Introduction
Alongside the erosion of publicly funded welfare state supports for care, it is estimated that half of Canadians will provide any form of unpaid support to family members or friends who require help (Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence, 2024). Family members have long provided most of the unpaid support for older adults. Challenges faced by carers are complex and vary widely, but often include navigating expectations that are institutionalized within familial and formal systems. Though familial and care relationships can be meaningful, the work of care is largely both unrecognized in and expected by the public sphere, and can become costly in its time and material requirements, as well as its physical and mental health consequences (Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence, 2024). Despite this, the unmet needs of carers have persistently remained a private issue.
Understandings of care as a private concern tend to impede policy intervention and maintain the status quo of policy (Levitsky, Reference Levitsky2014). This lack of politicization keeps care work outside the public sphere and sustains gendered and racial inequities in caregiving (Levitsky, Reference Levitsky2014). Racialized populations, by which we mean groups subjected to oppression and discrimination while being actively constructed by powerful groups as part of a particular ‘race’, experience disparities across key social and economic determinants of health (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2005; Public Health Agency of Canada, 2022). In a context of growing economic globalization, these inequities not only increase the need for care in racialized populations but can make racialized carers susceptible to precarity from the added financial and emotional strain of unpaid care work (Jacoby et al., Reference Jacoby, Sen, Kelly, Montoya-Boyer, Rewald and Henderson2024). Additionally, navigating systems that lack culturally relevant supports may also increase care work for these families and contribute to experiences of systemic and interpersonal racism and to mistrust in available solutions (Shahbaz, Reference Shahbaz2024).
Levitsky (Reference Levitsky2014) argues that to enable new imaginaries of care policy, we need to understand ‘under what conditions, beliefs about family responsibility [for care] are questioned, rejected, or reimagined’ within people’s everyday lives (Levitsky, Reference Levitsky2014, p. 10). To this end, we engaged in an in-depth way with experiences and interpretations of caring for older adults among a group of racialized carers who identified as being South Asian and Punjabi. This population in Canada is of significant size but is underrepresented in existing caregiving research in ways that can amplify their experience of inequities under current care policy approaches. Drawing on Levitsky’s (Reference Levitsky2014) concept of everyday politicization, we analyze these carers’ discussions of everyday care activities, and how they advocated and negotiated social expectations and systemic barriers within their localized contexts and within the interview itself. Before describing this approach further, we situate this research within an overview of South Asian and Punjabi communities in Canada, as well as existing research on family care within this community.
South Asians and Punjabis in Canada: uniquely situated carer perspectives
South Asian populations are projected to remain the largest racialized population in Canada, possibly exceeding 4.7 million by 2041 (Statistics Canada, 2022a). People identifying as South Asians are not a homogeneous group, though many share cultural and historical characteristics (George & Chaze, Reference George, Chaze, Rajan, Varghese and Nanda2015). In 2021, 7.1% of Canada’s population reported being South Asian; many were born in Canada, and some migrated from countries such as India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (Statistics Canada, 2022b). Understanding the diversity of South Asians in Canada requires familiarity with their historical presence, which has been influenced by European colonization of South Asian countries, post-colonial geopolitical conflicts (e.g., independence wars of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh), as well as significant changes to Canada’s immigration policies (Agrawal, Reference Agrawal2013). Punjab is a region in northern India bordering Pakistan, and the term ‘Punjabi’ refers both to the people from this region, a cultural identity, and to the language spoken there. The population of Punjabi people has grown over a long history of immigration starting in the early nineteenth century (George & Chaze, Reference George, Chaze, Rajan, Varghese and Nanda2015).
Punjabi carers navigate a distinctive experiential landscape of care shaped by their cultural, religious, and linguistic backgrounds, with varying levels of care responsibility and strain across families. Punjabi communities typically position family care as a normative cultural expectation, a framework often influenced by religious understandings, such as Sikhism (Jassi, Reference Jassi2022). The cultural norm for extended families to live together or in close proximity stems from, and facilitates, a collective approach to care, whereby multiple family members and generations share responsibilities (Galdas et al., Reference Galdas, Oliffe, Wong, Ratner, Johnson and Kelly2012). Punjabi families often continue care practices that are rooted in the Punjab region, shaped by a patrilineal kinship system in which sons typically remain in the parental home after marriage, often for life (Jassi, Reference Jassi2022), whereas Punjabi daughters typically leave their parental homes to move and live with husbands and in-laws. This system encourages gendered care expectations, particularly for Punjabi daughters-in-law, to be highly involved in caring for their aging in-laws (Jassi, Reference Jassi2022).
Care experiences in Punjabi families are further complicated by immigration and settlement processes. Research on South Asian newcomer families documents economic challenges (Statistics Canada, 2024), housing instability (Randle et al., Reference Randle, Hu and Thurston2024), and underemployment (Debbarman, Reference Debbarman2019). These challenges, alongside the strain entailed in navigating cultural expectations of care within a new social and structural context, can exacerbate the stress involved in care (Asanin & Wilson, Reference Asanin and Wilson2008). Among families who migrated to North America, multigenerational living often stems from necessity alongside cultural preferences (Johnson et al., Reference Johnson, Bacsu, McIntosh, Jeffery and Novik2019). Though multigenerational living arrangements can support South Asian older adults’ well-being, in some circumstances it can also contribute to their isolation (Burholt & Dobbs, Reference Burholt and Dobbs2014).
