Does your sibling (or siblings) help with the care of your parent(s) with dementia?
Mine refuses to do anything to help beyond making a call to our mum one a week and sending her a hamper at Xmas.
There's no good reason for him not to help. He's very wealthy and semi-retired and with time on his hands for holidays and leisure pursuits aplenty. He lives in another country, but could easily be here, at the door, in three hours. Yet he hasn't seen our mother in years.
When I asked him directly to help so as to give me a break, he bluntly refused and threatened to make things difficult with mum's will when the time comes if I asked him again.
Of course, she dotes on him and has a million excuses for why he is absent.
Now, by any measure this makes him a pretty awful person and to be fair, he always has been, When we were children he was a bully. I have wondered were he to present himself, if he would meet the criteria for a diagnosis antisocial personality disorder or what is more commonly termed a sociopath. It's not that rare, around one in 33 men could meet those criteria.
Yet reading these boards it is clear that he is hardly unique and the number of siblings who refuse to help are far greater than the likely number of sociopaths. I went looking for academic research that might shed a little more light on why siblings refuse to help with care so often. There's not very much out there. Sibling relationships are very poorly researched compared to parental relationships.
It has set me wondering. When one child becomes the main carer:
- is it actually more common for other siblings to avoid helping than for them to help?
- how can this be explained? Could it be that sibling order and longstanding roles and gender expectations have an influence on capacities for empathy?
- is it cultural? Do other cultures share the care more fairly?
I'd love to find some data about this and I'm interested to know what your experiences have been.
Mine refuses to do anything to help beyond making a call to our mum one a week and sending her a hamper at Xmas.
There's no good reason for him not to help. He's very wealthy and semi-retired and with time on his hands for holidays and leisure pursuits aplenty. He lives in another country, but could easily be here, at the door, in three hours. Yet he hasn't seen our mother in years.
When I asked him directly to help so as to give me a break, he bluntly refused and threatened to make things difficult with mum's will when the time comes if I asked him again.
Of course, she dotes on him and has a million excuses for why he is absent.
Now, by any measure this makes him a pretty awful person and to be fair, he always has been, When we were children he was a bully. I have wondered were he to present himself, if he would meet the criteria for a diagnosis antisocial personality disorder or what is more commonly termed a sociopath. It's not that rare, around one in 33 men could meet those criteria.
Yet reading these boards it is clear that he is hardly unique and the number of siblings who refuse to help are far greater than the likely number of sociopaths. I went looking for academic research that might shed a little more light on why siblings refuse to help with care so often. There's not very much out there. Sibling relationships are very poorly researched compared to parental relationships.
It has set me wondering. When one child becomes the main carer:
- is it actually more common for other siblings to avoid helping than for them to help?
- how can this be explained? Could it be that sibling order and longstanding roles and gender expectations have an influence on capacities for empathy?
- is it cultural? Do other cultures share the care more fairly?
I'd love to find some data about this and I'm interested to know what your experiences have been.