woodenpotty said:
But say it is your parents taking care of you and they get old (I'm 71 and healthy but...) or pass away. Who will step up and do the care provider work? Or are you increasing the odds you will be dumped into a nursing home?
If you're talking about the nephew and not yourself, I have a unique set of information for you:
I used to work in transporting the mentally and physically disabled back and forth to 'workshop', where they actually had a job and got paid money for it. The amount earned depended highly on what they chose to do. Some of them only got $5 a week but I know of at least two who threw themselves into the job and would pull down $300-400 a week. (The $5 group were mainly there as therapy/babysitting for their parents, they never HAD to do the work, it was up to them.)
There are 'group homes' that exist to allow people with basic skills to live as roommates with other similar folks. A lot of the 'funtional-but-can't-be-left-alone' folks live in them. They have a group of aides who work at the house making sure everyone gets the right stuff, like when they go to the store, making sure that Bob doesn't just buy a grocery cart full of raisins and chicken soup because that's what he felt like eating. XD They also deal with anyone who might be IC. And usually the guys who live at these places have regular kinds of lives, just with an aide tagging along to make sure everything is cool. The group homes are generally divided by gender, guys all live together in one house and girls live in another. I suppose you might think of these as a dorm or 'assisted living facility' because everyone has their own room and they share chores.
If you aren't able to deal with basic skills, then yes, you are greatly increasing the risk that you'd end up in a specialized care facility. They aren't the same thing as just a 'regular nursing home', the staff are trained to work with the mentally and physically disabled. When I was doing transportation work one guy had to go into the local one because his mother passed away and his sisters all worked too much to take him in. He was actually pretty OK with it because he got to hang out with some of his buddies from workshop. (He only got grumpy because they told him he couldn't just eat nothing but candy for lunch and he needed something else, too. Not that he couldn't have the candy, but that he had to eat a sandwich or something as well. LOL)
So that point is all up to the nephew and how cognitively aware he is. If he can do basic tasks like picking up his toys, and eating with utensils, he could probably transition into a group home. And this is providing that he doesn't actually develop a rather good set of skills and be allowed to live on his own in an apartment. That happens too. With the kid being ten, and not having met him IRL, I couldn't hazard a guess, but there ARE alternatives to 'dumping in a nursing home', you just have to contact the Board of DD locally and ask them for help. (That would be what was once called the Board of MR/DD, they dropped the "MR" a while ago.)
But that's up to your family to decide if they want/need to go that route.