help others need is both continuous and progressively demanding. Since the 1960s, deinstitutionalization of aging parents by their children has been a progessive trend. This has been both a course of financial considerations and a reflection in the current state of caregiving. For many people, caregiving is an expression of extreme altruism, where one's own well-being is sacrificed for the benefit of another. However, given that caregiving has the inherent capacity to evoke stress, the processes that generate successful adaptation as opposed to generally maladaptive outcomes are oriented toward two areas, namely stress proliferation and stress containment.
Stress proliferation relates to the encroachment of care-related stress into areas of life previously insulated from hardship. For children having to take care of their ailing parents, this area is of primary concern. The second area entails the regulation or control of the impact of numerous care-related stressors, largely through various material and psychological resources, called stress containment (Mezey & McGivern, 1993, p. 5). The extent of stress proliferation and the degree of stress containment explain why the well-being of some people is put at extreme risk by caregiving, whereas other people seemingly are able to survive with little apparent damage to themselves.
As a result of advances in public health and medical technology, people are likely to live appreciably longer than their parental generation. Consequently, the population has aged markedly over the past century and will continue to do so well into the next century. Approximately 32 million people are 65 and older, which is about 12.6 percent of the total population. Demographic trends portend concomitant increases in the number of elderly persons with chronic disease, disability, and dependence upon others for assistance with activities of daily living. Although functional loss and disability...