“Children are a good insurance policy,” said Merril Silverstein, a prominent gerontologist at the University of Southern California. “In some other countries, that’s why people have children. Here, though it’s less certain, it’s still a pretty good bet.”
For Ms. Logan and others in her situation, the research on childlessness should bring both angst and comfort. For starters, seniors without children do have higher rates of institutionalization. Historically, childlessness “has been a consistent predictor of whether you end up in a nursing home,” Dr. Silverstein said.
It shouldn’t be that way, argued Debra Umberson, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, who has written about childlessness and parenthood: “We shouldn’t have to have kids who work for us for free so we don’t have to go to a nursing home.”
Yet when Dr. Silverstein and fellow researchers at U.S.C. looked at a national sample of people over age 75 who had trouble walking across a room or getting in and out of bed, they found that those who were childless weren’t receiving less care than those who were parents. Nor did they score lower on measures of psychological well-being.
“The popular idea was that without children, you’d be in a whole heap of trouble,” Dr. Silverstein said. “But there’s not a whole lot of empirical evidence showing that.” Even among those childless and unmarried, “we didn’t see any indication that their unmet need was higher.”
via newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com
In my practice, clients naming friends on Powers of Attorney and Health Card Advanced Directives is quite common. Children and family move away; extended family probably already live hundreds or thousands of miles from home. Reliance on friends appears to be much more common and more accepted in modern American life.
