“Heather Oglesby, who was featured in another Times article, tends to her mother, Patricia.” Credit Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times

by Aidan Gardiner

“Daughters said they sacrificed careers when their relatives wouldn’t. Others said hiring help sapped finances. And more than a few found treasured final moments with loved ones despite the overwhelming work of caring for them.

“After The Times published a pair of articles on elder care — one about a Connecticut home health aide and another about women forgoing careers to care for older relatives — hundreds of our readers shared their own experiences with the hardships of trying to make the final years of a loved one’s life comfortable.

“Many of the readers said they had parents and other relatives who fit squarely in a growing demographic in the United States of elder-boomers who want to spend their final years at home.

“Below is a selection of the reader comments … “

Click here to read this article in its entirety at The New York Times.

“Gloria Brown is the primary caregiver for her husband, Arthur, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer\’s disease four years ago. (Emma Marie Chiang for California Healthline)

by Samantha Young

“Gloria Brown didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Her husband, Arthur Brown, 79, has Alzheimer’s disease and had spent most of the night pacing their bedroom, opening and closing drawers, and putting on and taking off his jacket.

“So Gloria, 73, asked a friend to take Arthur out for a few hours one recent afternoon so she could grab a much-needed nap. She was lucky that day because she didn’t need to call upon the home health aide who comes to their house twice a week.

“The price of paying for help isn’t cheap: The going rate in the San Francisco Bay Area ranges from $25 to $35 an hour. Gloria Brown estimates she has spent roughly $72,000 on caregivers, medications and supplies since her husband was diagnosed four years ago.

“‘The cost can be staggering,’ said state Assemblyman Jim Patterson (R-Fresno), author of a bill that would give family caregivers in California a tax credit of up to $5,000 annually to help offset their expenses.”

Click here to continue reading this Kaiser Health News article.

This is an opinion statement from Laurie Orlov’s blog at Aging in Place Technology Website.

“Where the baby (or elderly family member) may be.  The WSJ investigation of Care.com has only added a level of urgency about the risky business of finding and placing caregivers in homes. Consider the Care.com CEO’s egregious assertion that “Care.com is a marketplace platform, like Indeed or LinkedIn.”  Really, finding someone to watch your baby or your aging father is analogous to finding a worker to fill a job opening in your IT department or seeking a manager to fill out your org chart? And having nasty problems with convicted criminals taking on caregiving roles, resulting in occurring in multiple states, but never aggregating those into a nationwide picture of a horror show, until research into incidents was done by a Stanford MBA student? Read that link, please.

“What’s wrong with this picture of oversight? Fixing the Care.com background checking fiasco will take ‘more than babysitting money.’ No kidding. It will take vote-with-their feet feedback from the firm’s investors and especially the customers.”

Read this opinion column in its entirety here.