Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

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Can’t See Aging Mom Easter, Passover-7 Ways to Make Her Feel U Are There

April 12, 2022

Can’t see Aging Mom on Easter or Passover

Can’t See Your Mom on Easter or Passover – Long Distance?

Can’t See your Mom on Passover or Easter as you are a long-distance care provider, what’s the best way to keep in touch with the long-distance elder if you can’t visit on coming  Passover or Easter.

Easy Low-Touch Non-Tech Ideas

photo of father and boy coloring Easter egg together as Can’t see Aging Mom on Easter or Passover

Use low touch—the old-fashioned communication elders grew up – the Post Office and telephone. If you can’t see Mom or Easter or Passover, send a card with a photo of your kids dying easter eggs. Older people came from a generation where cards and mail were really meaningful. It is easy and really touches elders who love opening the little personal mail they get, especially from family. These heritage links are a great way to support a far away elder. Non-tech, they cause no stress on their part. Even we boomers who walk haltingly through the tech world of 40 characters forget that connecting with a stamp or a call is so familiar to an older person. Plus you give that feeling of warmth they always got when they  “ opened” “ or “ answered” saw a real photo -something real (not virtual); Try having the whole family send a card even kids. A flooded mailbox on Easter or Passover fills their heart.

Let Mom or Dad Smell The Affection. Send Passover Easter in a box

Can’t see Mom or Dad on Passover or Easter but Dad or Mom, are not religious, mail holiday care packages —bake or buy cookies or small loaves of bread. Bake it with your children and send samples along with actual photos of everyone baking in the kitchen or buying treats.  Even if they crumble a bit, elders will smell the affection.

Easy Option -Holiday in a Box

Can’t see Mom on Passover or Easter, send a “ holiday in a box. Easter and Passover are coming up. Send a basket of kids’ drawings, candy, nuts, home-baked or purchased Easter Bread or cookies or Matzah that reflects the holiday celebration plus a gift certificate for an Easter brunch or dinner with a friend.  Give Mom joy in a simple package. For an extra special surprise, arrange an invitation to a Passover or Easter dinner with a friend or through your parents’ synagogue or church

Passover in a Box

For those adult children who are time-deprived, and can’t see Mom over the holidays, order Passover in a box on Amazon if you have little time and want to send something special. The same goes with Easter in a box with delicious Easter cookies.

A Little Help From Aging Parents Friends

Can’t see Aging Mom on Easter or Passover

Skip that holiday in a box, if you can’t see Mom on Passover or Easter you can create a circle of care . Get the app  Lots of Helping Hands through neighbors, friends, people in your elder’s place of worship, or a group they belong to. Then you can ask if they can arrange to include your older relative or friend in the Easter brunch, egg hunt or Passover meal. You will then have an entire support team your elder with a whole circle of support in the future and not feel so alone.

 

Make Aging Tech for Holiday Gift

Send Passover Easter in a box

Send a high-tech gift, if you can’t see Mom or Dad over Easter or Passover. Send a high-tech device that your loved one can really use and figure out. I just ordered the Esky Wireless Locator because I keep misplacing my glasses.

How Care Managers Help Get to Long Distance CarProviders

Care Managers can do lots of things for a family member who is long-distance and can’t see Mom on Easter or Passover. Julie Menack in her chapter “Long Distance Care Providers” in my book Care Managers Working With the Aging Family lists tasks long-distance care providers can do to make their own lives and their long-distance loved ones saner, sounder, and happier

Find a Care Manager Through Aging Life

Marketing Phrases for Concierge Care Clients

 

If you want to investigate an Aging Life geriatric care manager in your parent’s own town find a professional who can help you do all this so you can remain a son or daughter and a less stressed caregiver.

Do You Know The Best Phrases To Attract VIP Care Management Clients?

