Caregiver Resilience Mantra
Resilience utilizes realistic expectations and healthy boundaries to sustain the long term responsibilities of caregiving……
Caregiver’s Context: The Big Picture
Sometimes the big picture helps makes sense of what we are experiencing. This is certainly true for caregivers of aging parents who feel overwhelmed and exhausted from the complexity and uncertainty of their work.
The Caregiver’s Context Mind Map offers…
How To Talk To Aging Parents About Where To Live
I was recently interviewed for an article entitled “Conversation vs. Confrontation: Guidelines for Effective Communication with Your Aging Parents.”
In it I discuss how often the insistence by older adults to “stay put” in their home despite deteriorating circumstances prevents…
End of Life Medical Quicksand
We all know someone with a family member who has fallen into end of life medical quicksand and suffered an excruciating outcome. In his article I Know You Love Me–Now Let Me Die Dr. Louis Dr. Profeta, an ER physician,…
Spousal Care
The Delirium Epidemic in Hospitalized Older Adults
“Medical care has evolved to be absolutely inhumane to older people.” Sharon Inouye, MD Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Hospital-induced delirium, the sudden disruption of consciousness and cognition marked by vivid hallucinations and an inability to focus, affects 7…
Wisdom Cards
Aging Parents Dance Cards are a deck of the 20 cards designed for anyone involved in the care of an older adult. Each card is an aphorism I created on a topic, issue, or situation common to the caregiving experience.…
Why Do We Teach CPR, But Not Caregiving?
Indeed, why don’t we? This article by Dr. Richard Lindsey discusses how he enlisted help from Virginia’s college and university students to invent an app or product to improve the health of caregivers…This is the kind of intergenerational creativity we…
Higher Levels of Depression in Married Caregivers
“We also found that caregivers who are married and caring for a family member with a diagnosis other than cancer, such as Alzheimer’s disease, had higher levels of depression,” says Debra Parker-Oliver, professor of family and community medicine at the…
Home Unfurnishing Your Parent’s Stuff
This is an excellent article by Richard Eisenberg that offers eight strategies for systematically paring down the stuff of aging parents that apparently nobody wants. It’s a necessary but ultimately awkward ritual of sorting with an eye towards aggressively casting…