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LIZ JONES: Parents are the real problem - not 'elder orphans' like me

Published: 18:21 EST, 16 May 2015 | Updated: 03:24 EST, 17 May 2015

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I'm IN a rage. I can see a red mist. 'One in five over-65s risks becoming 'elder orphans' with no relatives to look after them,' experts warned last week. There is even a charity called Ageing Without Children to cope with the problem.

What planet are these people on? How many more attacks can those of us who are child-free withstand? As someone without children, you pay a significant amount for other people to give birth, educate their offspring, inoculate them, and claim child benefit.

And how many people do you know who care for their parents, really? People of my generation, those in their 50s and 60s who are the parents of adult children, are the worst when it comes to caring for their parents.

Older people often don't want loved ones to look after them, anyway – my mum was shy, she would have been mortified (stock image)

They are putting their children through university, or buying them their first car, or first flat, or babysitting their grandchildren, or doing up their holiday villas in Tuscany.

It is always the child-free women who take on the burden financially and practically because, according to parents, what else could we possibly have to do with our time and money?

I am one of seven children, and when it came to my mum needing full-time care, I was the only one who contributed financially every month. Everyone else pleaded the expense of their own children. In fact, when a brother made a rare phone call to me to ask how I was, and I said I was having a manège put in for my horse, he said: 'How on earth can you afford that?'

I didn't say to him: 'Well, how can you afford a holiday villa and private schools, and to help your children buy flats?'

In my experience, too, adult children these days continue to be a drain on parents, even when their parents are in their 90s.

This isn't rural India where different generations of one family co-habit and women are married precisely to become carers of their husband's parents

Anyway, you don't give birth to a future carer, you give birth to a child in the hope it will have a happy, fulfilled, productive life. There are no guarantees you will give birth to someone female and barren, a sort of remarkable Ann Widdecombe figure, who told me, when I asked why she felt compelled to care for her mum: 'It felt like the most natural thing in the world.'

This isn't rural India where different generations of one family co-habit and women are married precisely to become carers of their husband's parents.

And I don't believe the modern career woman (men rarely come into the equation when it comes to caring for our parents; only my sister and I ever bought my mum underwear, nighties, slippers…) is cut out to be a carer. There is no longer the selflessness of our parents' generation; we are too spoilt, too used to our lovely lives and pristine homes.

Older people often don't want loved ones to look after them, anyway – my mum was shy, she would have been mortified.

I was hopeless at looking after her in a practical, intimate way: I became bored and short-tempered, even after just one day. She ended up in tears, saying: 'I'm so sorry.' It takes skill and training to care for an elderly person, something we forget as we criticise those who choose to perform what is a low-paid and under-appreciated career.

Rather than whine about adult orphans, why not pay professionals the wage they deserve?

I was shocked near the end of the movie Wild, where the mother dies and leaves her beloved horse in the charge of her daughter, played by Reese Witherspoon. Unable to afford vet bills (although the daughter can still afford to inject heroin), she shoots the horse and takes off on a hike for months to indulge her own grief.

Children not only neglect their parents, they neglect the responsibilities they leave behind, too.

PS The being-a-shy-Tory backlash has begun. When a friend read I'd voted Conservative, she texted: 'They've been in government less than a week and are already putting in Fascist laws, threatening free speech, which the Lib Dems stopped them doing. Tut, tut, tut.'

This made me even more angry, given she lives in a council maisonette with a garden, smokes like a chimney, and works cash-in-hand.

Another friend, someone who sacks employees the minute they become too old for the Government's apprenticeship scheme, and who packed all their food and drink from the fridge in a holiday villa instead of leaving it as a gratuity for the cleaners, texted: 'Who will you vote for next, Ukip?

They're bringing back fox hunting!' My ex-husband always moaned I was bourgeois: he was working-class, but he left his pants on the floor for the cleaner, and never gave her a Christmas bonus, let alone severance pay (I gave her three months' salary when I left London). My reply to them all? Unprintable.

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