Do programs like Family Care encourage dependency?

A reader commented on Family Care and other programs like it:

Even though I see a lot of effectiveness with the program, I see first hand the abuse. The money spent on providing care for someone who should be challenged to do more for themselves.

The extensive equipment that is purchased so that the client has everything they want regardless of whether they physically need it or rather should have it.

Paying of family members to provide care even though the client should re-trained to do it themselves as well as family members who should want to care for others out of love not money.

I am hopeful but not optimistic that as the population ages, more people will realize that we need to help seniors HELP THEMSELVES so as to age more gracefully and safely.

Are too many clients being overserved, having things done for them that they could do themselves? Are we “enabling” older adults to be dependent? I’m hoping some of you will continue this discussion, because I don’t have any professional knowledge about it.

I do have personal experience with my mother, who’s now over 85, living in independent senior apartments, and needing more help to get along. She’s frail and no longer drives. Judging by this brave woman, who's always made decisions that would keep her independent and not "burden" others, elders eventually reach a point at which no amount of retraining can compensate for lost health and abilities.

And daughters like me are pressured by jobs to support their families and responsibilities to their own children. That can get in the way of expressing love through caregiving the way we might like to do it.

Civil rights and dignity for the old

If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had not been the victim of the violence he deplored, he’d have been 78 years old today.

I wonder what wisdom age would have added to his extraordinary dedication to “the cause of justice and the imperative of human dignity.”

One blog responder in the Huffington Post who calls herself auntigrav wrote:

“We must never EVER forget that Civil Rights are not the rights of the groups who get all the press, but the rights of the individual, whatever color or belief they have. Rosa Parks was a person who needed to sit down.

”The fight is always for one person: you, or I, or a child. When we forget the individuals, we forget what Being is all about.”

If King had lived, he might be teaching us today about the civil rights and dignity of older adults, too.

Senior citizens hold—and exercise—great legal power as a voting block. But seniors (and the disabled) who are frail and isolated may depend on people like us to “sit down” on the bus for their right to live in dignity as respected individuals.

Thanks for the courage, commitment, and love you bring to your work with older people.