Family Caregiving and Work!
The decision to leave your job to care for a friend or relative is seldom an easy one. Especially if it will cost your retirement plan, your benefit package, that necessary second income or an indispensable only income.
Sometimes, it has to be done. Someone you care about cannot get to the bathroom, eat meals, answer the phone or do any number of other simple, necessary tasks without help. Sometimes, even though he is fairly self-sufficient, you staying home is just safer for your "family patient".
If you are reading this and shaking your head sideways then you have not arrived at this point and still believe, when the time comes, you'll hand your loved one into the care a paid professional far more qualified than yourself.
If you are reading this and shaking your head up and down, then you have reached this impasse,or you have passed it and are looking for ways to muddle along, or, like me, you are standing not too far in the distance and you see it looming on your horizon.
Working at Home
If you don't have an independent source of income,The question becomes: Do you remain employed outside your home or do you find some way to become home employed?
Let's get real for a minute. In this country, home employment is usually self employment. How many of us really want to be self-employed? Who wants the legal hassles or to worry the accounting and tax issues, and who wants the additional obligation that naturally comes with giving birth to your own baby business? Not to mention, of course, that inevitable sinking feeling that comes with giving up the security of a predictable paycheck.
Keeping the Job
About 65% of American family caregivers opt for remaining a company employee despite the numerous pitfalls.
Employed family caregivers can wage an almost constant battle trying to balance the demands of their employer against the needs of the people they care for. Often, their employers are sympathetic but just as often, an employer is apt to see caregiving as an extracurricular activity that shouldn’t interfere with work. Sometimes, the caregiver gets no feedback whatsoever and is afraid to ask.
Say you have that ideal situation. Your job can be packed into a few boxes and moved into your home office. Your company mainframe is accessible to your home computer and your company's intranet manager hasn't objected because of potential security risks. Your boss is 100% supportive.
Still, you have some hurdles to overcome:
-
you will miss important staff meetings,
not get a necessary memo,
lose touch with your co-workers,
spend hours playing phone tag with your own office,
be unaware of key changes in personnel,
not know about the client conflict that affects your current project.
If you’re in a profession that requires continual retraining or you need additional training in order to advance, you may be unaware when classes are offered or be unable to attend.
In short, you’ll be out of the loop.
The chances are good that your boss won’t be entirely supportive. From his point of view, if you work at home:
-
you can’t help cover the phones when the receptionist goes to lunch,
you can’t sub for Bob if he misses that meeting,
he can’t wander down the hall to pick your brain about this client, or that project, or some other thing that happens to be on his mind at the moment.
he’ll lose track of you. He’ll never know what you're up to. He can’t catch you at the water cooler or yakking on your cell phone.
Employees present on company property are convenient. Employees working at home are complications.
What works?
The deal is, the direction in which you choose to move will undoubtedly depend on numerous factors that are specific to your personal situation. Your family patient may be your elderly parent, your debilitated child, your spouse or your best friend. It could be your non-elderly parent and you may be still be a highschool student. Your stint as family caregiver may have started by making a few phone calls, running some errands, chauffeuring doctor’s appointments but now it's escalating. Or maybe it was thrust upon you as the result of one earth shattering, life-defining moment and suddenly your future turned in an entirely unexpected direction. You may judge your situation to be relatively short term or it may require a complete realignment of all your plans and expectations.
The links on this page are a path leading through a field of options, not any one of which is right for every family caregiver. I do not promote one more than any of the others, not even that which I have chosen for myself.
On Being Self-Employed
On Telecommuting
Best of all IT'S FREE!
READING ROOM