Our intention is to contribute to a contextualized understanding of how the Punjabi carers we interviewed experience and interpret the meaning of care for older family members. This includes attention to how these carers are oriented to, respond to, and negotiate complex social expectations and systemic barriers within their community and household settings.
Methods
Theory and study design
This analysis was part of a broader feminist ethnographic research project (Fonow & Cook, Reference Fonow and Cook1991; Pillow & Mayo, Reference Pillow, Mayo and Hesse-Biber2012; Reinharz, Reference Reinharz1992) aimed at building and diversifying understandings and potential sites of action about gendered conditions shaping everyday family/friend care work in Canada. The project included multiple phases and sites of data collection exploring policy, media artefacts and situated experiences of family/friend carers (Sawchuk et al., Reference Sawchuk, Klostermann, Funk, Cherba, Giguère and Dunsmore2024; Funk et al., Reference Funk, Klostermann, Symonds-Brown, Aubrecht and Giguère2025). We built on Levitsky (Reference Levitsky2014) to conceptualize everyday politicization as connected to how people establish a collective identity or claim solidarity with others; interpret otherwise ‘private’ circumstances as a political or social problem; and set limits or negotiate their circumstances.
A larger sample of interview participants was designed to include various communities of carers across Canada that were not typically represented in research or advocacy, including racialized, newcomer, French-speaking, and LGBTQ2 + IA carers, as well as a separate group that identified as feeling ambivalent or reluctant about filial care responsibilities. This paper uses data from a specifically situated group of participants recruited from one of the project’s three geographic sites, described further below.
Study setting and recruitment
The data were collected in one Census Metropolitan Area of Western Canada, where South Asians are the largest visible minority. Recruitment proceeded after receiving ethics approval. Participants were eligible if they self-identified as South Asian and Punjabi, were 18 years or older, and were helping an older family member or friend on a regular basis. The term ‘caregiver’ was not used in recruitment materials since many within this community may not self-identify as such.
Convenience sampling involved circulating research project information and invitations (in both English and Punjabi) through community networks (of seniors’ centers, gurdwaras, mosques, and advocacy groups), public posters, social media, newspapers, and radio advertisements. Snowball sampling was also used. Recruitment was difficult for a population not typically included in (and potentially mistrustful of) research, and where cultural norms of family care as a responsibility can be predominant. Eight participants were successfully recruited over 2 years. However, for qualitative exploration of narrative processes, and where there is an expansive theoretical body of knowledge informing a study of focused scope, the in-depth analysis of a small number of information-rich interviews is generally regarded as appropriate (Malterud et al., Reference Malterud, Siersma and Guassora2015). We did not aim to generalize descriptive findings, but to diversify narratives in the extant care research and in the theorization of politicization processes among family carers.
Interviews
Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted via telephone (n = 1) and Zoom (n = 7) between January and August 2023. The bilingual first author completed six interviews in English and Punjabi and translated responses from Punjabi. The second author completed two interviews in English. Participants provided informed consent and received a $40 honorarium for their time. The interview guide (see Appendix A of the Supplementary Material) began with sociodemographic and descriptive questions, followed by open-ended questions about participants’ care relationships and experiences, including balancing care work with other responsibilities, accessing support, and identification (or not) as a ‘family caregiver’. Interviews lasted 45–60 minutes on average; seven were conducted over Zoom and one by telephone. Interviews were audio recorded, then transcribed, deidentified, and assigned pseudonyms by the research team.
Analysis
The approach to analysis was abductive (Timmermans & Tavory, Reference Timmermans and Tavory2012), insofar as it was informed (but not rigidly prescribed) by existing theories around caregiver narratives, gendered dimensions of care work, and a sensitizing concept of ‘politicization’ (Levitsky, Reference Levitsky2014), as noted above. Thus, we attended to how carers talked about their care work and the conditions in which it was performed, traced how they constructed their identities as carers, and framed challenges of care work and potential solutions as a private or public concern. Interviewers wrote reflexive analytic notes immediately following interviews, which were shared with the team. Each author closely read the transcripts to gain familiarity with participants’ narratives. Attention was paid to both stated and implicit content (metaphors used, speech patterns) of interviews, as well as surprising observations. Using initial notes from the close readings, reflections, and group discussion, the team identified the initial codes related to what information was shared (care work activities, social/material resources, advocacy, resistance, and challenges). Two authors then independently coded all transcripts in Dedoose using these codes, and conflicts were resolved through team discussion. After grouping coded material together, preliminary themes were identified. These themes were further refined through continued reading of transcripts and larger dialogical engagement within the research team, and in relation to the project’s overarching theoretical and analytic grounding.
Findings
Overview of participants
All but one of this group of eight South Asian or Punjabi-identifying participants also identified as being of the Sikh faith. Six identified as women and two as men. When asked about their ability to make their financial ends meet with their monthly income, half reported some difficulty, and half said they could do so fairly easily. Based on what they revealed in the interviews, the participant group was also, on average, highly educated, with over half having completed post-secondary education, and one being a current student. Three participants (Jas, Simran, and Kiran) were first-generation Canadians. Four participants were born in India (Veer, Preeti, Kaur, and Harman), and one was born in Pakistan (Aliya). The five participants who migrated reported having lived in Canada anywhere between 9 and 42 years; this duration may help explain their apparent high level of familiarity with available health and social services for older adults (which emerged in interviews).
