenway:

  Thank you.