Elder Care Journey
By Laura Katz Olson (PhD'74)
(University of New York Press (SUNY), 203 pages; 2016)
Caregiving is the “new normal” for nearly forty-three million Americans who will relate to An Elder Care Journey: A View From the Front Lines with tears, laughter, sighs, outrage and nods of acknowledgement. Laura Katz Olson, a researcher of elder care, finds her studies inconveniently interrupted by a real person with ever-increasing demands—her own mother. A healthy and strong Senior Olympics medal winner, mom is steadily incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease and a gradual loss of vision. Thrust into a long-distance caregiving role, Olson finds her previous notions about assisting a frail parent increasingly at odds with the reality of the experience. Countless Aha! moments reveal hidden aspects of situations that shatter earlier convictions and expose the irrationalities of many government strategies. Elder Care Journey also is a window into commercial long-term care industries such as nursing homes and home care agencies that consume a significant percentage of taxpayer dollars but often fail to deliver quality care. Students will gain knowledge and insights concerning social policy that a purely scholarly book cannot offer. And after reading this story, people coping with elder care responsibilities should feel less alone in their struggles.