There was an absence of spousal carers or participants who were older adults themselves in the participant group. Aside from one participant (Veer), all lived with the older adult(s) they were caring for. Participants ranged in age from their twenties (Harman) to early fifties (Aliya) and described caring for older adults who ranged in age from their sixties to mid-eighties. One male participant (Veer) cared for his parents, and another (Harman) was responsible for arranging care for his grandmother. At the time of the interviews, four participants, all of whom were women, described being primarily responsible for caring for their in-laws (Jas, Simran, Preeti, and Kaur). These same participants also described having their own biological parents who were aging. Three of them (Simran, Preeti, and Kaur) described that their obligations to care for their in-laws challenged their ability to care for their own parents. The remaining two participants, also women, included one who was married, caring for her mother (Kiran) and the other who was unmarried, caring for her parents (Aliya). Six participants were also caring for their own children (Harman, Jas, Simran, Kaur, Kiran, and Preeti).
All participants described carrying significant care responsibilities for older adults in their families. Although the forms and intensity of these responsibilities varied between participants, some described past care experiences that were more intense, and which provided important context for their interviews. All participants described currently helping with financial assistance, access to medical care, socialization, and communicating with health services, such as booking appointments and translating medical information. Four participants (Aliya, Simran, Kaur, and Kiran) had experience providing physically demanding hands-on care work for palliative or significantly immobile older adults at home. Moreover, this study was conducted in a metropolitan city where the participants did not seem to trust or rely on public transit, so all were involved in providing transportation. Indeed, this illuminated how limited mobility, not only due to bodily (e.g., arthritis, post-surgery) but also social (e.g., lack of a driver’s license, mistrusting public transit) challenges, generated needs for driving assistance.
Analytically, what these carers described doing, and the challenges they encountered, can be connected to broader caregiving contexts, mobility, immigration, and gender, among others. We also identified three broad themes related to whether and how carers politicized their role and work in their narratives: (1) Working out caregiver status; (2) Caring on the margins; and (3) The affordances of householding practices. The conditions of care we describe in further detail below often intersected in important ways to shape carer narratives.
Working out caregiver status
According to Levitsky (Reference Levitsky2014), political mobilization of carers hinges on people identifying as part of a larger group of caregivers (collective identification), and then framing and claiming their grievances as a social rather than an individual problem. Processes of grievance construction often rely on the social norms and resources available for care. Interestingly, there is no word for caregiver in the Punjabi language that is a direct translation for the English meaning of the word. The closest equivalent, seva, connotes selfless service rooted in spiritual and moral duty, particularly within Sikhism, rather than a distinct role involving emotional labour or entitlements (Singh & Singh, Reference Singh and Singh2010). In response to an interview question about self-identification as a caregiver, two participants (Jas and Kaur) did not identify as caregivers, and although the other six did, answers were rarely straightforward, but seemed to involve rhetorical work to justify and differentiate their care work from familial and cultural expectations.
Indeed, identifying as a caregiver (or not) involved acknowledging and weighing the reciprocal nature of care work in the household. Kaur, a woman in her mid-forties caring for her in-laws at the time of the interview, had a recent history of providing palliative care for her mother. Kaur worked through how she saw a family role as different from a caregiver role, because the former entailed mutual benefits to her and her children, and involved no monetary gain. She positioned her situation as one of reciprocal exchanges of support within a family:
If she’s there, she’s mentally very helpful for my kids. And in return, if I’m just doing the favour taking care of her. I think it balances out. It’s a family. It’s not a caregiver like I’m not doing it, for. You know, money or anything. She’s a family. She’s grandmother of my kids. (Kaur)
Kiran, a woman in her thirties who lived with and helped her mother in her mid-sixties with instrumental activities of daily living (e.g., transportation), told us she had been a caregiver for her grandmother, who recently died. She helped her grandmother with basic activities of daily living, such as eating, bathing, and mobility. In contrast, Kiran believed that what she was currently doing for her mother was more about being helpful in an interactional family relationship:
Like we talked about earlier it is still like a reciprocal, that’s not the right word… it is still a relationship- we are both doing things for each other, so I do not feel like I’m the caregiver for the entire family and I think with my grandma that felt different. She could not do anything and at that point it felt like a lot more responsibility. (Kiran)
Self-identification may hinge on the extent of individual need and carers’ feelings of responsibility in this regard. It also, however, reflects ideas about what counts as ‘care’. Kiran, for instance, positioned her role in driving her mom as a relational activity rather than care ‘work’. Moreover, much of the navigation and accompaniment work described by participants was typically not described as caregiving, but rather just what was done as a family member. Interestingly, however, the two participants who did not identify as ‘caregivers’ nonetheless described the need for flexible paid work arrangements required to complete these responsibilities.
