Bobo Hi-Po Lau. January, 2024
The COVID-19 afforded our team a unique opportunity to focus the Hong Kong Centenarian Study on the experience of caregivers, as they are the ones whom we could approach by phone calls without face-to-face contact. Among the 151 cases, 23.8% caregivers were still working full- or part-time alongside providing care to their loved ones of advanced age, and most of these working caregivers are Golden Agers (median age = 58). The labour engagement rate of older adults (aged 65 or above) in Hong Kong doubled from 7% in 2011 to 14% in 2021. Some of the reasons behind could be enhanced education, re-employment and re-training opportunities, and health. Considering the recent shrinkage of the labor force due to migration, retirement of the baby boomers and so on, it will be of practical interest to examine how work and care duties may harmoniously co-exist among caregivers, especially those who are still in their middle-age or early elderhood. On the one hand, unleashing the productivity among caregivers by (re-)engaging them in full- or part-time occupation could be a fruitful avenue for sustaining or replenishing the local labor force. On the other hand, this could also save their valuable skills and knowledge from going in vain while they are still reasonably healthy and productive.
To this end, our team conducted a secondary data analysis of the caregivers’ narratives of their caregiving experiences from the Hong Kong Centenarian Study 2. We looked for narratives of caregivers on how their work enhances their caregiving and/or vice versa. The data from a handful of cases revealed that the working young-old caregivers sought pleasure from being able to apply what they have learned from their jobs to providing care for their aging parents and staying ahead in the fast-changing society. However, the benefits of caregiving to one’s work were not apparent, probably because these caregivers are mostly young-old who are close to retirement.
We then turned to younger caregivers to examine instances of work-family integration. As such, we conducted a stakeholder engagement exercise with three employees from a social enterprise with explicit family-friendly organization policies. The three employees are middle-aged women with backgrounds in healthcare, and are sandwich caregivers, meaning they are required to take care of their children as well as their aging parents. They are hired part-time as nursing consultants and trainers by the social enterprise. For how their works have benefited their family roles, they reported enhanced status in their family as an income provider, being able to stay ahead of society, and having a break and a buffer against their caregiving stress. For those who perceived a greater match between their job and their caregiving duties, their received practical gains from their jobs such as network, skills, and knowledge, which could be applied on their families. On the flip side, their family role as a sandwich caregiver gives meaning and encourages efficiency in their work. They found themselves productive while switching between roles, and being able to fulfill both roles has been personally rewarding. Thus, when we asked if they plan to relinquish one of the roles, say quitting the job or asking someone to shoulder more of the caregiving duties, they prefer keeping the status quo, especially as they have established a sustainable routine with various formal and informal support after much trial-and-error. In the 1980s, Jeffrey H. Greenhaus proposed the role conflict theory which postulates that engaging in multiple roles that compete for resources results in stress which hampers caregivers’ well-being. In 2006, he wrote a piece that theorizes how work and family roles could be allies and termed the concept ‘work-family enrichment’, which refers to the transfer of benefits from work to family and vice versa, eventually leading to satisfactory fulfilment of both roles. As the population is rapidly aging and the elderly dependency ratio continues to escalate, in addition to work-family conflict, researchers should also examine how family and work could be allies. These successful examples may enrich the repertoire of family-friendly organizational policies and inform the development employee-friendly elderly care services.
Last Updated on January 24, 2024