Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

7 Tips to Make Labor Day Midlife- Sibling Stress Free

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Happy Labor Day. 

If you are working with midlife siblings to solve elder care issues and they are attending a Labor Day barbecue-  

Here are 

Suggestions to make the ritual of Labor Day –  a holiday to be enjoyed by midlife siblings and their families  – not dreaded like the annual Thanksgiving dinner where Mom burns the turkey and your uncle gets drunk and sings. 

Here are 7 tips to help them keep the Labor Day heartburn free without a midlife sibling to build a midlife sibling team over aging Mom and Dad issues.

1) Don’t discuss politics. In this era of the Trump presidency with so many families at odds over President The Democratic Presidential Race ,Trump, the Russian hacking investigation, DOMA, the building of the ” Mexican Wall ” –politics can be lethal to families. Spare siblings, and guests. This is bloodier than the civil war with so many kin at opposite poles. So keep it positive and light or just plain pass the time of day. And whatever you do, don’t drink too much and forget the ban on politics.

2) Remember that it is a family gathering and it is not “all about you”.Suggest keeping a positive attitude for the sake of aging parents, if they are there,  and  kids, who will model bad sibling behavior when they face parent- care in the future

3) Call email or Facebook, Evite everyone ahead of time. Ask everyone to bring a dish to share. That is the beginning of building a sibling family team- sharing food. Call every midlife sibling and family member. Do not exclude. Again to build a team effort.

4) Attempt to get all midlife siblings to plan activities ahead and jointly work to make them happen-with a sibling team spirit. Think of softball games, horseshoes, and a treasure hunt, anything that everyone can have joint ideas about beforehand. Use Facebook to do this- hopefully, all your siblings are your Facebook friends.

5) Arrange to split the bill for beverages like alcohol and soft drinks, again sibling team effort. Remember to go light on alcohol because, like the recent Houston explosion caused by hurricane flooding, alcohol can detonate sibling warfare.

6) Share jobs- setting up tables, bringing in equipment for sports or games, lawn chairs- especially ‘manning” the barbecue. (Sisters can cook too) Share it and don’t let anyone be top dog –be the chosen chef, unless everyone is fine with that.This is again modeling a sibling team about helping an aging Mom and Dad.

6) It is a party, not a sibling family meeting. If you want to talk about personal issues, make a date in the future to get together with your angry sister/brother.

7) Don’t make this a family meeting where old sibling grudges get hashed out.It is a holiday.

IF you are an ALCA member or GCMCheck out the chapter ” Working With Adult Aging Siblings” by Cathy Cress and Kali C Peterson in  Care Manager’s Working With the Aging Family – for a deeper dive into how to work with midlife siblings around aging parent care. 

Also, you could apply this to any labor day gathering with siblings and just leave out the aging parent issue.

HAVE A HAPPY LABOR DAY

7 Tips to Make Labor Day Midlife- Sibling Stress Free

Dys-fam90264_CH22_FIG02.jpg

 

Happy Labor Day. 

If you are working with midlife siblings to solve elder care issues and they are attending a Labor Day barbecue-  

Here are 

Suggestions to make the ritual of Labor Day –  a holiday to be enjoyed by midlife siblings and their families  – not dreaded like the annual Thanksgiving dinner where Mom burns the turkey and your uncle gets drunk and sings. 

Here are 7 tips to help them keep the Labor Day heartburn free without a midlife sibling to build a midlife sibling team over aging Mom and Dad issues.

1) Don’t discuss politics. In this era of the Trump presidency with so many families at odds over President Trump, Charlotteville, the Russian hacking investigation, DOMA, the building of the ” Mexican Wall ” –politics can be lethal to families. Spare siblings, and guests. This is bloodier than the civil war with so many kin at opposite poles. So keep it positive and light or just plain pass the time of day. And whatever you do, don’t drink too much and forget the ban on politics.

2) Remember that it is a family gathering and it is not “all about you”.Suggest keeping a positive attitude for the sake of aging parents, if they are there,  and  kids, who will model bad sibling behavior when they face parent- care in the future

3) Call email or Facebook, Evite everyone ahead of time. Ask everyone to bring a dish to share. That is the beginning of building a sibling family team- sharing food. Call every midlife sibling and family member. Do not exclude. Again to build a team effort.

4) Attempt to get all midlife siblings to plan activities ahead and jointly work to make them happen-with a sibling team spirit. Think of softball games, horseshoes, and a treasure hunt, anything that everyone can have joint ideas about beforehand. Use Facebook to do this- hopefully, all your siblings are your Facebook friends.

