Psychology of Aging Parents

Aging Parents: Time To Move?

Helping aging parents consider a change in living accommodations is a delicate process. Before offering unwanted advice about where to live, adult children should first undertake a compassionate assessment of the losses and potential gains of this emotional transition. There…

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Poetry and Aging Parents, Part 6

We grant the old a special courage to weather the slings and arrows of aging, but we forget their older brains are rewired for contemplation, a benefit that goes far beyond facilitating life review. This unique capacity of second half…

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No Longer Safe To Drive

At some point it becomes painfully obvious. Maybe it’s the near misses, another fender bender, traffic tickets, getting lost on errands, poor night vision, or increasing confusion. Whatever the mix of warning signs, the message is clear and deeply concerning.…

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Dearest Son, Dearest Daughter…

I wrote How To Say It To Seniors for adult children of aging parents as well as professionals who work with older adults. In retrospect, that was short sighted. What I failed to appreciate was that older adults were deeply…

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Shutting Down The Planning Conversation

  “Despite good intentions, outdated assumptions about older clients may lead advisors to inadvertently send out the wrong message–and it is this poor signaling, not the eccentricities of aging, that proves to be a primary cause of communication setbacks. The…

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Best Possible Day

Atul Gwande’s article “Best Possible Day” is compassionate and articulate about asking the right questions, over and over again, in a world where time is running short… Best Possible Day…

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Caregiver Mind Maps

In March 2013 I released my new book Caregiver Mind Maps: New Tools for Aging Parents. I elected a PDF format because the book’s mind maps are designed to be used on the front lines of caregiving, a kinetic space…

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Communicating with Older Adults: An Update


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I have been studying how to unlock the communication code of older adults for the last twenty-three years. My first breakthrough came early on with developmental psychology, a model based on age-specific tasks that are easy to understand, easy to…

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David Solie on Communicating with Senior Housing Clients


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This is an interview I did for the Senior Real Estate Institute on January 17, 2013. The topic was communicating with senior housing clients, older adults and adult children. The focus was the two psychological hurdles that have to be…

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