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Courtesy of the Guttenberg Family
When actor Steve Guttenberg’s father was diagnosed with kidney disease, the actor stepped into the most important role of his life: caregiver for “his idol.” The star of movies such as Cocoon, Police Academy and Three Men and a Baby began waking up at 3 a.m. for a weekly drive from Los Angeles to Phoenix for his father’s dialysis treatments. Stanley Guttenberg, an Army Ranger, NYPD officer and later engineer, received the diagnosis of kidney failure in 2017 at the age of 84. He was a role model for his son his entire life, and the respect between father and son was mutual. “My dad was my greatest teacher,” says the actor. “His love was bottomless and his strength through this amazed me. He used to say, ‘You can love someone, or you can love someone and show up.’ ” Steve did both.
Stanley Guttenberg was the first one to champion his son when Steve followed his dream in Hollywood, and he proudly attended every movie premiere. “My Dad loved my success,” writes Guttenberg, 65, in Time to Thank – Caregiving for My Hero, a memoir that toggles between growing up with his father and a poignant account of caring for him at the end of life.
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Steve took his caregiving one step further, becoming a certified dialysis technician to personally administer his father’s treatment when he was home. “Caregivers need to be prepared to call on a great amount of patience, but making the decision to do this required no thought at all,” Steve says.
Increasing numbers of male caregivers
In the past, the “typical” caregiver has been a daughter or female spouse providing unpaid care for a relative, loved one or friend. The reality is that an increasing number of caregivers are men, who may approach their roles slightly differently than women. In 2009, men comprised 34 percent of family caregivers of adults. In 2020, according to a report by the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP (“Caregiving in the U.S. 2020”), roughly 40 percent of informal caregivers in the U.S. were men. And that number is likely to increase, according to a 2019 NIH study, due to a shrinking family caregiver pool and shifting policies that provide better support for all caregivers, regardless of gender.
There are many similarities regarding how genders approach the caregiving experience, including the fact that men and women who are not full-time caregivers may not identify with this title.
“A lot of the right mindset around being a caregiver is the ability to identify as one,” says Kate Abate, Community Life Director at Broadview Senior Living in Purchase, New York, a residential retirement community for people with mixed care needs. “After baby boomers, millennial males are the second largest cohort of men doing the caregiving for parents and grandparents.”
The role also places a heavy burden on all caregivers, from high levels of physical and financial strain to disruptions in career or income. Men and women may also similarly feel that assuming caregiving duties is not a choice.
Tasks versus contributions
But there are also some key differences between the genders. A 2023 story in The Street revealed that approximately 78 percent of men have little or no support from other caregivers and are less likely to admit their negative feelings or process and share emotions related to their caregiver role. Men also tend to break down caregiver roles into tasks to be checked off a list and completed, which means they often don’t recognize their actions as caregiving contributions. According to a 2017 report by AARP, male caregivers report more discomfort with high-touch personal care, which encompasses acts such as changing adult briefs or bathing. Men who are responsible for their wife’s care might be more inclined to hire a caregiver, rather than provide it themselves, due to this discomfort.
Abate has observed that especially when it comes to adult children, it’s still socially acceptable for caregiving to be the inherited job of the female. Male caregivers are much more likely to go to the doctor and want things fixed, rather than looking at ways they can take care of it on their own, she says. “I’ve seen men act and get help out of desperation faster than women,” Abate says. “They can get angrier and feel out of their lane earlier than women.”
Brittaney Jones-Alleyne, health service director at Broadview Senior Living, sees that generationally, boomer and millennial male caregivers are more comfortable showing their softer side. “I see male caregivers being more empathetic and compassionate in their style of caregiving and trying to be as involved as possible, even among memory care residents,” she says, adding that families with only sons “rely on them to be their caregiver, and they are quick to step up.” She does note that men can be quicker to rely on the staff to make decisions. Jones-Alleyne has also seen an increase in male caregivers becoming certified Home Health Aides and Certified Nursing Assistants, and their gentle, warm approach brings comfort to residents. “Families are also receptive to their loved ones being cared for by a male, and some of that may be the perception that they are often physically stronger than a woman,” she says.
