Aging Archives ⋆ Page 3 of 214 ⋆ Cathy Cress

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

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

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.

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

December 18, 2017

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.

Technology Tools to Help with Reminicsence Over the Holidays

December 17, 2017

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

Why Does the Concierge Nearly Normal Family Melt Down Over the Holidays ?

December 16, 2017

Many concierge aging families are healthy or a nearly normal family. But discovering they must care for a parent can force them into tailspin. When the parent figure in the family begins to suffer the losses of aging, a filial crisis occurs.

What’s that-? That is accepting your parent in the here and now .When a Mom or Dad is no longer the north stars they were to the family, midlife adult children need to learn to learn to balance parental love and duty with independence. These midlife kids must create a two-way relationship instead of the parent sending, love, money and nurture only one way. This can throw adult children in a nearly normal family into a parental panic.

Nurturing and care have always been a one-way street – ending with them. Were they selfish – no? That’s what good parents do- nurture their children through all the stages of life. However, this new stage takes a two-way street.

The healthy nearly normal family is also thrown off balance by a shock to the system- someone has to replace the Queen or King bee. The person who took the lead role on the family stage has not shown up or forgets their lines. On the holidays they don’t decorate the Christmas tree, forget the words to the blessing on Chanukah, the recipe for Latkes or their famous Christmas sugar cookies.

Now the adult kids must make the Christmas cookies, Latkes, lead the Chanukah prayers or host Christmas. Many are reluctant to step up to the plate, take over the work of a ritual- be the head of the family

At this giant pause in family play, the family system, even in the normal family must face the loss of control in the system because the parents or parent figures usually have that control. When they can no longer manage on their own, or function as the main gear or guide that moves the family system forward, even the normal spins out of control.

How to Help Step Grandparents on the Holidays

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

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