Caregiving is hard work and it is easy for caregivers to get burned out. Adult day care centers provide care and companionship in a group setting to seniors who need supervision during the day, allowing their caregivers to go to work or take a much-needed break.

Caring for an elderly loved one is, more often than not, ensuring that they receive the right care at the right time, and neither too much of it nor too little. This balancing act can be difficult, expensive and exhausting.

Elder care options are often appreciated and one intermediary option was recently covered in an ElderLawAnswers post titled “Adult Day Care: Providing a Break for Caregivers.”

While there are a number of types of actual facilities, sometimes you don’t quite want or need a facility. Perhaps you are not ready just yet or you hope to avoid them entirely. Increasingly, families are choosing to personally care for their elderly loved ones at home.

The difficulty faced is the burden this places on the caregiver, and the limitations it imposes on the lifestyle of the elderly loved one. A convenient solution is adult day care, a service less diminutive than the name suggests and rather quite useful as an intermediary option to take much of the burden off of the caregiver.

Adult day care programs vary widely, both in substance and in availability. As a result, it is wise to snoop around in your local area and consider your needs. The costs tend to be modest, in the grander scheme, and various health insurances or long-term care insurances will cover or defray the cost. Medicare, unfortunately, does not yet pay for this type of service.

For more information about caregivers, please visit my estate planning website.

Reference: ElderLawAnswers.com (April 11, 2014) “Adult Day Care: Providing a Break for Caregivers”