10 Do’s &Don’ts Doing the Dysfunctional Family Calls Post Holidays

September 5, 2023

Most Calls for Care Managers Post Holidays

More than half of the aging families who call you inquiring about services will be dysfunctional families post-holidays. The great majority of calls will come from adult children. If you want to make the sale during the inquiry you have to know how to handle these dysfunctional family members on the phone and give them enough trust in you to sign your contract and give you a deposit for your services.

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How Do You Get Them To Trust You Enough to Sign Contract with Dysfunctional family Post holidays?

Do Be Objective
Do Use Active Listening
Do Give them Hope you can solve their family problem
Do a two-part inquiry and have the problem defined in the first part done by a skilled administrative Assistant
Do study the problem before you do the second call and have exactly how you would solve the problem ready in a planned elevator speech
Do a complimentary 30-minute consultation
Do not give away the store but outline how you are an expert at solving the problems (moving, keeping at home, Alzheimer’s wandering and a bare outline of your solution
Do not criticize dysfunctional family post-holidays
Do not blame,
Do not take sides if several family members points of view and express them

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4 Dysfunctional Family Markers Clinicians Face

August 2, 2023

The normal family is the hand grenade compared to the nuclear bomb of the dysfunctional family

When both are faced with a filial crisis of aging parents being dependent and the adult child needs to take over they cower or explode.

How Do You Know a Dysfunctional Family

1. They lack the ability to resolve conflicts

The dysfunctional family has frequent psycho-social blockages that prevent the family from growing emotionally. They fail miserably at moving through all family stages and orchestrating family rituals. The adult children both love and hate their parents

2. They Cannot make Life transitions

In each dysfunctional family most life transitions in the family, like birth, adolescence, and marriage have been very difficult to make, marked by a lack of support from the parents. Every holiday, family reunion, funeral any family gathering might be drunkenly ruined. The parental figures are usually not in charge, nurturing, or able to establish establishes clear rules. They have never created an Excel spreadsheet on tasks to do to orchestrate a holiday. Like a disease spreading down generations, they never knew how happily celebrate anything together, as their parents wrecked ritual occasions as well.

3. There are murky roles in the family

The chief role of the parent is characterized by a lack of leadership in the family and the ability to nurture the children. Mom rarely became the high priestess at the summer family reunion or the memorial day picnic when everyone gathers at her house or any family ritual gathering. The family members generally do not believe the parent is there for them and can be depended upon. The concierge’s dysfunctional family is colored by bloody strained relationships and unresolved conflicts and ruined ritual memories.

4. They inspire great literature

The family is the inspiration for great literature. O’Neil’s wrenching play A Long Day’s Journey into Night” portray the most miserable of dysfunctional families. Alcohol, drugs, and secrets that have been kept by all for generations splatter the pages of this great play mirroring all the ruined family ritual celebrations -children of dysfunctional families recall with horror. Award-winning plays and films, like Tracey Letts August in Osage County about a ruined ritual funeral from hell when Julia Roberts tries to beat up drug-addled, drunk presiding mother Meryl Streep, or Succession Where a Narcissistic Dad pits his adult children against each other to succeed him when he dies

Rituals Bring Out the Worst in Family

In a dysfunctional family when an aging Mom does not make the very small things she was able to pull off like the Latkes or the Christmas cookies, the Memorial Day family Reunion or big things like the daughter’s wedding, someone has got to take over or be and family organize or r the successor to Mom, and resentments skyrocket – tempers flare – and the torch just might never get passed.

The family is again thrown into crisis.

That means someone in the tribe has to take over -yet the dysfunctional family has no model or spreadsheet for any transition in power. They cannot pull off any ritual celebrations or even family Taco Tuesdays. Most critically when the rudderless head of the family needs care, these adult children cannot care for a parent who did not care for them. Succession is about the transition of power in the family.

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September 16, 2023

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Understand the Dysfunctional Aging Family System you must enter to get care for elders

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Learn more about how to work with the dysfunctional family in Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 5th edition

US COVID Double Jeporady- Race& Aging

February 1, 2022

To Celebrate Black History Month let’s explore the recent revelation from COVID of the Double Jeopardy of COVID Race and Aging

There is a US double Jeporady- Race and Aging showing up in our 3-year-old pandemic. Black people and older adults are the two groups most affected by COVID-19. History is not just about the good things that transpired but the negative events that occur like COVID and what it has revealed about the health of both Elders &Black Americans.