Yet for Kiran, her grandmother’s limited capacities around transportation, bathing, and feeding herself had made her feel more like a caregiver. More broadly, participants often positioned needs for caregiving as arising from a mismatch between the external environments and an older person’s capacities. It seemed that the physicality of care and increased demands on time in particular shifted participants’ self-identification. Similarly, Aliya, a woman in her fifties, described herself as a caregiver when she began providing more intensive help supporting her parents’ day-to-day needs, and quit her job to provide full-time care for them. Aliya was perhaps the quickest to identify herself as a caregiver. Both her parents were in their mid-eighties and required significant help with aspects of daily living. When asked if she considered herself a caregiver, Aliya answered:
Yes, because now I have responsibility for, I guess taking care of especially my mother’s needs. Um… physically, medication wise, making sure again if she is ill. I am responding to making sure that she is cared for. I do a little bit for my dad. He is independent, but still, I have to arrange his appointments. I have to take care of some of his stuff. But for my mom especially because she is not mobile. And even if she needs a drink of water, if there is nobody here or the caregivers (homecare staff) do not want to because it is not in the care plan then I am the only one who can give her that care. And help her get either better or stable or be safe. (Aliya)
Here and elsewhere in the interview, Aliya described herself as a caregiver due to her daily responsibilities of feeding, physiotherapy, and mobilizing her mom at home. Yet this work was entwined with familial and moral obligations. For instance, she contrasted her own moral stance against her friends’ surprise about how much she does for her parents. Aliya identified that some formal carers, such as home care staff, maintained rigid boundaries around tasks (i.e., not providing a glass of water to her mother and ensuring she drinks it, when not listed in the care plan). Aliya positioned herself as motivated by the moral principle of delayed reciprocity when describing her responsibility for filling in these formal care gaps:
…. your parents give you so much. And the understanding is, the way that I was raised and understood is [that] I have a responsibility to return that back. However, that may be - and whenever that might be. (Aliya)
Thus, Aliya aligned her caregiver identity closely with a moral justification of doing ‘the right thing’. She did not question the caregiver role and identity while situating it in relation to cultural and familial expectations. She framed this as a moral code or understanding, and a way of life rooted in her upbringing, alongside feelings of indebtedness to her parents. Similar understandings wove throughout all the interviews in this study.
In sum, the meaning of a caregiver identity (and how it is taken up in particular ways) appeared fluid, with interpretations being shaped by conditions of care, sociocultural understandings of family care, and gaps in formal care services and community resources.
Caring on the margins
As participants described helping older family members, we also learned how they framed the broader conditions of care work through how they accounted for challenges and their solutions to them. Participants described several points of conflict in navigating care within formal care templates, workplaces, and exclusionary local community spaces and practices. Explored in further detail below, they interpreted these caring tensions as unique forms or manifestations of marginalization within their caring experiences.
Formal care templates
Participants reported various care-related challenges within a myriad of formal care templates. From their perspectives, such templates, designs, and processes (e.g., home care and institutional care) that were purportedly designed or intended to support older adults and their families often paradoxically seemed to create alienating conditions for their care work, insofar as they were insensitive to carers’ and/or older adults’ needs. This problem was often heightened when the older adults experienced acute illness or new diagnoses. For instance, one participant, Kaur, positioned the hospital as unable to provide culturally relevant care for her mother:
It was her last wish. She literally said, ‘either you can keep me at home or send me back home to India. I do not want to stay in the hospital’. Because there are a lot of issues, like language is one big thing. The caregivers did not understand her language, and she did not feel that they were taking good care of her. The food was another big issue. (Kaur)
More prominently, several participants identified the dominant social practice of institutionalizing older adults in nursing homes as incongruent with their community and cultural beliefs; moreover, it was not interpreted as a feasible option, due to their lack of trust in these services. Aliya, introduced earlier, recounted with frustration that when she spoke about her care challenges to her parents’ physicians or home care service providers, their response was to suggest she could institutionalize her parents within a care facility, rather than help her find alternative solutions:
It was an automatic well let us put her in an institution. And they wanted to give me the paperwork to sign right away. Every time if I mentioned it or brought it up that it was a challenge, everybody was like institutionalize. (Aliya)
For Aliya, institutionalization was not a viable solution that matched her or her parents’ needs, nor did it align with their cultural values. Aliya’s mistrust also stemmed from her past experiences with formal care services; her mother was hospitalized during the COVID-19 pandemic after falling at home, yet the hospitalization prompted delirium and increased frailty. Aliya also recounted news stories of poor care in Canadian long-term care settings. Aliya positioned the formal care system as not understanding her or her parents’ needs or preferences; this had direct implications for her own care responsibility as she continued to try to support her mother with limited support at home.
Moreover, home care plans and procedures built on Western, medicalized, bureaucratized, and neoliberalized templates provided limited space for the forms and approaches to care that participants perceived the older person as needing (indeed, for some, these did not resemble ‘care’). Kaur, introduced above, identified a lack of relationally oriented care as rendering home care services somewhat useless to her. She spoke emphatically that it was inconceivable for her to leave her mother with someone who would not make a cup of chai. In Punjabi culture, a cup of chai, which is typically black tea steamed in milk, is often brewed and served when people come into your home. Conversation while sipping chai is a ritual that creates warmth, connection, and can awaken the senses and provide comfort through the blended spices and caffeine. Kaur expressed:
But the [home care] system which is [run] by [the provincial] government, they have told their people not to even make tea for older adults right? Like they will…Just… they will just sit and they will go. What’s the fun of that? You are sending someone just to sit in…like they do not know how to communicate with that person. It will be more helpful if someone will come and just make a cup of tea and talk to my mom. (Kaur)
In addition, a mismatch between respite policies in home care and cohabitating or multigenerational living was a barrier for Kiran’s family. Kiran (in her thirties) was primarily responsible for caring for her mother (in her sixties), yet often described their family’s challenges caring for her late grandmother. Kiran cited her grandmother’s respite services, which included a policy wherein neither she nor her mother could be physically present when the respite worker was there:
The case manager said that if they were to offer it (respite) my mom could not be present they basically wanted her to go to the basement. Apparently, it is not a break if she is still there…. But just having that help was really what we needed. (Kiran)
Since Kiran, her mother, and her grandmother all lived together, the requirement to leave the home would entail extra effort and limit their abilities either to do other activities within the home or simply to relax in the space.
