holidays with aging parents Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

Do you Need 10 Alarm Bells As Copy to Attract Long Distance Clients During The Holidays ?

October 23, 2018

We are creeping up to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukkah. Long distance family members from nearly normal families will call in the highest volume in the next 2 months. As they have been seeing their parents over time they know Mom or Dad face a decline and they themselves are probably reaching burn out from constant travel and caring on top of their own work-life demands

If you use social media, do a blog or newsletter, you can proactively offer a list of alarm bells that they can look for this holiday season that would trigger engaging your services. This is top rate marketing to get new long-distance clients, who do not see subtle changes as they live far away

You can use this list in your copy so long distance adult children can assess their parents or older family members during the holiday season and compare notes on a post-holiday or right away-then call you. Below is a list of red flags. If they see any red signals on Thanksgiving, Hanukkah or face them on Christmas-encourage them that is the time to do something about it by hiring a care manager. You can give them this is a checklist of some worrisome they may seen.

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

Set up a meeting when the midlife adult children return from the holidays. You have helped them proactively, begin to engage your services. Learn more tips at my newest webinar

Join me in my new free Webinar

5 Ways to Tame the Turbulence of Holiday Meltdown in Aging Families

During the busiest season for care management referrals-

You Will Learn:

How to give hope to frantic children who call, after seeing their aging parent struggling with the rituals
How to sell services to desperate adult child callers
How to use GCM tools to contain Holiday chaos
How to use financial forecasting to prepare for growth during the holidays
How to work with both dysfunctional and long-distance families who call during the holidays
- Sign Up for Free Webinar

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

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.

Why Does The Loss of IADL’s Cause That Blue Blue Christmas and Hanukkah ?

November 2, 2017

Why does an aging crisis occur so often during the holidays? Why do so many desperate adult children get you on the phone and howl about Mom or Dad? There are a million bad reasons, – too much alcohol, too many folks who do not get along and drink that alcohol, just another Blue Blue Christmas as Elvis predicted. But the physical basis for all of this in elder is a loss of executive function and IADL’s.

It takes IADLs- (Instrumental Activities of Daily Living) meal planning, shopping, plus ambulation to the person in charge of the holiday to pull it off. Older people Then add depression – widowhood, loss and you have the challenges of aging in managing this entire titanic ritual.

The holidays are a disaster for another neurological reason. Mom or Dad’s Executive skills have crashed just like a computer.

Executive functioning involves the ability to organize, plan and carry out a set of tasks in an efficient manner. It also includes the ability to self-monitor and control our behaviors and multiple other cognitive functions and to perform the goal-directed behavior. It can be described as high-level thinking skills that control and direct lower levels of cognitive functioning.

Planning for the holidays takes those high level thinking skills organizing planning and carrying out 25 different major tasks according to a study in the UK- Just think, planning a specific holiday ritual menu,( brisket and latkes or popovers and beef prime rib- then shopping for it cooking it, planning the ritual items in the celebration – a menorah and Hanukkah bush , Christmas tree and creche, buying them or getting them out of storage on and on

This is a massive event/ planning job taken on by one woman usually and as executive functioning powers down in her brain the computer which is our aging brain starts to crash- the result- the family freaks out because Mom forgot the ritual steps.

Join me Wednesday, November 8 and learn how to come to the rescue of Concierge Entitled families who find coal in their stockings.

Wednesday, November 8 @11am Pacific Time

2pm CST/ 4pm EST / 8pm LONDON / 5am SYDNEY (Find your local time)

The holiday season in the aging dysfunctional family triggers amped up turmoil. Mom can’t cook the turkey, she forgets to wrap presents, Dad’s not just drunk but he’s wandering.

In this 1-hour webinar, you will learn the 10 clinical steps to handle these long distance and fractured families when the adult children call a care manager for help when they visit during the coming holiday season

Holiday Hostess Tips to Avoid Fractious Family Feasts This Weekend

December 23, 2016

Holidays dinners can be dark comedy horror -shows with dysfunctional families Instead of bringing joy—family lips are loosened by festive cocktails, old wounds are ripped open and the meal turns into a drama worthy of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Seinfeld’s the Strike . or Kyle Cease’s brilliantly funny black psycho-comedy holiday dinner
“How Enlightened Families Argue

Save yourself all the preparations ending in acid reflux and a blood splattered table this Christmas Hanukah weekend. Follow these 10 suggestions.

Sidestep Certain Topics– Request that certain subjects be avoided. Politics, religion, or money can take the place of silence, or old grudges, that will fill the silence

Limit alcohol– Alcohol tends to loosen lips and add fuel to already heated family debates or wounds.
Share Joy– One way to bring civility to the table is to ask each family member to share those things that gives them joy this holiday.
Say One Good Thing– Have each member at the Christmas or Hanukah dinner table say one nice thing about the person to their left.
Invite Unrelated Guests– We all act better in the company of guests!
Have a Children’s Table– If the whininess of children at the table is a trigger, just have a kid’s table. Those of us who grew up sitting at the kid’s table are saner for it!

Buffet Style Meal– If your family can’t behave at the table at all–serve the meal buffet style, and people can sit wherever and with whoever makes them feel comfortable.
Conversation Starters– To set the tone, consider filling a jar with per-approved conversation topics. Set a timer and have each person pull one topic out every 5 minutes to keep the conversation from getting too heavy.
Table Games– Consider introducing fun games like “I’m going on a Picnic” and “Twenty Questions.” or other distracting table games
Place Cards– If you are having a very large gathering, try using assigned seats to separate out potential troublemakers. It might seem ridiculous to assign adults seats, but any event planner will tell you it’s a great idea!

Bon Appetit

Find out more in Emily Saltz and 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 Bartlett

Handbook of Geriatric Care Management, Fourth Edition

Holiday Hostess Tips to Avoid Fractious Family Feasts This Weekend

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