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Trouble on The Tracks – If Holidays Revealed Aging Parent Problems

December 26, 2017

 

Here are some suggestions that you might consider as new New Years resolutions- even as we approach February.  You may have already vowed this and not followed through because it is uncomfortable or scary or too much to take on— but this is one that will help avoid disaster.

It’s not “go on a diet,” but what you should do after the holiday with your parents when you spotted red flags that made you concerned about your aging mom or dad. Here is a list of resolutions you might make for your next visit to your parents after the holiday gave you a reason to worry about an aging family member:
Accompany the elderly person to the doctor, and talk to the doctor in person.

  • Gather legal financial and insurance paperwork, scan all, put originals in a safety deposit box and leave easily found copies for your parents
  • Have all bills except magazines forwarded to yourself or another relative who will manage them
  • Contact and meet with old and present friends and form a network of support
  • Investigate quality of life local programs like a senior center, bridge group anything that would bring your parent joy and engagement
  • If your older family members are in a facility, make contact with staff that cares them, and the ombudsman.
    Meet with your elderly relative’s present support network
  • Look into Lyft or Uber’s senior driving program if seniors should or no longer wish to drive
  • Arrange a family meeting to see how adult children and friends can share tasks using Lots of Helping Hands
  • Look into Forgiveness techniques with siblings if you have old wounds that may stop you from sharing care with adult brothers and sisters
  • Meet with an aging life or geriatric care manager in the area who can do all these tasks for you

Filed Under: Aging, Blog, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, Long Distance Care, Quality of Life for elders Tagged With: aging life care manager, aging parent crisis, care manager, elder care manager, geriatric care manager, Lyft for seniors, New Years resolutions for adult children, nurse care manager

15 Red Flags for Holiday Visit With Aging Parents

December 24, 2017

 

It’s almost Christmas and time for the family visit with older relatives. If you suspect festive cheer with aging family could devolve into some scary scenes, here are some red flags to put in a checklist and share with your midlife siblings before the holiday celebration.

Perhaps your older parents have piles of junk mail, dirty clothes, unwrapped gifts when Mom used to shine through her color-coordinated presents. All are cause for the sibling 911 alarm- then action.

You can use this list to assess your parents or older family members during the holidays and compare notes on a post-holiday conference call. If all midlife siblings have the same criteria, it makes easier to agree what to do and what to flag as family New Year’s resolutions. 

Below is a list of red flags. If you saw any of these problems on Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or face them on Christmas- now is the time to do something about it. Use this is a checklist.

Alarm Bells List for Visiting Long Distance Relatives During the Holidays

  1. Unpaid bills
  2. Missed appointments
  3. Clutter in a home that was once always neat
  4. Weight loss
  5. Memory loss, change in short-term memory
  6. Poor grooming by a person who was once meticulous
  7. Getting lost
  8. Wandering
  9. Refusing to go with friends on outings or to religious services
  10. refusing any suggestion or conversely agreeing to everything without consideration
  11. Mood swings, getting angry when normally easy going
  12. Refusing to go to medical providers
  13. Not taking care of activities of daily living: cooking, bathing, dressing, housekeeping, etc.
  14. Entering contests, credit card maxed out on shopping channels
  15. Recent fall

When midlife adult children return from the holidays, the family can have a family meeting alone or with an aging professional and look at the problems on everyone’s the list, agree on the top red flags and start helping the long distance family.

Don’t wait till you and your midlife siblings are shocked out of sleep by late-night calls from brothers and sisters, frantically telling them of a crisis with aging Mom or Dad. Don’t force yourself and the other adult children to book last minute, high-cost flights, and gather in scary, sterile hospital rooms with brothers and sisters they have not really communicated in years.

Call an aging life or geriatric care manager for help 

Filed Under: Aging, Aging Family, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, care manager, case manager, elder care manager, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Long Distance Care, nurse care manager Tagged With: aging life and geriatric care management, aging life care managers, care manager eldercare manager, check list for holiday visit, danger signs for holiday visit, geriatric care manager, holidays with aging parents, nurse case manager, visiting aging parents during holidays

How to Help Step Grandparents on the Holidays

December 23, 2017

During the coming holidays like Christmas and Hanukah step-grandparents are faced with their status as outliers.

Christmas Day may find the giving gifts as a step-grandparent. But blending families means multiple parents, two houses, and myriad grandparents.

Each kid can have a divorced Mom and Dad plus his or her newly remarried mother and father. Each set of children will spend Christmas twice- once with their divorced father and once with their divorced mother but in different houses. It is worthy of an excel spreadsheet.

Merging families means blending rituals. If one family celebrates Christmas on Christmas Eve and the other Christmas day -it’s a clash of cultures

Blood grandkids can spend Christmas morning with their blood dad or mom or stepmom or dad or some combination of all. New step-grandparents need to have to have the same schedule.

If step-grandchildren are teens, time with friends and boyfriends must be allowed. So getting all children- blood and step – gathering with their blended parents and two sets of grandparents on Christmas Day or evening is a challenge. The complications are myriad. The shores treacherous.

