Today’s teenage girls will dedicate 9 years of their lives to unpaid care
This is an amazing statistic and I suspect some of the most acute demands, due to distance from services fall on rural based families. This story tells us:
Girls aged 15 today will dedicate more than nine years of their lives to caring for their loved ones, an official study has found, leaving them facing a heavier burden of care than any other generation.
With an ageing population more people are dependent on family members to look after them and the burden is falling disproportionately on women, especially those in their 50s who are spending 20 per cent of their lives caring for others, a new analysis of the 2011 Census by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has found.
Whilst the amount of care a person will have to provide differs between regions, the figures show that a 15-year-old girl in Britain today can expect to spend 9.3 years of her life, more than 13 per cent, providing unpaid care, whilst a teenage boy will spend 7.1 years, 11 per cent of his future, looking after others.
Women aged 50, who bear the biggest burden of care in England and Wales, will spend 5.9 years, just over 17 per cent of the rest of their lives, caring for free, while their male counterparts will spend 4.9 years, almost 16 per cent.