Posted by
jillian on Jun 30, 2006 in
Issue no.2/3, March/June 2006,
Volume 05 |
Comments Off on Revisiting Caresharing in the Context of Changes in a Florida Retirement Community
Eleanor Krassen Covan, Ph.D. Abstract In this paper I revisit the basic social process of caresharing whereby people engage in personal and communal strategies to maximize their pleasure and minimize their losses. I originally discovered caresharing in the context of Hollywood Falls, a Florida retirement community that provided no formal supportive services for its aging residents (Covan, 1998). There, hiding frailty was the most obvious caresharing strategy. In this community which has since become more diverse in terms of ethnicity and age, hiding frailty is no longer practical among the oldest residents. It has been surpassed by bolstering strength, a process which involves exposing need, expanding the caresharing network, stifling crises, and staking competence claims. In consequence of bolstering strength, the oldest residents are able to diminish the costs of help while augmenting opportunities for personal autonomy, thereby extending their period of residence within their ‘independent’ living community. Introduction Caresharing is a basic social process, originally discovered in the context of Hollywood Falls, a Florida retirement community (Covan, 1998). The process involves a combination of personal and communal strategies employed by residents of the community in order to maximize their pleasure and minimize their losses. Caresharing is no doubt an enduring universal social process, occurring in many contexts in which people decide to help one another in order to improve their lives. Caresharing is initiated from the ‘ground-up’by the people who themselves need some assistance and by the people who feel they can provide it, as opposed to services that are imposed by some larger more formal system of care, governed by codified regulations. The gerontological literature is replete with articles on “informal caregiving networks,” that could more appropriately be described in terms of their caresharing properties if researchers were to analyze the conditions in which caresharing alliances developed. Rousseau (1762) believed that citizens exchange natural liberty for something better, such as moral liberty. He posited that individuals would subject themselves to the moral order of formal communities for the common good of citizenry. In contrast, caresharing develops as a much looser network of voluntary exchanges such that surrender is inherently revocable, negotiable, and dependent on fluctuations in individual, communal, and environmental resources. Caresharing arrangements are selfserving, expandable, yet retractable social alliances, generated by functional needs as recognized by individuals. People elect to help one another because life is easier and thus ‘better’ this way. To the extent that caresharers perceive ‘surrender,’ it is surrender in the face of needs which they cannot meet on their own. They also understand that surrender may require reciprocating when others need help and that the help they receive may be provided by others who are reciprocating for services received in the past. When surrender occurs, it may be revocable when the need is no longer present or when the costs of providing or of receiving help are too great. Thus, caresharing alliances may involve individual considerations that social economists would recognize in terms of cost/benefit analyses. Of course, we are social beings and thus the endurance of caresharing alliances is dependent to some extent on the emotional and social bonds of kinship and or friendship. Within Hollywood Falls, such alliances in the past have been fostered by neighborliness, involving mutual respect for autonomy, reciprocity, and desperate personal struggles to remain in an independent living community. That caresharing benefited the Hollywood Falls community as a whole occurred in consequence rather than in motivation. As the residential population of Hollywood Falls has been changing,...