Caregiver Time Poverty: The Time We See and the Time We Don’t

I was having a conversation recently with my friend Christa Haanstra about caregiving when she used a term that stuck with me: time poverty.

Christa has been a strong voice for caregivers in Canada for as long as I’ve known her. Through her work at 4CStrategy, she helps organizations put lived experience at the centre of their thinking, with a particular focus on patient, client and caregiver engagement and co-design. She has worked with organizations across healthcare and caregiving, including the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence and the Ontario Caregiver Organization, always making sure the caregiver experience is actually heard and considered.

Neither of us was particularly in love with the phrase “time poverty,” but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to do a pretty good job of describing something caregivers know all too well.

Because time poverty isn’t just about having too much to do. For a caregiver, there’s the time you can actually count: driving to an appointment, picking something up, making dinner, going over to check in, sitting in a waiting room or making the phone calls. But there’s also all the time when you’re not actually doing any of those things and caregiving is still taking up space in your day. It’s the time in your head.

Is Mom okay? Why didn’t she answer the phone? Did she remember her appointment? Should I call again? Should I just get in the car and go over there?

You might technically be sitting at your desk at work, but some part of you is still caregiving. That’s what I mean by caregiving taking up space in your time.

There’s research behind this

A recent Canadian study published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health looked at the mental health impact of caregiving among nearly 2,000 unpaid caregivers, including 997 people caring for older adults.

One of the big findings was just how important time scarcity is. Among people caring for older adults, every additional hour of care was associated with an increased likelihood of experiencing a mental health impact. But the finding that really jumped out at me wasn’t actually about the number of hours spent providing care. It was about whether caregivers felt they had any time left for themselves.

Older adult caregivers who agreed that they lacked time for leisure had more than five times the odds of reporting greater mental health impacts than those who didn’t feel they lacked leisure time.

That’s a pretty staggering number.

The researchers talk about the experience as time poverty, this constant feeling of trying to fit more into the time available. Personal time disappears, self care gets pushed aside, relationships get squeezed, and eventually all of that pressure starts taking a toll.

Another recent study, this one looking at parents and children, approached time poverty in a slightly different way. The researchers measured things like feeling pressed for time, being in a hurry, worrying about how time is being used and feeling like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

It’s a different kind of caregiving, but that feeling is pretty recognizable.

Giving someone respite isn’t always the same as giving them time back

We talk a lot about respite when we talk about supporting caregivers, and of course respite is incredibly important. But there’s a wrinkle to it that I don’t think we talk about enough.

Imagine someone has been caring for their mom or dad for a long time. They know the routines, the medications and the appointments. They know what Mom likes for breakfast, what can upset her, what she might forget and what to do when something goes sideways.

Now tell that caregiver that someone else is taking over Saturday and they should go take the day for themselves.

Sounds fantastic. Except there’s a whole bunch of work that has to happen before Saturday. Who’s coming? Do they understand Mom? Do they know the routine? What happens if something goes wrong? Will Mom be comfortable with them? Will they actually show up? And maybe the biggest question of all, do I trust this enough that I can actually stop worrying?

It’s a bit like going on vacation. There’s the vacation itself, but there’s also everything you have to do to get ready to go on vacation.

For a caregiver who is already stretched thin, arranging the thing that’s supposed to give them a break can itself become another job. They may not even have the time or energy required to organize the respite that is supposed to give them some of that time and energy back.

The Canadian research picked up on this problem too. Caregivers talked about the difficulty of finding appropriate and reliable paid care. Even when services were in place, they could still find themselves monitoring the quality of that care, which meant they weren’t necessarily getting the respite they were supposed to be getting.

I think that’s an important distinction. The goal isn’t simply to surround a caregiver with more services. It’s to actually take something off their plate.

Some caregiver time is easy to see. Some isn’t.

I’ve started thinking about caregiver time in two ways. The first is physical time, the minutes we can actually count. The drive across town, the grocery run, the doctor’s appointment, the phone call or the visit because Mom didn’t answer.

There are lots of ways to give some of that time back. Family can help. Friends and neighbours can help. Home care can help. Technology can help.

But there’s another kind of time that’s much harder to see. I think of it as emotional time, the time and energy consumed by uncertainty. You can be having dinner with your family and still be wondering about your dad. You can be sitting in a meeting and thinking about your mom. You can wake up in the middle of the night remembering something you need to arrange tomorrow.

Nobody puts those hours on a timesheet, but they’re real. And if you’ve cared for someone you love, you probably know exactly what I mean.

When 30 Seconds Can Give You an Hour Back

This was actually one of the reasons I joined the journey with Paige in the first place.

I could see pretty quickly that sometimes what a caregiver needs isn’t another service or another person involved. Sometimes they just need to know that everything is okay, and sometimes that takes 30 seconds.

Mom doesn’t answer the phone. You call again and still nothing. Now the wheels start turning. Is she okay? Did she hear the phone? Is something wrong? Should I get in the car and go over there?

I’ve been there. A lot of caregivers have.

But if you can connect easily, see her face, have that quick conversation and know everything is okay, those 30 seconds might save you the drive across town. More importantly, they might save you the hour you would have spent wondering whether you needed to make the drive in the first place.

Thirty seconds can give you an hour back.

That was something I believed Paige could do when I got involved, and what’s been really interesting is hearing it confirmed by our customers time and time again.

Paige isn’t a replacement for care. It certainly isn’t a replacement for actually being there and spending time with someone you love. It just makes staying connected incredibly simple. And sometimes knowing everything is okay is enough to let you get on with the rest of your day.

Maybe giving time back is the point

We’re going to need lots of different ways to support caregivers. We need better access to home care and respite. We need workplaces that understand what caregiving actually looks like. We need families to share the load, and we need friends and communities to step in.

I also think we need to pay more attention to the hundreds of little things that can give a caregiver some time back.

Someone cuts the lawn. Someone makes dinner. Someone drives Dad to an appointment. A brother or sister takes responsibility for Tuesday. Technology eliminates an unnecessary trip.

A 30 second conversation can remove hours of uncertainty.

None of those things solves caregiving, but I’m not sure that’s the right test.

If time poverty is one of the things making caregiving so difficult, then giving someone even a little bit of their time back matters.

And sometimes the most valuable time we can give back isn’t the time a caregiver spends doing something. It’s the time they spend worrying about whether they need to.

About the Author

Bob Millar is Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Paige, a Canadian technology company helping older adults stay connected to the people who matter most. Bob’s interest in Paige is deeply personal, shaped by his own family’s experience with aging, caregiving and the challenges of staying connected. He writes regularly about caregiving, aging, technology and the very human realities families face as the people they love grow older.