Filed Under: Aging Parent Pain, ALCA business, ALCA Concierge, Easter, Easter gifts Mom, Edder Lonliness, Elder Lanliness, Grandchild gifts for grandma, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holiday Rush Technology, Holiday season, isolation, Loneliness, Long Distance Care, Long Distance Care technology, Long distance caregiver, long distance caregiver burnout, Long distance family impostion, Long Distance Gift Easter, Long distance gift Passover, Long Distance Safety Travel COVID, Long Distance travel Holidays, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Passover, Passover Gift Tagged With: aging family, aging life care manager, aging life or geriatric care manager, case manager, Easter, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Gifts for Easter 0r Passover, Holidays Crisis in aging family, holidays with aging parents, long distance caregiver, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Passover, Reminiscence on the Holidays

4 Dysfunctional Family Markers Clinicians Can Face In New Years

December 27, 2021

 

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.

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 might be drunkenly be 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 family-fight-300x223.jpg

The chief role of the parent is characterized by a lack of leadership of the family and the ability to nurture the children. Mom rarely became the high priestess on Hanukkah or Christmas 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 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 plays 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 holidays children of dysfunctional families recall with horror.  Prince of Tides a tale of a southern concierge dysfunctional family gives us a timelier glimpse of a family whose center can never hold together and whose blood oozes all over everyone from one generation to the next. 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.ed6855aa32d877d7fc1ef9ee757e0f17-98.jpg

 Rituals Bring Out the Worst in this family

In the 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 she always made every Hanukkah and Christmas,  or cannot pull off big things like the daughter’s wedding someone has got to be the cook and family organizer, 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.

Sign Up for My January Webinar on Working With the Dysfunctional Family

 

 

 

 

11 Clinical Steps to Work with Dysfunctional Families-Post Holidays –

Thursday, January 6, 2021, 2:00-3:30 PM

 

Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday 

Join me 

and learn how to come to the rescue of concierge dysfunctional families who found coal in their stockings.

 

 

 

 Learn how to:

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

 

Understand 11 Warning Signs You Are Working with Dysfunctional Family 

 

Master the 5 Clinical Tools – you need – to solve these problems with your clients

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learn Six Steps Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families

Sign -Up Now 

 

 

Find out more in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel                                                                  Geriatric Care 1

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

 

Filed Under: adult child pain-point, adult child physical abuse, Adult children, Aduly Child Stress, Aging, Aging Family, aging family crisis, aging life business, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, Black, Black Aging Family, Black Entrepreneur, Black Entrepreneur RB, Black Entrepreneur RN, Black entrepreneurs, Black Geriatric Care Manager, Black geriatric care managers, Black RN, Black Travel Nurses, Blog, case manager, Cut Off, Dysfunctional Aging Familu, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, geriatric social worker, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holiday season, Holiday Sibling Rivalry, Holidays, nurse advocate, nurse care manager Tagged With: aging dysfunctional family, aging life care manager, boundaries dysfunctional families, care manager, case manager, Clinical Tools Dysfunctional Holiday, Dysfunctional Concierge Family, dysfuntional family, geriatric care manager, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Long Days Journey Into Night, nurse care manager

Thank Your Employees Taking On Call While you Celebrate Holidays

December 23, 2021

photo.JPG

Did You  Give a Happy Holiday Thanks to Your Staff?

Did you thank your employees for working over the holidays? This week is Christmas when we offer thanks to our friends, loved ones, family. But what about your employees this holiday month. How will you thank your

employees, the very people that power your business and profit and may be on call for you right now on New Years?

“Truly, from bosses I liked, anything was great because I appreciated that they thought of me. From “bad” bosses, anything would annoy me. You can’t make up for being a jerk with a token of any kind once a year.”

Ideas for inexpensive but really appreciated gifts to thank your employees – this holiday season- gift cards to grocery stores or department stores, a gift certificate from Amazon all given with a nice personal handwritten note.