Whereas study participants could quickly identify structural issues such as those described above, their envisioned solutions were often enacted in the context of their sense of personal responsibility. Kiran, for instance, implied she should have been a stronger advocate for her grandmother. She situated this claim as part of her duty as both a family member and within her knowledge as a health professional. For Kaur, the lack of relational care for her mother led her to seek a private Punjabi home care service and pay out of pocket for these services. And when Aliya refused to take the only solution (institutionalization) offered to her as an alternative to insufficient home care and a lack of in-home physiotherapy, she had to continue filling in the gaps in care for her parents, with the added responsibility of monitoring the home care workers. This decision was enabled by her brother’s financial support which allowed her to quit her job and work full-time caring for her parents. In sum, limited and inappropriate existing formal care solutions in their urban Canadian city furthered participants’ sense of cultural alienation as well as their marginalization in caring responsibilities. In response, participants imagined and enacted alternative individual solutions that centered on fulfilling material and cultural needs unmet by existing formal care services, such as paying out of pocket for private services or doing the missed care work themselves.
Lack of workplace recognition
Needing to provide daytime care was further complicated when participants also felt unsupported by their formal employers. This often occurred when work absences were required, and participants had to navigate workplace tensions and within family routines. For some participants like Aliya and Kaur, care responsibilities resulted in having to leave the workforce: neither had the material and social affordances to continue working full-time and caring for their parents. Aliya did not have additional family members with whom to share care responsibilities, and Kaur described compounded needs to care for her children, which superseded her needs to be employed, despite undergoing extensive postgraduate education.
That’s when I made the decision and I quit my job. And I moved in with my parents, because my dad could not look after her (mom). And I had no other local siblings. (Aliya)
I literally quit my job…Because I have done masters [degree]. I was working in my field with two small kids. It was not working out so I literally had to quit my job, take care of my parents and now, I’m just doing odd jobs because I cannot go back to my field. (Kaur)
Jas, a woman in her thirties caring for her mother-in-law and who also shared her past experiences caring for her grandmother-in-law, described how her workplace (i.e., manager) reinforced problematic assumptions about the boundaries of carer responsibilities towards extended family members:
Workwise, it gets difficult. So, for instance, like when [my husband’s grandma] was sick, my work could not understand that I needed to take time off work to stay home and help [my husband’s grandma] … And they could not understand why cannot anybody else do it. Right, why are you having to do it? … (Jas)
Although reports of unsupportive employers are prevalent among many carers (Katz et al., Reference Katz, Lowenstein, Prilutzky and Halperin2011), these Punjabi participants interpreted these situations as signifying that their employer invalidated their cultural context and, indeed, their cultural identity. Again, as with inappropriate and inadequate formal care services, participants recognized their exclusion at a structural level, yet were constrained in terms of limited solutions to address this exclusion, either taking on the work they identified as missing or resigning themselves to the status quo.
Making up for exclusionary community spaces
A key challenge consistently reported by participants revolved around supporting the social and mental health needs of the older adults in their lives. They frequently expressed a responsibility to ‘get people out of the house’ for social activities and inclusion. As a grievance construction, this often manifested in participants’ interpretations of immigrant older persons’ outsider position in the community. Participants cited ageist attitudes and the lack of normalized inclusion of older people in community spaces. While framing their outings with older adults as part of family social activity, they also alluded to how accompaniment was needed based on limited capacities of the older person; moreover, such needs also hinged on and reflected participants’ evaluations of community spaces, services, and resources that did not seem to be designed for their parents, in-laws, or grandparents, and were therefore inaccessible. For instance, Harman, a 20-year-old man who helps his 69-year-old grandmother, explains:
[My Grandmother] cannot take the bus because it’s too cold, right? I cannot send her (on) a bus because she’s older, and I do not want to send her on the bus. Bus is not that friendly for Punjabi seniors… They just do not feel comfortable going in the bus for some reason…I think it is hard to navigate. (Harman)
Participants’ comments alluded to intersecting barriers of gender, culture, and social capital, with some speaking of how older women family members were less experienced with and confident in navigating on their own outside of the household space, yet with relatively greater comfort within the home space, reflecting gendered division of spaces and cultural norms of care. A resulting gendered differential in access to social and public spaces was a key concern for several participants. As Jas explained, women were often too ‘busy’ to get out for social activity.
In their normal day-to-day lives with family and with children I feel like there needs to be more in the community for women to socialize and get together… some of our older seniors at the [neighborhood] library or at the different cultural centers have space for them to get together. But women, especially my mom’s age I find, do not have the time or ability or capacity to get out and socialize on their own as much. (Jas)
Kaur linked the social isolation and risks faced by older women to lifelong family care responsibilities, observing how cultural expectations can restrict older women’s social engagement:
I think the main problem with Indian community is… Even ladies do not talk about mental health of their mothers. It’s a sad reality working all those years [in care for family]. They just saying old Mother should stay home. Cook. They do not give them opportunity to go out. (Kaur)
This quote reflects the invisibility of older women’s emotional well-being and the enduring effects of gendered care roles across the life course shaped by norms that end up confining older women to domestic spaces, even after decades of caregiving – a form of social exclusion with cumulative mental health consequences.