5) Arrange to split the bill for beverages like alcohol and soft drinks, again sibling team effort. Remember to go light on alcohol because, like the recent Houston explosion caused by hurricane flooding, alcohol can detonate sibling warfare.

6) Share jobs- setting up tables, bringing in equipment for sports or games, lawn chairs- especially ‘manning” the barbecue. (Sisters can cook too) Share it and don’t let anyone be top dog –be the chosen chef, unless everyone is fine with that.This is again modeling a sibling team about helping an aging Mom and Dad.

6) It is a party, not a sibling family meeting. If you want to talk about personal issues, make a date in the future to get together with your angry sister/brother.

7) Don’t make this a family meeting where old sibling grudges get hashed out.It is a holiday.

Check out the chapter ” Working With Adult Aging Siblings” by Cathy Cress and Kali C Peterson in  Care Manager’s Working With the Aging Family – for a deeper dive into how to work with midlife siblings around aging parent care. 

Also, you could apply this to any labor day gathering with siblings and just leave out the aging parent issue.

HAVE HAPPY LABOR DAY

Geriatric Care Management Tools- Special Needs Clients

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When there is an adult child of an aging parent who is disabled or otherwise dependent there is additional stresses on the aging family unit. The Geriatric Care Management  tool to manage this stress is a whole family approach.  For the older parents, there is the concern of who will take care of the dependent child when they cannot. We have an example of that with elderly Mrs. Sterling, who has a special needs son with autism and refuses care because she wants to leave her money to her children, especially for her adult son with special needs.

The geriatric care manager who worked with Mrs. Sterling used a whole family approach as a tool to assess this dilemma and get care for the elderly client, plus help the family plan for the care of the special needs adult child.

For the midlife siblings, this question is often of equal concern to that of taking care of any older parents. Financial, emotional and logistical issues as well as the specific responsibilities need to be considered by these families, due to the fact that the duration of the care often is longer than the care required for a senior family member.

Contacting an elder law attorney to investigate special needs trust is a second step. This is using the continuum of care to help all family member- the aging parent the midlife siblings and the adult child with special needs.

 

Contacting an elder law attorney

Are Your Children a Sibling Family Team?

Some families show their offspring how to work as a team in childhood. Parents teach siblings to form a team through creating them. So parents organize and run garage sales as a family, having every child help, they to get ready for the family vacation, by sisters and brothers all taking a job or before school to get out the door when Mom left for work early, one siblings makes sandwiches, one puts lunch in everyone’s backpack and on child checks that on everyone has an umbrella if it’s rainy.

These families carry out both tasks and participate in family fun as a team and foster team spirit by working together as a team. Some families need to organize sibling in a team in childhood. They may have regular sibling family meetings where children can talk about both positive and negative subjects with the parents as a mediator. In this way they learn the format for a sibling and family team consensus.

Some parents in families foster no team spirit. These families can usually benefit by a sibling family meeting the most and have the hardest time reaching a consensus in the beginning. They can learn consensus and having a sibling family work as a team through childhood family meetings.

 

Aging Professional Communication Rules For Working With Adult Siblings

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Some important points for aging professionals, like geriatric care managers , to consider when working with midlife siblings in an aging family crisis, is how the adult siblings seem to be functioning. If there is one adult sibling who is the family caregiver, what is her or his attitude toward aging and an older person’s particular illness (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease)? If the adult sibling caregiver has the attitude that older people are supposed to become demented, then the older person’s behavior will not be seen as a problem to be considered. What motivates the adult sibling and the aging family to care? If the adult sibling caregiver has a full load with a job, marriage, and children, he or she may not be looking for additional problems and deny the problem. How do the adult siblings work as a sibling team? Do the adult sibling members address problems together, or do problems split them apart? Is there domination from a single adult sibling member? Is abuse and threats, implied or real, used to control adult siblings? What do the adult siblings value? Do some value one thing, like keeping an aging parent at home and other believe in placement like a CCRC? Will the family be receptive to your aging professional suggestions?

If the family is receptive to suggestions, you, as an aging professional, can help improve how an adult sibling communicates by modeling the following communication techniques:

l Do not interrupt adult sibling until they have finished speaking.

l Show each adult sibling that he or she has value in the family.

l Show each adult sibling that his or her views are valid.

l Acknowledge to each adult sibling that his or her experience of a situation is valid.

l Encourage family adult siblings to work together to make the load easier for all to bear.

l Realize that adult siblings will make mistakes and that mistakes are acceptable as long as the midlife sibling learns from them.

l Remind adult siblings that it is acceptable for one member to express that he or she has reached their limit of time, emotion or stress.

l Encourage adult sublings to ask each other for help.

l Allow adult siblings to decide whether they can be helpful.

 

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