Family caregiving for older people from a life-span developmental point of view

Family members are the most important informal carers for older people. The present paper analyses their situation with core concepts from life-span developmental psychology such as critical life events, developmental tasks, development-related goals, emotions, and actions. From that perspective two mayor branches of past caregiver research (on caregiver burden and on caregiver gain) are reviewed and criticized as underestimating the active role of family carers as authors of important decisions for their own and the care-recipients’ life and as neglecting the carers’ differentiated emotions. Following this, hypotheses are generated about how the multi-facetted caregiving situation partly frustrates and partly fulfills family carers’ goals concerning their own development and that of the care recipient and how this gives rise to family carers’ emotions, action tendencies, and actions. Moreover, family carers’ goals, goal conflicts, and major action possibilities are considered as well as carers’s goal adjustments and development of competencies and personality attributes in response to caregiving. It is concluded that concepts from life-span developmental psychology enable a more comprehensive analysis of family caregiving and promise future progress in research, especially if they also take into account the socio-cultural constraints and options of family carers’ actions and development.