In some comments, participants further connected gendered isolation in old age to the broader design of community space, specifically the lack of culturally inclusive and welcoming spaces. Kaur, for instance, extended her explanation above to describe the challenge of finding a community gathering place for older Punjabi women. For Kaur, others’ perception of a breach of ‘normal’ behaviour in public spaces was the key barrier:
[Older people] do not know where to go out. Their kids will just drop them at the Rec Center. But other communities get upset with them. Why, they are here, and, to be honest, like they will get up to, like other people are like, ‘why are these just old people sitting here?’ (Kaur)
Here Kaur refers to ‘other communities’ to describe those who do not share the same gathering practices. Harman echoed this difference in community gathering practices in Canada compared to India, which he attributes to the busyness of employment-focused Canadian culture and lifestyle. He interprets the resulting lack of neighbourhood interactions as isolating for his grandmother, with implications for the work his family must do to support her social health in this environment.
They never lived in isolation like how they are living here. The lifestyle is completely different, and they are not used to that no longer. How much time we have been in Canada that would not change their mindset because they grew up the way in India. That is way different from Canada’s lifestyle here. (Harman)
Though locating the problem of isolation structurally, Harman also normalizes this as a Canadian lifestyle, which keeps the solution as a private matter for him and his family to adjust to and deal with. He goes on to claim that even if his grandmother or parents spent more time in Canada, their mindset or perception of cultural isolation would not change (implying a sense of resignation about the status quo). Some participants did move beyond private solutions, for instance in voicing their desire for more culturally specific programming. However, regarding other barriers to inclusion such as accessible transportation, participants seemed to take a more resigned approach (i.e., taking it for granted as unchangeable) that precluded the possibility of advocating for change.
The affordances of householding practices
Participants framed householding practices – the day-to-day responsibilities and activities of working, cleaning, and cooking, as well as caring for multiple generations within the home setting – as simultaneously affording comforts and challenges. Householding practices enabled the possibilities and limits of how care work and responsibility were distributed. For instance, care expectations often fall to women in the Punjabi community, and this was reflected within our participant group, as the six women participants lived in multigenerational homes, typically caring for their in-laws, raising children, and also working either full-time or part-time paid jobs.
Possibilities of caring within the home
Participants described home-based care arrangements and exchanges as a traditional and expected practice within Punjabi families, often accompanied by social disapproval of institutionalization. Harman, a male participant, expressed the strong sociocultural expectation he felt to have his parents and grandparents live together in one home:
Our parents kind of stay with us. We do not kick them out like that. If you do that, then you are kind of disrespecting your culture and your family. (Harman)
By stating ‘we do not kick them out’, Harman draws on a collective identity that positions caregiving as a moral and cultural duty (i.e., being Punjabi), which shapes his understanding and approach to caring for older family members in the home. For Harman, keeping care at home affords a sense of cultural membership and respect for cultural social caregiving practices.
Harman was a single male at the time of the interview and only had responsibility for his biologically related family members. However, married participants in our study referred to cultural influences shaping their household care work in particular ways. For example, Kaur, a woman with in-laws but also aging parents and no brother to take responsibility for them, explained that daughters taking care of their own parents is taboo within the patrilineal kinship system (whereby daughters-in-law move in with their husbands’ family and provide care for them as they age). This constrained her ability to care for her parents. Similar tensions arose for Preeti, a woman caring for both her mother and her father-in-law (who had severe mental health concerns). Preeti moved her biological parents, who were in their late sixties, into a separate basement space near her home. Preeti could not fathom having both her in-laws and her parents in the same house; she perceived it as taboo. With no brothers, Preeti was her parents’ primary carer and would visit weekly to socialize and bring them food.
In the Punjabi culture you need more [support] especially for the girl’s side. I do not have a brother. So we are like two daughters. So it’s always hard to help the girl’s parents, girl’s side. Or it’s very hard for me to make a balance [the needs of] the families together. I cannot imagine them living together. That’s why I keep them separate so they have their own privacy. There’s a limit. I can go there. I do not spend the whole day at my parents house. I try to help my parents. I make time for them. I want to give them attention, so they do not feel ignored. It’s very hard because I provide them everything, but I do not spend that much time with them. I have to come back home. For my in-laws I spend the whole there, there’s no issue. If I spend whole day with my parents, there’s a big issue right? (Preeti)
Although the women participants readily attributed their householding and care responsibilities to gendered cultural norms, rather than explicitly problematizing these responsibilities, they often foregrounded reciprocal exchanges and normalized relationships with, and care for, older adults in their lives and within their households. For instance, Simran, who cared for her 72-year-old mother-in-law with mobility issues, described caring for and living with older family members as always being part of her household life. In this way, appeals to householding practices served as a cultural framework that helped these carers interpret and manage their situations. Participants positioned the householding and co-living tradition as helpful for a few reasons. Like Simran, Jas (who lived with her mother-in-law) described the continuation of caring reciprocity in her family, explaining how she intentionally models and normalizes family care traditions:
When I was younger I would take my grandparents to appointments and things like that, because my parents were busy working. And so it’s just that natural transition to I’m taking care of mom (Mother-in-law) now. As she gets older and the kids get older, my oldest is eight. But we always talk and joke that when he can drive, he can take grandma to her appointments and all those different things. They already have that. They already know that they are going to be doing that. And I tell them. And I say it look dhadhi [grandma] is giving you breakfast. She is feeding you, but you know when she’s older you are going to do that. And they kind of go, mom why do you always keep saying that we already know that. We already know we are going to do that. And I’m like okay good I’m reminding you. But for them again, it’s natural at this point too because they see it. (Jas)
Jas stated that she enjoyed living with her mother-in-law not only to carry on cultural care traditions, but also because it made things easier, for example, for her to fill up her mother-in-law’s car with gas, do taxes, and provide technical support.
