Gail Sheehy suggests a sibling family meeting

Are you a mid-life sibling fraught over caregiving issues that have divided your midlife siblings?

Gail Sheehy in her book Passages in Caregiving, strongly suggests having a family meeting over caregiving issues and offers some guidelines for midlife siblings seeking this tool.

Sheehy proposes not involving the older family member or care receiver at the first meeting, because midlife sibling issues need to be solved first.

Serrated family concerns such as present middle-aged sibling struggles over parent care or brother and sisters life long battles need to be addressed immediately before moving forward with the family meeting.

Solutions like a path to sibling forgiveness need to be road mapped before caregiving problems can be solved. Other strategies like a forgiveness system might be tapped into as a goal before care giving could be shared by adult -child siblings.

The aging professional should have a thorough background in midlife sibling issues before she or he tackles a family meeting. Sparks can fly at a family meeting, because adult siblings gather as a team for the first time since childhood, facing a red hot aging parent problem

Organizing this first family caregiver/sibling team is a good reason to have a pre- family meeting about midlife sibling issues with a third party like a geriatric care manager or, if you are a dysfunctional family, a mediator . But the professional third party must know sibling dynamics, such as the parental caregiving patterns in midlife siblings, sibling aide and direct services and sibling rivalry extended into midlife.