Staff 

 

How To Thank Staff  All Year 

  1. I  did a blog about your need to bill 85% of your client hours. When a care manager does bill’s 85% write them a handwritten thank-you note being
  2. Be grateful all year long for having the amount of productivity to keep the business thriving. Handwriting is not a lost art. It sends a message that you take the time, personally, to really celebrate what the employees do for your business.

2. Send a handwritten thank-you note to thank your employees, to each staff member during the year applauding something they did. Be grateful by thanking your staff for something specific may be the ultimate reward. If you do it selectively yet authentically, a thank you note may be pinned above your employee’s desk for years. Create a formal letter recognizing your employee’s achievement. Sign it and use the company’s seal to give the letter something extra. If you really want to do it right, frame it.

3. Thank your staff by naming an employee of the month, each month in your newsletter with their picture. Give them a gift GCM-pix-3.jpgto tell them you are grateful for their hard work. Create a formal letter recognizing your employee’s achievement. Sign it and use the company’s seal to give the letter something extra. To thank your employees right, frame it too.

4. Be grateful this year, if you do not feel safe hosting an in-person party, to thank your employees, by having a virtual employee holiday party and mail gifts ahead of time to all employees for being such excellent care managers and for billing the 85% you need them to the bill so you will all have employment. It is late now so try New Years.

5. When COVID is gone, someday, to thank your employees, plan employee picnics, birthday parties, anniversary parties to thank them publicly throughout the year.

6. B.J Curry- Spitler, one of the first and I might say the greatest care managers, founded Age Concerns in San Diego in 1982. and knew how to be grateful to her staff. She was a master at thanking her staff.  To thank her employees, she gave gifts of massages to her care managers. A brilliant gift, a massage recognizes the tough emotional work that care managers do and their need to take care of themselves- which you as their employer are doing.

Thank your staff throughout the year.

SIGN UP FOR MY FREE WEBINAR

Sign Up for My New Years Webinar 

11 Clinical Steps to Work with Dysfunctional Families-Post Holidays –

Thursday, January 6, 2:00 PM 3:30 PM Pacific 

 Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday

Join me and learn how to come to the rescue of concierge dysfunctional families who found coal in their stockings.

 

 Learn how to:

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

 

Understand 11 Warning Signs You Are Working with Dysfunctional Family

 

Master the 5 Clinical Tools – you need – to solve these problems with your clients

 

Learn Six Steps Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families

Sign -Up Even if you cannot attend & receive the recording the next day 

 

 

Find out more in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel  Geriatric Care 1

 

     

 

     

Filed Under: Aging, Aging Life Care Assocaition, aging life care manager, Black Aging Family, Black Entrepreneur, Black Entrepreneur RB, Black Entrepreneur RN, Black entrepreneurs, Black Geriatric Care Manager, Black RN, Black Travel Nurses, Clinical Tools Dysfunctional families, Cut-Off, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, Dysfunctional Family System, Families, GCM Webinar, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, Holiday on call, Holiday season, News, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, on-call staff, Thanking staff, Thanksgiving, THANKSGIVING BLOG, Therapist Specializing in Aging Tagged With: aging family, aging family Christmas, aging life care manager, Aging Mom on Christmas, aging parent crisis, care manager, case manager, Christmas, eldercare, GCM on call, geriatric care manager, Holiday Staff thank you, Holidays calls to GCM's, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, staff on call on Christmas, start-up eldercare, Thank employees, Thank Staff all year, Thank You, thanking staff on Christmas, Thanks staff

With Omicron Make a Plan If Aging Parents Can’t Spend Holidays With You

December 20, 2021

HOLIDAY GATHERING WITH AGING PARENTS NOT SAFE

The CDC has warned again in yet another holiday season – 2021 to be very cautious about traveling on the holidays to keep yourself and your elderly relatives safe with the new variant of Omicron spreading so quickly.

Dr . Anthony Fauci has some very excellent advice about safe holiday gatherings with the specter of Omicron spreading so quickly over our celebrations.

