Coping With Your Difficult Older Parent : A Guide for Stressed-Out Children by Grace Lebow, Barbara Kane, and Irwin Lebow

• Do You Have An Aging Parent Who:
• Blames you for everything that goes wrong?
• Cannot tolerate being alone, wants you all the time?
• Is obsessed with health problems, real, or imagined?
• Make unreasonable and/or irrational demands of you?
• Is hostile, negative and critical?

Coping with these traits in parents is an endless high-stress battle for their children. Though there's no medical defination for "difficult" parents, you know when you have one. While it's rare for adults to change their ways late in life, you can stop the vicious merry-go-round of anger, blame, guilt and frustration.

For the first time, here's a common-sense guide from professionals, with more than two decades in the field, on how to smooth communications with a challenging parent. Filled with practical tips for handling contentious behaviors and sample dialogues for some of the most troubling situations, this book addresses many hard issues, including:

• How to tell your parent he or she cannot live with you.
• How to avoid the cycle of nagging and recriminations
• How to prevent your parent's negativity from overwhelming you.
• How to deal with an impaired parent who refuses to stop driving.
• How to assess the risk factors in deciding whether a parent is still able to live alone.

Caring for Yourself While Caring for Your Aging Parents, Third Edition: How to Help, How to Survive by Clarie Berman—

Caregiving for an aging individual evokes an emotional roller coaster of feelings and needs in the caregiver, all of which call for recognition and resolution. Through an expert weave of personal stories, her own experience, and expert advice from others, author Berman (Making It As a Stepparent, Carol, 1992) speaks directly to the emotional, practical, and financial aspects of caregiving. Berman writes in an easy-to-read and -relate-to style. Among the topics she looks at in this unique emotional resource are communication, boundary-setting, attention to the caregiver's needs, the guilt involved in long-distance caregiving, sibling stress, decision-making, loss and grief, the nursing home dilemma, and the future picture for caregivers. She provides a listing of helpful resources, a caregiver bill of rights, and a suggested bibliography. This is truly a one-of-a-kind book, with practical suggestions aimed at validating and supporting the caregiver's emotional coping mechanisms.

A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion—

"Life changes fast
Life changes in an instant
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

The reality of middle age is a sudden upheaval in life as we know it.  In Joan Didion’s case, it was the death of her husband, unexpectedly and compressed amid the horrible illness of their daughter.  Boomers need to read this book to better understand the malignant currents of middle age and for the pleasure of Didion’s extraordinary writing style.

Elliott, a professor of bioethics and philosophy at the University of Minnesota, has discovered one of the biggest American maladies and fears-social phobia-and knows that Americans are on the hunt for the cure. His book reads like a travelogue that takes readers through the many forms of remedy, from Viagra, Paxil, and Botox, to the other American disease, "boredom" and our various responses to it. Arguing that "now we are excessively self-conscious about being self-conscious," Elliott, packing the book with intriguing examples of manifestations as well as cultural references, examines our self-consciousness and the roots of it. The writing is intelligent and thought provoking.