Quit or get fired — Survey finds 1 in 20 family caregivers overwhelmed by competing demands

Pay the bills or care for her sick child. As a single mom, Tracy Oliver says that choice felt impossible.

Fourteen-year-old Emrrys Oliver was struggling. The teen was exhausted and in pain, stuck lying in the dark in their bed without any clear diagnosis on what could be wrong.

And for Tracy, the doctors' visits and days at home were adding up.

"I was getting really strained at work," said Oliver, an educational assistant in Brooks, Alta. 

"I was taking so many days off, they were starting to get testy with me. Finally, I had to take stress leave because I had to be in two places at once and was mentally overwhelmed."

"It was three months until I ran out of that sick time," she said. "It's absolutely ridiculous. It just puts you to the point of tears."

In Alberta, thousands of other parents, spouses and adult children are facing that same dilemma.  

One study of adults caring for frail adults found one in 20 people who identify as caregivers for their loved ones quit or were fired from their jobs each year.

That's roughly 23,700 Albertans, says Jacquie Eales, part of a University of Alberta research team that analyzed the Statistics Canada's 2018 General Social Survey on Caregiving and Care Receiving. 

That same survey found one in seven caregivers reduce the hours they worked. Half of them missed days of work, an average 6.5 days a year, in order to get children, parents, spouses, siblings and other loved ones to appointments or physically tend to them when needed.

It adds up to a lot of people, because that same study found one in four Albertans are providing unpaid care for an adult. 

Back in Brooks, Tracy Oliver returned to work after that first stress leave, even though Emrrys was still sick. But things went further downhill. Emrrys started to have multiple seizures around Christmas 2020.

Tracy took one leave unpaid but had to go back. Then she stopped work again and learned she could draw unemployment insurance under the federal family caregiver benefit for children.

That lasted 35 weeks because Emrrys is younger than 18. It's 15 weeks unemployment insurance if a person is caring for an adult, or 26 weeks if that adult is dying.