Disrupting patrilineal living arrangements and gender norms would likely create more work for Jas. She described her mother-in-law as healthy but also unable to live by herself. Even if she lived in supportive housing, the lack of proximity would make it harder for her to continue to help her. As such, for Jas, living in close proximity made it easier to care for her mother-in-law, and in turn, for her mother-in-law to support her with cooking and childcare.
Limit-setting within the home
Though participants worked out limits as carers within the household, sometimes this was subtle. Kaur, for instance, resisted the ‘caregiver’ label, asserting the reciprocal nature of care in her home. Yet she also described distributing work to the broader family network.
You come home from work and they [in-laws] will be like, “today’s the day we have to go,” and then they will be like, “no, we cannot go tomorrow! We have to go’ - because it’s an event….you are like, ‘okay, I’m not gonna do it. Please try to understand [there are] other people in the family to take you out there’. So there are some time limits which we have to set for your own self. (Kaur)
Moreover, when Kaur’s mother was dying, Kaur arranged to have her in-laws visit India for 6 months in order to care for her dying mother in her own home, resuming care of her in-laws in her home after her mother’s death. For Veer, a male carer, his resistance was more overt, as he arranged a living-apart situation for his parents, to protect his wife from patrilineal care responsibilities:
We’re gonna go by our own household rather than listening to other people. At the end of day I do feel good about it to be frank with you. (Veer)
In addition, Simran most clearly questioned family (in-law) care norms, positioning her care work as threatening her own self-care and ability to support her children. She and her friends in similar situations, she says, have some shared sentiments in this regard. Simran has begun to question the normality of the status quo and whether this has to be part of being Punjabi.
It was just like this is how we do it. This is how it’s done. And that’s what my husband was told. … It’s almost our normal. And now when you stop and think and say why is this our normal? And should we continue to make this our normal? That’s when you kind of realize, for myself I do not really want that for my kids. … Right like, I know my friend was like ‘culture is…. so like we create culture. This is something that somebody created; like we can create our own new culture’ and for me I was like, that is so true. (Simran)
Despite this realization, Simran stated ‘she’s in too deep’ and feels unable to change her current situation; instead, her vision of solutions manifests when she shifts quickly to talk about her hope that her children would not be put in the same situation.
Moving from grievance to action
When asked what they would like government leaders to know about their care situations, participants focused on government support for older adults (and indirectly, for carers) – particularly financial assistance, mental health services, and community-based elder care. Yet otherwise, even for Simran as described above, and with other participants, solutions to care grievances seemed to remain within the realm of the household. Rarely were care challenges situated, in other words, as an issue for public deliberation. For example, Aliya responded:
I would tell them that there really needs to be more focus, awareness, and I would say financial as well as community supports for seniors. They are really overlooked. I think unfortunately society, politics, everybody gives up on people when they reach a certain age. When they have stopped working, unfortunately they are seen as a taker and not a giver. And they are forgotten about. (Aliya)
Many participants were apprehensive about future changes that aging could bring to their household and care workload. However, carers’ politicization of care within the interviews was often limited to immediate limit-setting with family or distant plans for a changed future. Like most Canadian carers, however, they advance structural critiques of inadequate care and community supports for older adults, with these critiques drawing on ageism as explanatory frameworks. Moreover, when prompted, they identified needs for structural change, including financial supports and changes in home care service delivery. In part reflecting strong filial values, their recommendations for advocacy within the political sphere were less focused on limiting their own workload and framed instead around the quality of life of older adults and the need for social health care options that are culturally inclusive.
Discussion: truncated networks of support and the politics of inclusion
In this study, we engaged with Punjabi family carers’ knowledge and interpretations of family and public responsibilities for supporting older adults. It is important to recognize that cultural practices of care are fluid, unfolding processes rather than pre-established characteristics of Punjabi families. Meanings of care arrangements were often closely tied to participants’ identities as ‘Being Punjabi’, and oriented them to use cultural norms and values of care as interpretive frameworks to understand their situations. Although these norms (e.g., patrilineal kinship care, caregiver identity) were by no means static, there were still unique specificities to participants’ care practices, as well as important variations based on the contexts of their lives. Participants described how their ideas of care and family differed from the protocols of care provided, how they mediated belonging, and how their householding practices responsibilized them for providing care and limited the external support they sought.
We are careful here not to essentialize politicization as only related to participants’ ethnic identity. Intersecting forms of advantage and disadvantage shape people’s ability to seek support and help in caregiving (Hess et al., Reference Hess, Abdulla, Finzel, Semkina, Harris, Boaz and Manthorpe2025), and while culture and gender were dominant forces within participants’ accounts of personal responsibility for care, their grievance construction could have been further shaped by social class, education, and migrant status. Indeed, the sample was relatively privileged in terms of education, ability, migration status, flexible work, and relatively stable income.
Current Canadian social policy and much policy-oriented advocacy and media coverage construct family carers as a homogeneous group, readily available and limitless in their scope (Keefe, Reference Keefe2011; Sawchuk et al., Reference Sawchuk, Klostermann, Funk, Cherba, Giguère and Dunsmore2024; Funk et al., Reference Funk, Klostermann, Symonds-Brown, Aubrecht and Giguère2025). This narrative supports a system in which formal care for community-dwelling older people is designed as a temporary and highly limited substitute for family care (Twigg, Reference Twigg2002), usually allocated in task-based increments framed by biomedical logics (Baldwin, Reference Baldwin1993; Exley & Allen, Reference Exley and Allen2007; Means et al., Reference Means, Richards and Smith2008). Participants in this study showed how these policy and service design assumptions are not responsive to the fluid and situated ways family care is arranged and practiced.
