| As a consequence of high birth rates and greater life expectancy among older adults, millions of adult children will participate in financial caregiving for their parents: a research area where the disciplines of aging studies, healthcare, business, and family communication meet. Familial caregivers provide more long-term care than any other national entity. Academics, healthcare professionals, and financial advisors have written about elder healthcare, family caregiving, and optimal retirement and end-of-life financial planning strategies. Yet, the roles and expectations of financial caregiving had not received attention in academic research. It was critical to understand financial caregiving because financial tasks comprise a significant amount of caregiving labor, families communicate differently about money than other topics, and financial matters impact the care recipient's overall well-being. Utilizing a qualitative, grounded theory method, this study analyzed semi-structured interviews of 20 adult children, including five who were also eldercare professionals, face-to-face in or near Lincoln, Nebraska. The resultant substantive theory supported three conclusions. First, the grounded theory of familial financial caregiving explained that caregivers fulfill a socially reinforced fiduciary duty to protect the care recipient's financial well-being. For care recipients, disclosing financial information demonstrated vulnerability and loss of independence, which might not be immediately evident to caregivers. And caregivers enacted their roles within powerful legal and financial systems that both empower and disenfranchise. The information gained can be utilized to enable seniors, families, professionals, communities, and policymakers to fulfill their roles and meet the challenges of financial caregiving. Finally, future researchers should study a broader, more varied sample to determine which conditions of the grounded theory of familial financial caregiving hold true in other contexts. In particular, research studying the process from the care recipient's perspective would be an important step in further promoting successful aging. |
