The evolving role of sons in health promotion of their elderly parents

Are Nurse Practitioners (NPs) overlooking a potential resource when developing a plan of care for community-dwelling elderly? Emerging practice research on filial sources of healthcare support has indicated that there is a growing trend for sons to assume some responsibility for the healthcare concerns and needs of their aging parents.  The purpose of this work is to propose that outcomes observed through a secondary analysis of data from a previous descriptive qualitative research project, conducted with a sample of 60 elderly residing in independent living centers, supports this concept in elder care. The original research addressed the question: “How do interpersonal relationships with adult children influence the older person to engage in health promoting behaviors?” The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the relationships between older persons and their adult children, with the goal of discerning and describing the patterns of intergenerational support exchanges and their subsequent impact upon the older person’s well-being. The qualitative data were collected by means of a focused interview instrument derived through an application of Neuman’s Systems Model (1989). The present study is a retrospective interpretation utilizing the original database to examine the new question, “What specific roles do sons play in the health promotion/health risk reduction behaviors of their elderly parents?” While daughters presently continue to emerge as the primary care provider, there is a significant trend in these data for older patients to depend upon sons for a variety of Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLS), as well as some specific areas of basic ADLS, particularly in the absence of a female relative or when the daughter lived at a distance. As the baby-boomers age, there is more of cohort trend for families to be smaller, adult daughters to be employed and for adult children to be more geographically mobile. These factors may combine to make caregivers and health care support networks more limited for the current aging population. It is incumbent upon the NPs to suggest possibilities for adult sons to participate in the continuing care and improved quality of life outcomes for older parents.