Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

5 Steps to Avoid Midlife Step Sibling Fireworks on Fourth of July

 

Do You Expect Acid Reflux at 4th of July Barbecue From Step Sibling?

Are your midlife step siblings or half siblings coming July 4th barbecue? Maybe you expect acid reflux from the hot sauce that parental divorce dribbles on family celebrations.

Rituals like July 4th events are the glue that bond family life. They patch up family and sibling disputes and give us the architecture of a year full of celebrations marking family history.

But the tidal wave of divorce among baby boomers and Generation X brings step siblings with old grudges, half siblings who lost family love, ½ their rooms, and gained a shredded family nest. Now the family does not know who it’s members really are and rituals like labor day – can turn into a nightmare.

 Avoid the Drama of Step Siblings to Help Your Aging Parents

Aging parents, who may be at the labor day event, don’t need the drama and will need all of you to be a family team when they need care as they decline.family-fight-300x223.jpg

Here are some tips to include everyone including step siblings and half siblings

 

1.Ask everyone to bring a dish. That is the beginning of building a family team- to share care of aging parent care

2.Don’t make this a family meeting where old sibling grudges get hashed out. Celebrations are just that. If someone pushes you button, keep that angry response to yourself and maybe arrange a future family meeting.




3.Makes an effort to includes step and half siblings and glue that jagged bond. Create activities that everyone can join -– blood, step, or half siblings.

 

4. Find out what everyone likes to do. If they are step kids or step siblings make sure you have fun things to do ahead of time that they enjoy. Step siblings who may feel like third wheels in your clan. If they have a difficult time blend Reach out to make them part of the group. Understand their reluctance to join. Do Not make them feel like Cinderella. Bring them up to the top floor of the castle. 

5. If none of this work and you face or are deep into aging parent care Family meetings can be planned post labor day with a geriatric care manager or a mediator’s help.

6. Find a geriatric care manager near you at Aging Life Care Association web site. Just put in your zip code and come up with a great care manager. Find an elder mediator

 

Dread Memorial Day with Midlife Sibings?

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Are you dreading the Memorial Day family barbeque?  . Will your estranged brother be manning the barbeque while you drink too much beer?

Are you a midlife sibling at war with sister or brother? Worse than that, do you feel like you and all your siblings are in not only a dysfunctional family but also an aging dysfunctional family?

What’s an aging dysfunctional family? Well they are very much like a war zone. Clans remain at war with each other, like the 1980’s Serbian conflict or the Iraq war pitting the Sunni’s against the Shia.These tribal battles have gone on for centuries and have the same bloody roots of the dysfunctional family -repeated from one generation to the next.

The hallmarks of the dysfunctional aging family, are after decades as a motley clan there is still not enough love in the family. The now midlife children have to fight for what little nurturance their older parents can bring to the ancient rickety nest they built.

Nurturing is often missing in the dysfunctional aging family because the aging parents themselves probably got little nurturing themselves as kids and on and on back down the family line. Parental neglect and abuse are frequent in the history of the aging dysfunctional family.

The now older parents can suffer from serious mental health problems such as schizophrenia or are bi-polar. Health and addiction problems like alcoholism are frequent.  Family interaction and communication, -parental treatment of siblings, brother and sister treatment of each other stepparent interaction and interface of everyone in the family has wrought deep tissue damage that never healed.

These aging dysfunctional families generally negotiated all of life’s developmental phases with great difficulty. The role in the family, especially the parental one, was murky with a poor, abusive or mentally unfit leader of the family. The rules in the family were unfair ambiguous or full of double binds. There is deep-seated ambivalence. Finally the last life transition in the aging family, the care of the declining parent, implodes the family, which had little balance to begin with. They are asked to care for parents who did not care for them, thus reeking havoc on an already disorganized aging family.

So good luck at the Memorial Day family gathering and perhaps consider hiring a geriatric care manager if you sibling war is affecting not only rituals like family gatherings but also the care of your aging parents. The GCM can help you end the constant hangovers and /or acid reflux.

 

Professionals Mediating Fighting and Feuding at the End of Life-

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May is National Geriatric Care Manager’s Month I will be speaking at the 29th annual Conference of the National Association of Professional Care Manager’s in Philadelphia on Friday April 19th. I will cover the thorny topic, The GCM as the Accidental Mediator: Fretting and Fighting or Feuding: Intergenerational Conflict in the Adult Family at End of Life. If you are interested in attending and learning more you can still register and attend the conference. . If you are considering this growing profession, I wrote the textbook Handbook of Geriatric Care Management,that is now out in it’s 3rd edition. If you think of opening a GCM agency, I just published the first manual on how to operate a geriatric care management agency My Geriatric Care Management Operations Manual. 

Add a Pick List to Your Care Plan

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 Frequently, many older clients have similar deficits as they age. Most care plans will include one or more of these problems, and it is good to incorporate this list into your psychosocial and functional assessment tools. These can become a pick list you can add to the beginning of your care plan because many of them will appear in your care plan.

  1. They include self care deficit
  2. impaired home management
  3. impaired mobility
  4. knowledge deficit
  5. alteration in bowel elimination
  6. alternation in urinary elimination
  7. impaired skin integrity
  8. loneliness
  9. depression,
  10. pain
  11. family dysfunction
  12. sibling rivalry
  13. elder abuse
  14. caregiver burnout
  15. We can now add technological needs to that list.

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