 

The hygienic shield protecting from virus

What is your short-term plan? Since the crisis with Omicron and its spread soaring through colleges, football games, restaurants, and schools are closing has come down in the last week,  what will you do about your holiday travel plans to family.

How are you going to get there? Why are we asking people to sacrifice distancing? If you have considered all the warnings of science and the CDC and if getting everyone tested with a home testing kit is not an option,  and you need to cancel seeing older relatives or family with immune problems -consider the advice of a noted scientist below. 

 

Last Holiday season Dr. Michael Osterholm, Disease Expert U of Minnesota,  had warned against  gathering in person with elderly family members on theHolidays
“We need somebody to start to articulate,  a story to use. ‘If  we don’t have that storytelling going on right now, that’s every bit as important as the science itself,”

 

NEED LONG TERM PLAN STARTING NOW

So adult children need to start making a new COVID-19 Omicron spreading so quickly travel plan. What will you say to their aging parents to convey they do not want to infect or even expose them to covid-19 so you cannot celebrate the holidays together? They cannot come to your home for the festivities; you cannot go to theirs.

This change in plans takes, as Osterholm suggested

creating a story and learning how to tell stories if you do not already know.

HOW TO TELL A STORY 

Vaile Wright, senior director for health care innovation at the American Psychological Association. suggests creating the story,beginning by explaining how much you care about your family “I feel it’s in my family’s best interests to be more strict, so we’re not going to travel for Christmas.” This type of language, she said, makes the other person less defensive, since it doesn’t come across as “You aren’t doing the right thing so I can’t come to visit.”

Sign Up for My Free  January Webinar

 

 

 

11 Clinical Steps to Work with Dysfunctional Families-Post Holidays –

Thursday, January 21

 

Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday

SIGN UP  

and learn how to come to the rescue of concierge dysfunctional families who found coal in their stockings.

 

 

 Learn how to:

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

 

Understand 11 Warning Signs You Are Working with Dysfunctional Family

Master the 5 Clinical Tools – you need – to solve these problems with your clients

Learn Six Steps Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families

 

Sign -Up Now 

Even if you cannot make the date, sign up you get a recording the next day

 

 

 

 

 

 

Find out more in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel  Geriatric Care 1

 

 

 

Filed Under: Aging, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, Blog, Coronavirus safety elders, CORONAVIRUS Stay at Home Plan, COVID & HOLIDAY SEASON, Covid Holiday Remote Visit, COVID Webinar, COVID-19 Webinar, Families, FREE WEBINAR, Geriatric Care Management Business, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holiday season, HolidaySeason and COVID, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, TELEHEALTH HOLIDAY PLAN, Telehealth with GCM, ZOOM CHRISTMAS, ZOOM HANUKKAH, ZOOM THANKSGVING Tagged With: aging family, aging life and geraitric care manager, aging life care manager, aging parent crisis, COVID & Christmas, COVID & Holidays, COVID & Seasonal Flu, COVID VIRTUAL CHRISTMAS VISIT, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday COVID Celebration, HOLIDAY VISIT TO FAMILY PLAN, nurse advocate, nurse care manager

What Happens When High Priestess of the Holidays Falls off her Throne?

December 13, 2021

 

Mothers are the high priestess of the ritual- like Queen Elizabeth without servants.

This sets up a filial crisis as women age. The UK estimated that there are 25 to-do’s women have on the holiday. It takes years to accumulate objects ritual dishes and religious objects used. It takes the left side of your brain executive skills, plans and organize, remember details, does things based on your experience. This eventually leads to a filial crisis and passing the torch.

Holidays are often done on autopilot

Women as they age –recalling all the jobs that must be done year after year get worn down in their assigned role as ” Mothers are the high priestess of the ritual.”

 It also takes their IADLs- (Instrumental Activities of Daily Living) meal planning, shopping, plus ambulation. Then add depression – widowhood, loss and you have the challenges of aging in managing these entire titanic rituals mothers are assigned by society.  Many times the aging Mom can no longer balance all these plates and the holidays shatter with the crashing ritual dishes.

