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As Polk Ages, Families Struggle to Find Affordable Adult Day Care
More than 12,000 Polk County seniors are estimated to need help with daily activities, but families and providers say cost and logistics often put care out of reach.
Activities Coordinator Martie Cahill plays a game of dominoes with seven clients at Beautiful Minds Social Center. | Courtesy of Erica Davis
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7-minute read
As Polk County ages, more adult children are stepping into an unfamiliar role: caring for the people who raised them.
For Kassia Alamm, the shift happened gradually.
Shortly after she got married, Alamm and her husband moved into her mother’s home. A few years later, as her now-91-year-old mother’s health declined, the roles reversed: The couple bought their own house and moved her mother in with them.
Today, caregiving shapes much of their daily life.
Alamm and her husband work opposite schedules to make sure someone is always home. Her mother, who adopted Alamm as a toddler, had lived in the same house for about 60 years before it became unsafe for her stay there alone.
“There hasn’t been a good solution,” said Alamm, 35, director of strategic communications and public affairs for the Lakeland Chamber of Commerce.
The arrangement has affected work, social plans, and thinking about the future.
‘Nobody seems to have a good answer’
Alamm hoped to rely on in-home support services. Instead, she found herself navigating insurance rules, inconsistent scheduling, and expensive private-pay care.
Finding help has been frustrating, she said. Families are often handed lists of providers and phone numbers, but little guidance about which services actually fit their situation.
“The biggest stressor comes when there are no easy answers or you get the runaround from the system,” Alamm said. “Nobody seems to have a good answer.”
About 1 in 15 seniors — roughly 12,090 people — have a self-care difficulty, meaning they may need help dressing, bathing, or moving around safely.
Most seniors aged 65 to 74 remain independent, with only 3.9% reporting difficulty with self-care. But after age 75 that rises to 9.9%.
On their United Community Indicators dashboard, UWCF and GWCF noted: “The senior population (aged 65 years or older) of Polk County was nearly identical in 1995 and 2023 (19.3% vs. 19.6%). However, the number of seniors in Polk County nearly doubled from 85,000 to 155,000 over that time frame … due to the rapid influx of people into the county.”
That mismatch — 92 adult day care spots and more than 12,000 seniors estimated to need help with daily activities — might suggest long waiting lists and overwhelming demand. But that’s not the case. Despite being licensed for 60 participants, Beautiful Minds owner Erica Davis said her center averages about 14 clients a day.
The biggest barrier is affordability.
Beautiful Minds charges $115 for a full weekday of care. For a senior attending five days a week for 50 weeks, that adds up to $28,750 a year — about $2,400 a month.
In-home care can cost even more. Alamm said companionship and sitter services can run $25 to $45 an hour, depending on the level of assistance needed.
Insurance gap
Beautiful Minds only accepts one type of insurance — Simply Healthcare — but Davis said that’s not by choice.
Humana, she said, offered reimbursement rates of about $40 a day, far below the cost of care. She is still in negotiations with several other insurers, who often take 18 months or more to respond.
Davis said she doesn’t understand why insurers don’t jump at the chance to provide services like adult day care, which can keep seniors at home longer and prevent hospitalizations from falls or other accidents.
When it exists, insurance help can also be difficult for families to navigate.
“Some insurance companies can provide like 50%, but you have to call and ask,” Alamm said. “Sometimes you just have to get the right person on the phone.”
Logistics can be difficult
If families can afford adult day care, making it work can still be challenging.
Beautiful Minds operates from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on weekdays. Sunrise for a Happy Life operates from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. — schedules that may not leave much commuting time.
Sunrise offers transportation services. Beautiful Minds does not. Davis said the insurance costs required to transport elderly clients safely were simply too high for the center to absorb.
A business built on sacrifice
Davis understands the problem from both sides — caregivers struggle to find workable help, while providers struggle to stay afloat.
She said she was inspired to open Beautiful Minds after her own family struggled to supervise her grandmother, who had dementia, during the workday.
After dropping off her younger siblings at daycare one day, Davis remembers thinking, “It’d be nice to be able to drop grandma off at daycare.”
Opening the center proved far harder than expected.
Davis thought licensing and permitting would take about six months. Instead, she held the lease for nearly two years before Beautiful Minds opened in September 2023.
The delays nearly destroyed the family financially. Davis and her husband refinanced and eventually sold their home, then lived in an RV with their children at her in-laws’ property for nearly two years while trying to keep the business afloat.
People occasionally approach her about opening centers of their own, she said, but quickly lose interest once they understand the financial realities and emotional demands.
“This is an industry that you get into if your heart is in it,” Davis said, “We put everything into this.”
Beautiful Minds Social Center had a dance party to celebrate the shared birthday of a staff member and client. | Courtesy of Erica Davis
More than supervision
About 95% of Beautiful Minds clients have dementia or memory-related conditions, Davis said.
“Most people think that people with dementia are just sitting around with their heads down and not doing anything,” Davis said. “That’s exactly what we don’t want them to do.”
Staff members help with toileting, medication reminders, and supervision while clients participate in games, physical activities, and social interaction to preserve dignity and cognitive function.
She recalled one woman who had stopped taking care of herself before becoming a client.
“The family reported back to us that she had just gotten so much life into her. She was doing her hair now, she was doing her makeup now,” Davis said. “She looked forward to coming all the time.”
‘People really just have no idea’
Davis said she has tremendous empathy for caregivers, who often sacrifice their own health, relationships, and routines while trying to keep elder loved ones safe.
“You can’t even go to the grocery store,” she said. “It has to be this whole planned-out process. People really just have no idea.”
Alamm said she and her husband have found a system that works, for now. She worries most about seniors trying to navigate the system alone.
“If my mom didn’t have an advocate, she would never be able to navigate things herself,” Alamm said. “She just wouldn’t.”
“And I think all the time about the people who don’t know how to coordinate on the level that I’m gratefully able to do — and don’t have anybody. That’s what pains me the most.”
Insight Polk examines community conditions and solutions in six target areas from UCIndicators.org: economic & employment opportunity, education, housing, food security, transportation & infrastructure, and quality of life.
LkldNow’s Insight Polk independent reporting is made possible by the United Community Indicators Project with funding by GiveWell Community Foundation & United Way of Central Florida. All editorial decisions are made by LkldNow.
Cindy's reporting for LkldNow focuses on Lakeland city government. Previously, she was a crime reporter, City Hall reporter and chief political writer for newspapers including the Albuquerque Journal and South Florida Sun-Sentinel. She spent a year as a community engagement coordinator for the City of Lakeland before joining LkldNow in 2023. Reach her at cindy@lkldnow.com or 561-212-3429.
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