Daphne Davis of Pinnacle Senior Placements joins Suzanne to offer tips for dealing with complex family dynamics of helping a struggling senior loved one. Be the son and daughter, don’t try to parent your parent.
Daphne says, “My first golden tip would be: if anyone has an opinion, or wants to be a part of a process, or will have a thought about what should happen with mom and dad, they need to be involved in gathering the information from the very beginning. Everyone needs to hear the conversations, everyone needs to get the printed matter. Even if they say ‘I trust you, you take care of it,’ because inevitably we’re curious people, we’re gonna ask a question and the person who’s at the front line is gonna go, ‘I’ve done all this work already. I’ve narrowed it to these things. You said you trusted me.’
“Those conversations need to be collective. I encourage people to have a third party. If you have a situation where someone lives out of town — or the relationships between child and parent are strained, or very different, or there’s 19 years between the oldest and the youngest siblings, there’s gonna be different perspectives — have these conversations together.
“The other thing that I would really suggest is having it agreed upon by all people involved that we are going to stick to the following highest values, which means you go through a process of discovering what are the highest values from your perspective with a child. What is an example of that? Mom could never give up her gardening. She’s got to have some kind of place to be gardening. That’s a high value. If they’re going to assisted living or independent living, she’s got to have a garden. Dad has to have a TV room, dad has to have his own space, he has a collection that he has to keep. There might be something from a religious point of view. They might need to be close to their church or their synagogue. There might be a difference in perspective concerning finances. Mom and dad have money, let’s just assume they have some money that they can privately pay for their own care, and they’ve worked hard for that. And one perspective is they should spend their money on themselves. But mom or dad says no, no, no, we gotta leave something for our kids.”
- Pinnacle Senior Placements website
- More podcasts with Daphne Davis
- Check out our affiliate podcast Alzheimer’s Speaks