When Mom Cannot do all the Holiday Preparation a Filial Crisis Occurs

 

Then the torch has to be passed and an adult child (usually an adult daughter must take over to resolve this filial crisis. This passing the torch is like secession, – Princess Elizabeth taking over for her Dad, King George, (who hated it and had a lifelong stutter) made famous in The King’s Speech who was handed the throne by his brother Edward who quit being king.   

WhenMom needs to Pass the Torch-Some  Baby Boomers Kids Shocked

Baby boomer-adult children and aging parents are unprepared by their own culture for this new developmental phase of passing the torch. They do not expect it as they did

the nights of the crying newborn or the rebellious teen, and are thrown off balance by the sometimes sudden and usually unexpected loss of their anchoring aging parents, when they find elderly mom is unable to pull off running the holidays  Indeed, what must happen in this new developmental phase is that the adult child must evolve beyond the needy child, he or she has been, depending on his or her parents for that fiscal, emotional, social support and ritual organizing parents, like managing the officiating over the Christmas or Hanukkah celebration and take on filial responsibility to avoid a filial crisis.

 Geriatric Care Manager to the Rescue

In the normal healthy family system this filial crisis of Holiday rituals can be overcome and the adult children with the brief help of an aging life or geriatric care manager they can let go of their former dependent roles and confront their parent’s loss by organizing and providing care. They can take over Christmas and Hanukkah by stepping in and grabbing that torch.

Geriatric care managers understand that the adult child must transition to what social work pioneer Margaret Blenkner labeled the filial crisis to filial maturity or a new mature state where they, as midlife adults, can give up their former roles as dependent, needy children and start to provide care to their old/old parents.

Dysfunctional Family Do Not Want to Take Over for Mom

In the dysfunctional aging family, this filial crisis is incredibly hard to trounce from both the parents’ and the adult child’s point of view. They really need a geriatric care manager’s services

Sign Up for My Free January Webinar  

11 Vital Clinical Tools For Desperate Families Post-Holidays

             Thursday, Jan 6, 2022, 02:00 PM Pacific Time (the US and Canada)

 

  Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday  

 Join me Post-holiday and learn how to come to clinically rescue concierge dysfunctional families who found coal in their stocking.      

Learn how to!

  • Understand the Dysfunctional Aging Family System you must enter to get care for elders
  • Master 11Vital Clinical Tools you to solve client problems
  • Take Six Clinical Steps Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families
  • Get care for aging family members when the dysfunctional family members resist

 SIGN UP NOW 

  1.  

    Find out more in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel  Geriatric Care 1

     

Filed Under: ADL Loss & Holidays, Aging Family, aging family crisis, aging life business, Aging Life Care, Aging Life Care Assocaition, aging life care manager, Aging Mother, Aging therapist, Alzheimers & Holidays, Blog, care manager, case manager, Dementia, Dementia & Holidays, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, elder care manager, Families, Filial Crisis, GCM Webinar, Geriatric Care Management Business, geriatric care management emergency proceduress, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Hanukkah, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday on call, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holiday season, Holiday Sibling Rivalry, Holidays, Nearly Normal Aging Family, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, POST HOLIDAY CALLS, POST HOLIDAY SEASON, sibling rivalry, Sibling Strife Christmas Tagged With: aging life care on holidays, Aging Mom on Christmas, aging Mom on holidays, aging parent crisis, aging parent crisis on holiday, alzheimers & holidays, black aging family, black american geriatric care managers, black american social workers, Black caregivers, Black Entrepreneurs, Black Nurse Entrepreneurs, Black RN's, Black travel nurses, Dementia & Holiday Tasks, dysfunctional family holidays, Filial crisis on Christmas, Filial crisis on Hanahka, geriatric care manager. aging family crisis, Holiday Crisis For Aging Family, holiday misery, Working With Dysfunctional family

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