-
IELTS Topic: FAMILY
Reading 3
Why should older people have to rely on their families
Original source: The Guardian
Catherine Bennett rejects government suggestions that children shoulder all the burden of looking after the elderly
No doubt, unless it was a coded message to his own four children, David Mowat, the junior health minister, meant well when he floated a proposal that “we start thinking as a society about how we deal with the care of our own parents”.
Around six months into the job, it has occurred to the primary care minister, that a less formal set-up might work wonders. “One thing that has always struck me,” he said, “is that nobody ever questions the fact that we look after our children. It is just what you do.”
Perhaps he has yet to learn about the work, not only of social services and family courts, but of the Child Support Agency, created precisely because of the hundreds of thousands of parents, from all kinds of backgrounds, who reject their obligations. In those cases, the state can prove more responsible than an absent parent.
As is traditional, this Conservative minister enthused about Italian and Greek arrangements as the perfect alternative to an adequately funded British system. “We need to see a wholesale repairing of the social contract so that children see their parents giving wonderful care to grandparents – and recognise that in time, that will be their responsibility, too.”
David Mowat suggested that families should be responsible for grandparents just as they are prepared to care for children.
Mr Moffat is a fan of the family structure in many Italian villages where grandparents live with their extended family.
Source: Brian Scantlebury/Shutterstock
This does of course rely on the children being around. Responding to Mowat’s solution, a group of age-related charities noted that “by 2030 there will be two million over 65-year-olds without children”.
… the constant in informal care … is that it is largely, still, supplied by women
Furthermore, the constant in informal care – as step-families have proliferated and mothers rejoined the workforce – is that it largely, still, supplied by women. If, as the Minister once said, “an elderly person at home is like a living golden treasure”, it’s all too clear who is expected to look after them.