Before you start

This is a short book about a feeling. Your mother or father is getting old, or ill, or both, and you're doing a lot for them, or not as much as you think you should, and either way there's a low steady guilt that runs under the week. It's there on the drive over and it's there on the drive back. It's there when you don't ring and it's there when you do and the call is short. It's there when your sister mentions, lightly, that she was round on Tuesday. It's there, most of all, at the moment you say goodbye and the door closes and you feel your shoulders come down, and then feel bad about that too.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the guilt makes sense from the inside. They raised you, they're frail now, the time is finite, and some of what you owe them is real. The second is that guilt is a poor engine for care. There's research on carers, and it points the same way from several directions. Caring done from obligation wears people down faster than caring done from attachment. Guilt predicts how burdened a carer feels over and above how much they actually do. And the worst outcomes for carers, and for the parents they look after, follow strain, not hours. Care driven by guilt tends to be care done as penance, a visit made to cancel a feeling rather than to see a person, and penance is never paid off, so it never stops asking. The third is practical. You can decide what you give, say it out loud, give it whole, and stop paying for it a second time with guilt. Chapters 20 to 23 cover how.

This book doesn't tell you how much to do for your parents. It won't say do less and it won't say do more. It's about the guilt engine, not the care, and if you take the engine out you may find you give the same amount, or more, and that it costs you a good deal less.

Three cautions.

If you're caring for a parent with dementia, or with an illness that changes their behaviour, a lot of this applies but some of it needs adjusting, and chapter 24 says where.

If your parent hurt you when you were a child, if they were cruel, or violent, or absent in a way that damaged you, the guilt you feel about them now has a different source, and this book's argument doesn't reach it. Chapter 24 says what I think does.

And if the feeling has stopped being guilt and become a flat, persistent low mood, most of the day, most days, for two weeks or more, the NHS says to see a GP, and you can refer yourself to NHS talking therapies without one. Carers are entitled to that as much as anyone.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.