Against a backdrop of cultural filial care expectations in Punjabi households (manifesting, for instance, in participants’ strong sense of filial responsibility in this study), Purewal and Jasani (Reference Purewal and Jasani2017) similarly questioned the assumption (underpinning state policies) that South Asian and Punjabi families are self-sufficient in caring for their own, arguing that neoliberal policies that increasingly require families to fill in care gaps obscure how women actually experience this work of upholding cultural care ideals in difficult conditions. Notwithstanding current efforts to promote a rhetorical, yet under-resourced, ideal of ‘aging in place’, a broader system reliance on institutionalized forms of care for older adults in Canada also tends to undervalue the expertise and perspectives of families, and older adults’ cultural preferences (Arya & Tong, Reference Arya and Tong2023).
Carers’ networks of support were somewhat truncated, necessitating more work by participants. Cultural norms of keeping older adults within the household also reinforced cultural gendered norms; Koehn (Reference Koehn2022) likewise documented sexism and ageism experienced by older Punjabi Sikh women. These norms also limited networks of support offered from formal systems. In this context, carers’ advocacy or politicization was often focused on immediate boundary-setting and resistance to norms they identified as Canadian. All participants described ongoing work to navigate these politics of inclusion within formal care, family, and community settings. The politics involved tensions that were often enacted as a result of dominant cultural assumptions of family care and aging, exacerbated by the individualizing nature of care policy in Canada (Giesbrecht et al., Reference Giesbrecht, Crooks, Williams and Hankivsky2012). These tensions worked to recursively sustain alienating conditions of care work, where possibilities for broader collective advocacy for structural change were limited. As such, even if they did identify as a caregiver and conceive of their work as more than familial, their politicization process was oriented towards their collective identification with other Punjabi caregivers rather than the broader general population of caregivers or caregiver advocates. This positioning keeps them apart from broader advocacy action. Katbamna et al. (Reference Katbamna, Ahmad, Bhakta, Baker and Parker2004) similarly found that familial obligation prevented carers from seeking additional support and help.
Implications
Reflecting on the durability of normative commitments to family care practices (Levitsky, Reference Levitsky2014), filial responsibility itself was rarely explicitly constructed as a grievance by study participants. The strong desire and need for culturally appropriate care among participants and their families not only signals a mistrust of institutions but also points to the possibility of engaging Punjabi carers to inform and design culturally appropriate care.
Many non-Punjabi Canadian families and carers express similar grievances as those described by our participants, including inappropriate and harmful formal care services (Daly & Szebehely, Reference Daly and Szebehely2012), unmet socioemotional needs (Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence, 2024), and unsupportive employers (Sadavoy et al., Reference Sadavoy, Sajedinejad, Duxbury and Chiu2020). These challenges point to actions for policymakers to consider, such as improving access for caregivers and older adults to mental health supports, implementing policy to protect caregivers’ employment, and designing home care supports that align with multigenerational housing practices.
Limitations
Future research is needed to better understand how intersecting identities such as gender, ethnicity, class, and employment conditions shape how carers enact and understand their roles (Giesbrecht et al., Reference Giesbrecht, Crooks, Williams and Hankivsky2012). Given the small sample and theory-informed goals, our findings are intended to expand caregiving narratives rather than represent all South Asian and Punjabi caregivers or to examine all possible intersectional factors shaping different patterns of responses. Our varied recruitment approaches (e.g., community venues, local businesses) may have inadvertently excluded individuals who are homebound or lack robust community networks. It is also possible that some carers may have restricted the types of grievances they shared with the interviewer, who belonged to the Punjabi community. Ultimately, however, the involvement of Punjabi researchers in this study strengthened data collection, analysis, and interpretation of the interview data due to their bilingual abilities and sociocultural expertise.
Conclusion
Responsive public policy requires a social imaginary of care inclusive of diverse caregiving experiences, yet a significant gap remains in care research that reflects racialized communities. Our findings provide important qualitative knowledge and insights into the meanings and experiences of family care for South Asian and Punjabi older adults at home. While not generalizing to all South Asian and Punjabi peoples in Canada, we offer a contextualized and nuanced understanding of how sociocultural and political practices, interpretive processes, and identities intersect in family care work for these participants. In doing this, we provide provisional insights for caregiving advocacy, insofar as the possibilities of mobilization and advocacy stem from available social and material arrangements. For these participants, navigating the politics of inclusion as ‘caregivers’, across formal systems, and within households, seemed to generate more individualized responsibility. When responsibilities of care arrangements continue to fall upon individuals, there are limitations in what supports are possible or become available. As such, this study offers an illustrative example of racialized carers in Canada and insights into how the politicization of family care of older adults as a public issue might be limited. Without political demand for better social caregiving policies to improve the conditions of care within households or in community spaces, we maintain the status quo and potentially exacerbate structurally produced inequities for racialized families.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at http://doi.org/10.1017/S0714980826100580.
Acknowledgements
We appreciate the insights and time provided by all research participants. We acknowledge the larger research team for this project, which includes co-investigators: Pat Armstrong, Katie Aubrecht, Maria Cherba, Mara Fridell, Janna Klostermann, and Dana Sawchuck, and research assistants: MacGregor Goodman, Lauriane Giguere, Maryem Zahra, and Alexa Carson. We also would like to acknowledge the community engagement support for this study by members of the Baba Nanak Trust foundation.
Financial support
This project was funded through a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant.
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