Sometimes family members become estranged. If the relationship with a parent was never close it just adds to the complexity of planning for their care. Elder care is not easy under the best of circumstances. Here are two suggestions to overcome this challenge.
One of the reasons that planning for elder care is not done is the reluctance of both parents and children to talk about money. Dan Taylor in his book The Parent Conversation is very insightful about this aspect of elder care.
This is another excuse for not doing anything. Accepting this reason is fraught with danger.
Planning makes elder care easier. Not planning, for any reason, just makes things worse.
Yesterday I shared some of the excuses not to plan for elder care that Dan Taylor wrote about in his book, The Parent Care Conversation. The reality is that if you accept an excuse now you will pay a heavier price later. It may be much more costly to deal with certain problems and some [...]
Dan Taylor has written a wonderful book entitled The Parent Care Conversation. In the book he writes about how to have the critical conversations with your elderly parent(s). The earlier you have these conversations the more options you have and the better you can manage the job of elder care. And it is a job. [...]
One of the reasons that the elderly don’t tell you what’s going on is that they fear for the loss of their independence which is quite reasonable. They also don’t want to appear incompetent or admit that they need help. In some cases the elderly don’t want to be a burden on their children.
One question that I keep thinking about is how we missed the signals. Why did we not see this coming? Or better yet, why did we choose not to see? This is not just an academic question. If we got this right, at the beginning we could have saved ourselves so much grief. I wonder [...]
During the time we took care of my father-in-law, we had thirteen trips in the hospital and eight stays in rehab. In addition, we brought him to dialysis treatment at the hospital three times a week for two years. This meant that we were dependant on other people for the quality of his care. We [...]
A touchy subject regarding falls is restraining the elderly patient.