Holiday giving takes a genogram to map.

Step-grandparents have to be assuming the supportive role to shore up their adult children and grandchildren, both blood and step.

They need to be anchors to this rebuilt ship.

On the bright side, in the exponentially exploding numbers, you might have multiple piles of gifts, for the grandchildren. If you love to give this answers a deep need for the holiday and all year round

If you your clients are step grandparents-ask them to see themselves as a gift this holiday season. The Mantra is  Stay steady, stay married, stay the same grandmother or grandfather, the same steady presence,

Be the counterpoint to incredible change.

They have to be the background, the supporting cast, the backstage crew that helps the play go on. For the new cast members, you are the green room, the welcoming place for the nervous and many times damaged – new stars.

 

Filed Under: Aging, Aging Family, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, Blog, care manager, elder care manager, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Siblings Tagged With: aging family, aging life care manager, care manager, case manager, geriatric care manager, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Step- Grandparent

Are You Skating Away From the Holiday on Ice Like Joni Mitchel?

December 18, 2017

 

Printer-friendly version of this lyric

It’s coming on Christmas
They’re cutting down trees
They’re putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on

As Joni Mitchel told us on her melancholy 1971 masterwork, “Blue”  Celebrations with family on the holidays can often want you to take the ice and skate away from

 

Spending time with dysfunctional families often causes lots of seasonal lubrication – “A Holiday on Ice”  as David Sedaris. What is the third sign that you are skating on the slippery slope as a geriatric care manager -Cut off

Distancing & cut off- are pulling away and having nothing to do with family or an individual in your family.

You find adult children who have not spoken to parents or siblings for years.

The celebrity feud and cut off between actress Angela Jolie and her Dad actor John Voigt is a well-publicized example

What prompted Jolie’s reconciliation – helping grandchildren- Jolie-  reconciled with her Dad because her children’s need for a grandparent and the knowledge that your children just have a very different version of a relationship with your parents than you do.

When you assess the aging family as a professional you look at several signs of dysfunction. Contentiousness and anger are two other signs- the ripping pattern of divorce, remarriage, or other disruptions in relationships that shred the balance within the family system- both hacked by anger and contentiousness.

Gathering all these angry, contentious, cut off, divorced, ex-spouses, stepchildren, left behind blood children, deadbeat Dad’s and pour on alcohol and hold the mistletoe -you have the wrathful explosion that is that is dysfunctional family skating the holiday on ice.

Find out more about in Emily Salz and Lynn Hackstaff’s chapter Family Conflicts, Dependence and Mutuality: Care Management and the Dysfunctional Family. Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition.Jones and Bartlet.

When they call you be prepared, be ready, be a little fearful. Here are some tips.

 

family-fight-300x223.jpg

Filed Under: Aging, Blog, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, Siblings Tagged With: aging life care manager, care manager, case manager, geriatric care manager, nurse advocate, nurse care manager

Technology Tools to Help with Reminicsence Over the Holidays

December 17, 2017

 

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Reminiscence isn’t new. Before the printing press, storytellers and bards were how history was recorded- in the new mind not on tape.

 

Oral storytellers gave us the Odyssey and another valiant tales. History exists in their family, and Ulysses or Penelope might be sitting in their living room this holiday season.


Here are some tips to use if their want to capture these family tales during this holiday season—a perfect time to do this. Use empathetic listening if you can. Make all the messages you are are giving the older person— tone, how fast you speak, how they are sitting- say, “I want to listen to you.”

Ask questions that prompt the story but don’t make judgments. If there are going to record the family tale, do it in a way that doesn’t distract or stop the older person from talking. Recording on your i phone , ipad etc is simple and non-intrusive 

 

Start somewhere. If the elder isn’t going to tell stories on his or her own, start the story and see if they will follow along. “That chair there are sitting in, where did their get it, Mom?” Pick an ornament off the Christmas tree and show it to dad to see if he can tell its story.

Reminiscence is sparked by the senses, and buried memories flow into our brains. That’s why the holidays are a perfect time to have their older family members share stories with them. The sense of taste spurs memories. Just think of making that pie that tasted a lot like their mom’s, a brisket, traditional Christmas pudding, latkes 

Here are two technology tools to help you with this legacy building for your older client

Life Bio

Grandma’s Pie

Check out my Book Handbook of Geriatric Care Management with more tools for legacy building written by David Lindeman Director Of the Center for Technology at UC Berkeley and Julie Menack of 21 st Care Solutions

 

Filed Under: Aging, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, Blog, care manager, case manager, elder care manager, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, nurse advocate Tagged With: aging life care manager, care manager, case manager, geriatric care manager, holiday with aging parents, holidays rituals, reminicsence technology

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Cathy Cress is the leading national expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management. She is author of Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition, Jones and Bartlett, published 2015 and known as the bible of geriatric care management. Continue Reading >

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