Daughters' Caregiving Decisions: From an Impulse to a Balancing Point of Care

ABSTRACT

Daughters comprise 29% of all caregivers of the dependent elderly and make decisions about parent care in a context of ambiguous and changing role expectations. This qualitative study explored the decision process of ten caregiving daughters. The women responded to parent dependency with an impulse to care and pursued a balancing point of care in the face of limiting decision conditions. Each daughter constructed a sense of “enough”: an equation of her multiply-determined impulse to care and her personal threshold of support. These constructions help explain the variability of levels, lengths, and forms of parent care.