November is nationally recognized as Family Caregiver Month, but caregivers work tirelessly throughout the year to provide quality care to their loved ones.
In the state of Idaho, 70% of family caregivers are also working part-time to full-time jobs. Many caregivers manage health concerns, with 73.7% of Idaho caregivers experiencing chronic health conditions and a third dealing with depression according to the Idaho Caregivers Alliance.
Funding for family caregivers
Sheila Weaver is a clinical social worker by trade, a program manager at Boise State University and works with Idaho Caregiver Alliance. The Idaho Caregiver Alliance operates due to a grant of the School of Public and Population Health.
Weaver said that supporting family caregivers saves the state of Idaho money in the long run.
“Putting somebody in long-term care costs over $100,000 a year — if we can figure out how to support a caregiver, so they can take care of their relative in the home, [it] saves the state a lot of money and is a much more humane solution than what often happens at the state,” Weaver said.
“It’s profound, what caregivers go through on a daily basis,” Weaver said. “Caregivers save the state of Idaho about $3 billion a year. When that relative steps up and takes care of that person, they’re doing it with no financial incentives, and yet, they are saving the state money.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Medicaid compensated family caregivers for their work due to an extreme shortage of workers. Now, Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare is attempting to end the program by Jan. 2025.
“Just recently, that [funding] was pulled away due to allegations of fraud, kind of abruptly,” Weaver said. “There’s a lot of questions around that happening right now … Family caregivers very much rely on natural support. They rely on people in the community, they rely on their friends, they rely on their neighbors, they rely on people [and] they rely on their employers to be thoughtful of them.”
Balancing being a student and a caregiver
“Students are very impacted by caregiving. There are students that drop out every single semester to [provide] caregiving,” Weaver said. “Every semester I have students who are caring for grandparents, caring for siblings, or translating for relatives, and that’s caregiving — when we think of caregiving, we think of it as something that happens when we get old but really … people are affected as caregivers at every single age.”
Weaver highlighted certain demographics that provide disproportionate levels of caregiving compared to the rest of the population.
“LGBTQIA+ caregivers are providing care at a higher rate than the population, immigrant caregivers make up 11% of the workforce of home health, and 26% of the informal sector [and] Millennials are more likely to be caring for somebody,” Weaver said.
Weaver runs a program called Family Caregiver Navigator, which aims to support caregivers and provide financial support through funding.
“We work with caregivers across the lifespan, and we’re kind of unique in that there are other caregiver programs that are focused on older adults or maybe cancer or some kind of disease … But we work with everybody,” Weaver said. “From students to older adults and everybody in between. My program exists because of a grant through Medicaid called ‘Money Follows the Person.’”
“Caregivers are a crucial backbone of support in our community, I don’t know that our community could really exist without the unpaid work of caregivers,” Weaver said. “We want to show up for caregivers this month because they show up for their communities and their friends and their neighbors and their loved ones every single day.”
Taylor Neher, assistant professor for the School of Public and Population Health published a journal alongside other scholars titled “Resource Needs of Caregivers and Parents as Students in University Settings.”
Neher said it is important for professors to have a sense of understanding for students who are family caregivers.
“Connect them [students] to resources or build policies that help support resources,” Neher said. “A lot of students say they need better policies around absences and not getting in trouble for missing when they’re doing their family caregiver duties. Universities could make resources around helping students advocate for those policies or advocate within their courses.”
Neher noted that many students who are caregivers pursue online education as they don’t have the time to attend in-person.
“A lot of those students talk about needing funding support — funding to come to school or funding to pay for care while they’re at school,” Neher said. “Scholarships or grant funding for students to apply for that can help them make their tuition costs less or support them getting care for their care-ees while they’re attending school, both of those would be great financial help to students that are facing burdens related to that.”
One of Neher’s areas of interest is mental health. She explained that balancing school, work and family caregiving can be overwhelming and that establishing community is important for mental well-being.
“Students, in general, have high stress levels without thinking about any other hats they have, so adding on extra layers of burdens definitely increases their stress and impacts their mental well-being and ability to thrive in their communities,” Neher said. [Some] different ways to help impact that [are] through social connection and minimizing isolation [so] that individuals feel they have a network around them.”
A family caregiver’s perspective
Emily Ballantyne is a first-generation Boise State graduate who has a masters in social work and a full-time caregiver for her son. Ballantyne works as a mental and behavioral health therapist.
In an email interview with The Arbiter, Ballantyne said that many aspects of caregiving are undervalued or overlooked by society.
“We are an invisible and often unpaid labor force. It’s not recognized as work by both our society and often by caregivers themselves. Parents of children with disabilities especially are scheduling and taking their child to multiple therapies, researching treatments, fighting with insurance claims, chasing down medical supplies or medical providers,” Ballantyne said.
“Caring for one another is to be human. It’s an essence of humanity. For my family personally, our son has shown such resilience and growth and that’s incredibly rewarding,” Ballantyne said.
Ballantyne said community members can support family caregivers by reinstating personal care services.
“Right now, Idahoans can help support family caregivers by contacting their legislative representative and asking them to replace the PCS (personal care services) program that IDHW recently ended access to. It was a program that enabled families to access pay for taking care of their loved ones, enabling them to care for them in their homes and not lose too much in the way of finances,” Ballantyne said.
Ballantyne said some common misconceptions associated with family caregiving are that it’s temporary, despite many family caregivers dedicating years if not their entire lives to caregiving. Another misconception is that caregiving isn’t “real” work or that the work doesn’t affect the caregiver’s life.
Caregiving is a line of work that is often overlooked and while it’s important to highlight this work during November, members of the caregiving community need support year round.