This double jeopardy, as a race- and age-informed analysis, demonstrates how Black race and old age are associated with practices and policies that shape key life circumstances (e.g., racial residential segregation, family and household composition) and resources in ways that embody elevated risk for COVID-19.
In a cross-sectional study of adults tested for COVID -19 in a large midwestern academic health system, COVID-19 positivity was associated with the Black race. Among patients with COVID-19, both race and poverty were associated with a higher risk of hospitalization, but only poverty was associated with a higher risk of intensive care unit admission.

Racial Capitalism

Racial capitalism is a fundamental cause of the racial and socioeconomic inequities within the novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) in the United States.
The Double Jeopardy -Race, and aging show up in the overrepresentation of Black death reported in Detroit, Michigan is a case study for this argument. Racism and capitalism mutually create harmful social conditions that fundamentally shape COVID-19 disease inequities. These disease inequities (a) shape multiple diseases that interact with COVID-19 to influence poor health outcomes; (b) affect disease outcomes through increasing multiple risk factors for poor, people of color, including racial residential segregation, homelessness, and medical bias; (c) shape access to flexible resources, such as medical knowledge and freedom, which can be used to minimize both risks and the consequences of disease; and (d) replicate historical patterns of inequities within pandemics, despite newer intervening mechanisms thought to ameliorate health consequences. I would also add that the majority of paid caregivers are people of color and contract it because they work with COVID patients- . Interventions should address social inequality to achieve health equity across pandemics.

How Do We Change the Roots of This Double Jeopardy of Race & Aging?

So we hope that these health revelations will spur our government to address the roots of this double jeopardy-Race and Aging, something we have failed to address, these historical patterns of inequity for poor people of color and all people of color not just over pandemics but our entire caste system when elders and people of color are at the bottom, as Martin Luther King said, along with the untouchables

When “Cut Off” in The Family is a ” Phantom Limb” at Thanksgiving

November 7, 2021

The Dysfunctional Family’s Worst Time of The Year

Thanksgiving, coming up soon, is the gateway to the dysfunctional family’s worst time of year- the holidays. Families face each other across the table they despise or just both love and hate. Or there is that empty seat- the uninvited guest- the brother-sister, aunt, son, daughter who is never invited- the cut off-family member.

Families Phantom Limb

But since this leaves the family with that “phantom limb”- like the awful sensation that an amputated or missing limb is still attached and where it was is pulsating in pain- families reach out for someone to fix it.

The ordinary aging processes are made far tougher when a family has a history of dysfunction. Aging professionals, like care managers, have their greatest challenges in working with these “difficult” families around the holidays.

Dysfunctional Families Fail Eldercare

Dysfunctional families are not able to organize themselves effectively in the face of eldercare challenges and crises. These families are under more stress as they move from long-established roles into uncharted territory.

Family” Cut” off faces Phantom Limb at Thanksgiving

What if they “ cut off” their Dad years ago and now he had a severe stroke-what do they do?? Someone has to take over Mom or Dad’s care and these dysfunctional midlife adult kids are heavy ambivalent or just don’t want to do it. Now that the holidays are arriving – they have the same attitude about attending the family Thanksgiving dinner.

My favorite aging dysfunctional family ” cut off ” Thanksgiving film is Pieces of April Made as a comedy in 2003, it touches death and dying, sibling rivalry, mother-daughter estrangement, interracial love- and Alzheimer’s all fueled by deep family fault lines and how to cook a turkey on a broken stove. The film manages to make the old theme of fraught family Thanksgiving, crisp, funny, and ultra worth watching.I ordered it from Netflix but you can watch on YOUTUBE

Shot in 3 weeks for a measly $350 K, it received a Sundance Film award and accolades for its pedigree cast including 21-year-old Katie Holmes as the grunge Goth daughter who her family has ” Cut Off”, Patricia Clarkson as the dying Mom who distains then forgives her rebellious eldest child and Alice Drummond as the demented grandmother who comes along and plays the most rational person in the film in her obliviousness to the family holiday freak-out.

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Get Ready for the Holiday Rush

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How to sell services to desperate post-holiday callers from Normal dysfunctional &long-distance family
How to use tools to contain Holiday chaos & arrange care in festive family fright
How to move the family to New Year’s stability

Pre-Holiday Social media campaigns to reach worried caregivers
Pre- Holiday-Materials about the warning signs that a parent needs help
Pre-Holiday Technology to help you move people from discovery to signing on the dotted line
Position Your Agency ahead of Care Managers who do not have great preholiday marketing campaigns and lack the clinical skills how to work with Adult Children and families during the chaotic aging family holiday visit when adult kids find their aging parents need care

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Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care Management

Natasha Beauchamp- MSc, Webmaster and Research Scientist at Elder Pages Online, LLC

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