Considering Moving an Aging Parent into Your Home?

After the holiday when adult children gather and find a parent so disabled that they should not live alone anymore, then consider moving a parent in. I did this with great success in the ’80s as you can see by the photo above. But I teach geriatric care management and knew exactly what I needed to do to make it work. So if you found coal in your parent’s stocking – do not move the coal to your house, consider what changes you need to make or if you should even do this by hiring a geriatric care manager first to help you decide then help make a successful move and living situation. A recent PEW study shows the number of multi-generational households has jumped from 6.2 million to 7.1 million in the last two years — a faster growth rate that the previous eight years combined.

 What a Geriatric Care Manager Can Do to Help Your Decide

Before moving a parent into an intergenerational family situation, both a parent and adult child should consider having an Aging Life Care Manager assess the older person with a psychosocial assessment. The GCM can use the psychosocial assessment to assess depression, anxiety both of which may result from such a move after the elder given up their own space, their home.

 Losses of Moving For An Elder

An elder’s home reflects their history their own individuality, their privacy, and all their memories. The GCM can create interventions that the adult child can carry out to help with these mental health issues. There are also the issues of loss as the aging parent may after giving up their home, privacy, and history encased in their furniture pictures and the sense of home they have given up.

 The Anxiety and Depression of Moving for Elder

The aging parent can bring furniture and photos into that reflect their old home, but the deep feeling of loss, expressed in perhaps unanticipated anxiety and depression needs attention. I would certainly be consulting their primary physician but perhaps, new activities with the family, outside social engagement, quality of like interventions like continuing to go to baseball games, a knitting group, play bridge, attend yoga or travel, as examples.

Blending families does not always go smoothly and his best approached with caution and professional help before all make a decision to cohabit.

A geriatric care manager or aging life care manager can also help your parents get engaged in outside activities by doing a quality of life assessment to find out the activities they enjoy and get them engaged in what they like to do in the community. This was the secret of my success. My mother in law and Dad moved in from different sides of the US for widely divergent reasons. ( pictures in family Photo above).His home was flooded by the storm of the century in 1989 after I had just remodeled it and Becca my mother in law was living with the ” Love of her Life” and he had a stroke.

She was by nature a social butterfly. So I got her engaged in a women’s group at the local senior center, chair exercise, the blind center as she had macular degeneration and Sunday’s at the local Presbyterian church.

My Dad was more a recluse having PTSD from World War 2 and eventually I got him involved in the Catholic church, Cindy’s Celebrations local faith-based senior services where he and Becca went to lunch once a week. They celebrated their birthday, took them to great restaurants each week and played the big band music they loved in the Van. I arranged all transportation through our senior transportation LifeLine, both churches provided their own transportation as did Cindy’s Celebration