More Men Assuming Daily Care of Ailing Kin

Edith Stricoff once loved to dance and to travel, but now cannot even brush her teeth on her own.

Her husband, Bernard, cleans house, cooks, does laundry, bathes his wife and helps her use a commode in a corner of the living room, where a hospital bed contrasts with colorful Peruvian weavings from a vacation a dozen years ago.

Stricoff, 65, said he cares for his 64-year-old wife up to 20 hours a day, on call even through the night, when a groan from downstairs will rouse him to see if she is cold or her arm is stuck under her body. For four hours a day, he has hired help.

People sometimes suggest a nursing home. They say Edith Stricoff, former bookkeeper and mother of three, is a burden at her advanced stage of Alzheimer’s disease.

But Stricoff hums old songs the couple once danced to and sometimes thinks she murmurs his name as he hugs her in the morning.

“You don’t throw an injured child out of the house because the child is injured,” he said. “Why should I do that to my wife?”

A growing number of men are caring for aging and infirm wives, parents and other relatives, according to a study by Lenard W. Kaye and Jeffrey S. Applegate, professors at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College in suburban Philadelphia.

“Men’s roles as care givers have traditionally been minimized, if not virtually dismissed, by the professional and lay public alike,” they write in their study.

Although women are two-thirds to three-fourths of an estimated 7 million care givers nationwide, a significant number of men “have been willing to commit a substantial portion of their lives, both in time and effort, to this challenging task,” the researchers said.

More men are doing so largely because women are stretched to the limit by careers, other family demands and the rising number of elderly, the researchers say. Other factors include men’s changing attitudes toward family and cuts in governmental aid for elder care, they say.

Kaye said in an interview the study was intended to address the special needs of male care givers.

“In no way are we trying to cancel out the dominant role--no question it’s a dominant role--played by women,” he said. “We just believe that they cannot keep up at this rate. We need to be able to turn and be willing to consider alternative routes to take when we talk about family care giving.”

The study is based on surveys of 152 leaders of care giver support groups and 148 male participants in such groups across the nation. The research, supported by a grant from the Andrus Foundation of the American Assn. of Retired Persons, also included in-depth interviews with 30 male care givers and nine elderly recipients in the Philadelphia region and surveys of a 26-member national expert panel.

Seven of eight men in the study considered themselves primary care givers, and more than a third were sole care providers. Only 20% said they were helped by more than two relatives. Four of five cared for people with Alzheimer’s, the progressive brain disorder that causes premature senility.

The men often continued to work while providing care and resisted joining support groups, preferring to “go it alone” or fearing participation would be an admission of failure.

In general, the men felt most competent at such tasks as paying bills, taking people to doctors and helping with telephoning and letter-writing. They felt least competent at helping with grooming, bathing and dressing.

The study is limited by its size and by the fact that care givers surveyed were primarily white, married men over age 60, living with and caring for wives, and relatively secure financially. Minority and low-income men tend less than white, middle-class men to join the support groups from which the sample was drawn, Kaye said.

Eloise Rathbone-McCuan, professor of social welfare at the University of Kansas, said she had not seen any evidence of an increasing number of men providing elder care. But she agreed that “the demographics of women and aging will force men to be confronted with many new roles,” especially care giving.

Robyn Stone, a research fellow at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, said the study could help draw more attention to care giving in general, which has often been viewed as a women’s issue. “From a political perspective, since it’s still primarily a man’s world, there may be more of a serious focus on this problem,” she said.

Kaye and Applegate said their results indicate that support groups should reach out more to men, who otherwise may end up enduring too much of the burden and allowing their own health to deteriorate. Advertisements for support groups should include more men and emphasize such practical topics as legal issues, finding home health care, stages of Alzheimer’s disease and information on government benefits, they said.

“Men are probably going to hesitate getting involved in a group if you play up too strongly the emotional payoff, the benefits of sharing experiences,” Kaye said.

Stricoff, who prided himself on being able to work things out himself as his wife grew more ill, resisted joining a support group sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Assn. at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

“I said, ‘Why do I have to go to a group for? Sit there and listen to them. What are they going to tell me? I’m living with the damn thing. I know what it is,’ ” Stricoff said.

But his children and other relatives kept after him. “And I went, and surprisingly enough, it was fulfilling,” he said.

Now he tries not to miss monthly meetings, because of the tips he picks up on ways to help his wife and the moral support.

Stricoff said he provides most of his wife’s care and does most of the household tasks by himself, although the couple’s children, who are grown and live in the Philadelphia suburbs and Florida, call regularly and help on weekends.

“You’ve got to remember how my wife would have reacted had I been in that situation,” he said. “I honestly feel she would probably do as much as she physically can for me, which is what I’m doing for my wife. I do it because of my love for her.”