‘Payback time’
Like Steve Guttenberg, Marc Taylor,* 63, from Bedford, New York, made a weekly six-hour round trip to assist his father, Dennis Taylor,* 89, in an assisted living facility in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for the past year. When Marc’s mother passed away from pancreatic cancer, his father was in the ICU. Following that, Marc went from engaged son and long-distance care “consultant” to rearranging his life to be there for his dad at his time of great need. “My father neglected his own health taking care of his wife during her battle with cancer. When he started failing, everything felt interconnected,” he says. Marc felt an overwhelming sense of duty and responsibility. “I thought of it as ‘payback’ time, and not in any obligatory way. This was the guy who picked me up when I fell off my bike and made huge sacrifices to give me opportunities. For the first time in my life, one of my parents really needed my active day-to-day help.”
Being an active caregiver and helping to make decisions for his father, especially closely collaborating with a sibling, was new for him. “I simply reacted,” Marc recalls. “I’m a pretty good problem-solver and that skill came in handy when my Dad was in distress. When he died, one of my first emotions was, “I failed because I couldn’t fix this problem.”
Marc is grateful for the “everyday time” he had with his father. “In the nine months between each of my parent’s passing, we went to the grocery store, ran simple errands, watched sports, gardened and enjoyed meals together. They were all, insignificant activities, but it was absolutely wonderful to slow down life and spend time with him one-on-one.”
A privilege not a job
Mike Woodruff, 60, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who also happens to be my brother-in-law, was also very much on the front lines for his father, Robert Woodruff, who passed away in 2021. “With my mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s, I witnessed my dad caring for my mom firsthand,” says Mike. “As the woman in the family, she’d always taken care of everyone, especially him. It was wonderful to see how he rose to the challenge and modeled that for his four sons.” Mike was always amazed when people would complement his father on what a good job he was doing with his wife. “He would turn to me privately and say, ‘It’s not a job, it’s just what you do.’ ”
When his father became wheelchair bound after a 2015 stroke, Mike and his brother Dave, who both lived near Robert in Detroit, moved him to an assisted living facility and visited regularly, coordinating decision-making between the four brothers. “Caregiving is something you do because you love a person,” says Woodruff. “But that doesn’t make it easy, and you can never really be prepared for it. Everyone does what they can … and in the end, that’s what I did.”
From her perspective, Jones-Alleyne sees the need to empower male caregivers to ask for help. She frequently hears a version of this phrase, “I’m the husband; I can take care of my wife and I know what’s best for her.” She understands some of that comes from the men seeing themselves solely as a loving spouse, not a caregiver.
“Being able to put pride aside and allow someone to help, even for a few hours, is important for every caregiver,” she says. She also believes society needs to transition the phrase “caregiver” to “care partner.” “The term caregiver often doesn’t land well with boomer husbands caring for wives, as they tend to view themselves as a husband doing what they are supposed to do.
Caregiving author and educator Donna Thomson says more research is needed to better understand the difference between urban and rural or younger versus older male caregivers. “Some work has been done to tailor support programs to the mental health needs of men, such as the Men’s Shed initiative. There, men (including those who are caregivers) can find a pathway to expressing emotions through old-fashioned friendship and collaboration on tasks. With growing numbers of men within caregiver ranks, unique approaches to their support needs must be found.”
Still, Steve Guttenberg wouldn’t change a thing about the time he spent caregiving for his father, although he came close to losing his driver’s license from a few speeding tickets on the lonely desert highway. He is grateful to those Police Academy movies and some friendly highway patrol officers who merely gave him a warning, which allowed him to continue those early morning drives to his father.
“Devoting yourself to caregiving is a lonely occupation,” says Guttenberg. “You need to anticipate what that person needs all the time and be ready to eat when they eat and sleep when they sleep.” And while the actor never imagined he would be in the position of caring for his father, he sees it as an absolute privilege. “He was always taking care of me, always the net at the bottom waiting to catch me. I got to be the one to catch him.”
*Names have been changed to protect privacy
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