With an ageing population in the UK, family members are increasingly finding themselves in the positions of informal caregiving. These caregiving roles evolve over time and change with the increasing agedness and associated frailty of the older relative, until the point comes when decisions have to be made about transitioning an older person into a care home where they can receive more intense or specialised support.

This chapter begins the journey of the adult child becoming a ‘carer’, and the initial stages of transitioning a parent into care. The first challenge involves an identity shift for the adult child from ‘son or daughter’ to becoming a ‘carer’ and how this feels like a role reversal – becoming a parent's parent – with important consequences for their relationship with their parent. Family dynamics can change too when the labour of care is divided between sibling pairings or groups, reigniting historical rivalries or alliances which were previously played out in childhood between brothers and sisters.

We begin the chapter by exploring what it means to ‘care’, the very definition of which has been subject of significant debate. Care involves a range of instrumental tasks, but it also involves significant emotional labour, and this emotional work in particular has traditionally been considered a female occupation – a daughter's domain – when caring for an older parent. Feminist scholars have redefined care to better recognise the emotional work and relational experience involved in the care relationship and have advocated for a more egalitarian distribution of care, not just within families, but by society as a whole.

Care and gendered expectations

Fine and Glendinning (2005, p 617) write that care ‘is a social concept that defies rigid definition, yet is helpful as both a normative, aspirational guide and a term for describing our behaviour’, considering care to be a set of practices which we carry out to provide assistance to the health and welfare of another. These practices may include physical activities of care, social transactions of care between people, and mental states of caring for another (Fine and Glendinning, 2005). The Care Collective define care as ‘a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life’ (The Care Collective, 2020, p 5).