The Bob Butler Tribute: 2 Week Seminar on Aging – Day 5

Posted on | July 16, 2010 | 2 Comments

The Bob Butler Tribute Seminar
Day 1. Aging Demographics
Day 2. The Challenge of Longevity
Day 3. Measuring Aging Vitality and Independence
Day 4. When Caregivers Need Care
Day 5. Long Distance Caregivers (Press Here)
Day 6. The Economics of Living Longer
Day 7. Financing Home Health Care
Day 8. Elder Abuse and Vulnerable Elders
Day 9. Aging and Obesity
Day 10. Untangling Alzhiemers
Day 11. Incontinence: The Silent Disability
Day 12. Operating on the Elderly
Day 13. Planning a Dignified Death
Day 14. The Best Place To Die

Category: aging, Bob Butler, Bob Butler MD, caregivers, caregiving, health policy, public health, public policy

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2 Responses to “The Bob Butler Tribute: 2 Week Seminar on Aging – Day 5”

Erica Dhar
July 16th, 2010 @ 2:15 pm

I would like to begin by thanking you for a most appropriate tribute to a remarkable man, Mr. Robert Butler.
As a consultant in the area of transnational caregiving, I would like to add to the discussion on long distance caregiving by including the component of “transnational caregiving,” or “caring for family relations across nations.”
What defines transnational caregiving and what is its relevance? This is answered through the lens of the two major phenomena of our time, Globalization and Global Aging. As technology has contributed to “the death of distance,” viz., Globalization, we witness higher rates of workforce mobility. Demands in labor markets have traditionally caused people to seek employment overseas; this is underscored by the current global economic crisis. Added to workforce mobility we have the increased longevity of the world’s populations. Hence, more families are witnessing their elderly parents being left behind in their home countries and in need of care. However, in the United States, when discussing the issues surrounding caregiving locally and long distance (translocal) there is no mention of the transnational caregiver. The seminal work in this emerging field has been done by social anthropologists Loretta Baldassar, Cora Velekoop Baldock and Raelene Wilding who have defined the components of transnational caregiving. They draw from ethnographic interviews conducted with immigrant communities in Australia. Although their research focused on “caregiving” from a distance, additional work has added to the discussion on “care drain” (when the youth of a country emigrate and leave large numbers of elderly in their home countries to fend for themselves). My work in this area has added to the discussion by expanding on the cultural perspective through introducing the topic of immigrants from India, living in the United States, who are involved in caregiving for their elderly parents in their country of origin.
The area of transnational caregiving is highly complex as it raises many questions, such as the relationship between countries and their governments which impact transnational caregiving, the use of technology, the cost and disparity of services offered by phone companies to some nations vs. others.
There are many more issues that are discussed by those few researchers engaged in this topic.
It should be noted, that there may come a time when we in the United States will see elderly populations left behind, as the youth go overseas in search of work due to the lack of jobs at home.
Therefore, it cannot be stressed enough that although this is an emerging area of research in the United States, the time has come to bring this issue into the discussion of caregiving and long distance caregiving.
Erica Dhar
Consultant
AARP Office of International Affairs
Contact: [email protected]

M.A., NYU, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, January 2010
Thesis: Transnational Caregiving, “Caring for family relations across nations.”

Baldassar, Loretta, and Baldock Vellekoop, Cora, and Wilding, Raelene. Families Caring Across Borders, Migration, Ageing and Transnational Caregiving. Palgrave McMillan, 2007.
Vullnetari, Julie, and King, Russell. “Does your granny eat grass?” On mass migration, care drain and the fate of older people in rural Albania, Global Networks 8,2 (2008) 139-171 ISSN 1470-2266, Journal compilation, Blackwell Publishing Ltd & Global Networks Partnership, 2008.
Mike Magee
July 17th, 2010 @ 10:25 am

Erica-

Thanks for your thoughtful and important comment. Your insights on transnational caregiving are right on the mark. They hit on two areas of interest and controversy when it comes to health reform – the strategic use of health technology to connect and humanize; and the roles and responsibilities of the modern multi-generational family in the face of of aging demographics.

In this regard, two vision statements that appear under health reform at http://www.mikemagee.org may interest you:

1. Techmanity
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc3ppvhb_416fp8hbwcg

2. Reconnecting the American family. http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc3ppvhb_418fdfkbsc9

Finally, a recent piece in Intel magazine provides additional context. http://www.intel.com/technology/itj/2009/v13i3/index.htm

Once agin, thanks for raising the critical issue of transnational caregiving.

Best, Mike