For those with parents and siblings:
Why is it one mother can take care of 10 children but 10 children cannot take care of one mother?
Well, baseline: taking care of my kid: having a bed in the house (ideally a room, but necessary is a bed), adding a bit of extra food on the table, some clothes, daycare (subsidized here), and they're living under household rules as a non-adult in the family. Excluding daycare (after subsidies, it's 160$/month for us, Americans may find it different) and including diapers, my toddler costs us a bit of extra space in our house and an average of slightly less than 150$/month according to our YNAB (including furniture as she grows, car seats, clothing, winter outdoor clothing and boots, toys, Christmas presents, etc). Including daycare, my kid costs us about 300$/month, and there's subsidies of almost 200$/month that come from the federal/provincial government to offset that. She's mobile, comes with us when we go places, etc.
My mother and my father, if we were to take care of them:
- Either move them into our house (and then that's moving another adult with their own ways of living AND a habit of telling you how they think you should live your life, yay family dynamics), or rent an apartment. And they need an actual room, not a bed/shared room. Either option involves a SIGNIFICANT disruption of either your family life or your financial life, if they can'T afford it.
- Elder care, if needed. 160$/month? Hahahahahaha.
- Food: more than my toddler, and also pickier.
- Diapers are 40$/month for disposables for my toddler. I'm not intimately familiar with the cost of adult diapers, but I'm willing to bet it's more than that...
- They want to go places, need to be driven (car maintenance/time driving). They have more healthcare appointments, issues, and need more help for medical stuff (at least usually, by the time they need care). More time off work, more appointments, more time in general, more issues, more work.
- Clothing: hopefully they have enough, but clothing for picky adults can be more expensive than buying a 4$ t-shirt with butterflies for a 'picky' toddler.
And the list goes on...
So, yeah. 10 kids in the house don't require a huge amount that's not the same (a pot of soup is a pot of soup, clothes get handed down, rooms can be shared, etc), they get pretty self-sufficient (once they're past the diaper stage and at the 'playing alone for hours' stage, anyway), and they have to obey household rules. Elderly parents who are used to things going THEIR way, resent their body for falling apart, and generally need a lot of help and aren'T willing to change how they live to suit another adult's rules? Different set of issues.
Based on my grandmother, anyway. I'm hoping my parents handle it better.