'Roller Coaster Ride': America's Aging Crisis Is Straining Families, but There Are Ways to Prepare

Life expectancy for Americans reached 78.4 years in 2023. That is nearly 11 months longer than the year before. This extended lifespan, though, has led to warnings of an aging population crisis that could affect seniors on a number of levels.

For 82-year-old Alice Butler of Portsmouth, VA, growing older isn't easy.
"It's hard getting older," Butler said in an interview with CBN News. "We've all got issues and it's really difficult."

In Butler's case that includes her 84-year-old husband Paul's declining health. "It's hard because he basically has stroke symptoms, and as a result of that he's slow processing things," said Butler.

For the Butler's daughter, Leigh Longino, still having her parents is a blessing although providing support isn't always easy, especially with her dad's health issues. 

"It's certainly been a roller coaster ride with their health, said Longino. "I never knew my dad to be ill until 2020, which is when he first developed a lot of these sicknesses that he's going through now."

Longino and her family live in Raleigh, NC, which means regular three-hour drives back to her parents' home in Portsmouth. 

"Traveling back and forth is expensive," she explained. "Spending time away from my family, my husband has really invested in a job which is flexible. He has taken on that role with our children to be there and to be flexible, pick 'em up from school, take 'em to the doctor's appointments."

It is a subject well documented by Dr. Hunter Baker, Provost and Dean of Faculty at North Greenville University. 

Baker highlights how today's modern family is often spread out across generations, living in sometimes distant locations which means aging parents may not have immediate family assistance.

"I actually think that the families of the past would have been better able to handle it simply because we had more intact families living closer to one another," Baker told CBN News. 

Baker explains the impact of this growing aging population reaches beyond families to the federal budget as spending on Social Security and Medicare are expected to balloon.

"We have gone in the twentieth century when these programs started, we had huge numbers of young people and relatively smaller numbers of older people. And that situation has flipped on its head to where we have many fewer young people than we did comparatively and many more old people," said Baker.

What About Long-Term Care Policies?

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, that makes planning for future care needs vital as nearly 70 percent of Americans 65 and older will require some form of long-term care.

It is an expense many cannot meet.

"I could invest in a long-term care policy when I'm 40 and pay maybe $300 a month, and now I'm 50 and it's $700 a month, and now I'm 60 and it's a thousand dollars a month, and now I'm 70 and it's $2,000 a month," explained Dean Longo, owner of Visiting Angels of Norfolk, VA, a group that provides in-home care for area seniors, including the Butlers. "The closer I get to needing it, the less I'm able to afford it."

"We are very, very fortunate, very blessed that mom and dad were proactive and put things in place for themselves in order to not be a financial burden on their children. And that is the only way that we've been able to do this in the way that we have been," Longino commented. 

Longo said he has seen an increase in families with older parents needing the services his company provides. "The eight years that I've been doing Visiting Angels, I've just seen that number increase and increase and increase," he said.

It's a situation that is often overwhelming for younger caretakers.

"You want to be everything to everybody because your parents deserve that," Longino said as she teared up. "Your children deserve that; your spouse deserves that. You really are pulled and have to make very hard decisions sometimes and then make the hard decision and try your best to not feel guilty about it."

Finding Support

Baker adds that the pressure of this additional responsibility being put on family members often means support from a spiritual community is needed.

"We need to start helping people to think about these kind of things in the church," Baker said. "And we also need to probably be thinking about how we can help each other in the church as we deal with these kinds of situations."

In the end, faith is what sustains Alice and her family. "It gives us a peace about all of this," she said.

"There's been many, many mornings that I've woken up upstairs and I just needed to know that the sun was going to rise, and the sun rose. And I was like, 'Okay, we made it through another day,'" said Longino.