Care Plateaus, Peaks, and Loops: Insights on Stress from Family Carers for Older Adults

With an aging demographic and increasingly stretched care services in many countries, the issue of unpaid care for older adults is a growing concern for families and policy makers alike. Empirical evidence highlights how unpaid caregiving can be a stressful and challenging experience. In this paper, we draw from and build on the stress process model, which conceptualizes caregiver well-being and mental health as outcomes of primary and secondary stressors within social context, as well as relational framing from intersectional life course theory and feminist political economics. Based on 57 in-depth interviews with unpaid caregivers for older adults across Canada, we articulate two non-mutually exclusive themes that add nuance to understandings of caregiver stress. First, many caregivers describe their caregiving in “plateaus and peaks,” with minimal stress much of the time and spikes in stress at moments of crisis and transition. However, there are outlier cases of chronically stressed carers, with evidence that gender, socioeconomic status and complex care situations inequitably shape caregiver experiences. Second, some care journeys involve “loops,” with care for one senior ending, followed by care for another beginning shortly thereafter, a novel articulation of multiple care which was found to influence caregiver decisions and meaning-making about care.