New York City Woman Features SeniorBridge's Expertise Helping Families Overcome Resistance to Help
A new website for women ages 40 and older spotlights expert advice form SeniorBridge's Claudia Fine, LCSW, MPH, CMC about helping a loved one accept professional support such as care from a home health aide. The article also features a personal anecdote by SeniorBridge Director of Professional Relations in New York, Julia Campbell, who took care of her mother after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
Below is an excerpt from the story. To read the entire article, click here.
Caring for an aging parent can be challenging, rewarding, frustrating, gratifying—or just plain overwhelming. Only two things really made me lose my cool. One was her adamant refusal to allow a stranger (a home health aide prescribed by her doctor) into her apartment.
Complex and often subtle changes take place in relationships as parents age. When for years your parent has been responsible for you, roles often change in midlife. So what do you do when you’re trying to be helpful and your parent says no?
“The first thing is to understand what the parent is saying 'no' to,” says Claudia Fine, executive vice president of SeniorBridge, a health care management company.
“When they’re saying ‘I won’t stop driving,’ for example, what they’re really saying is, ‘No, I’m not going to lose control; I won’t be able to do the things I want to do.’ So you have to listen: What is the concern, and how do you address it?”
Driving, of course, is one of the toughest activities for parents to give up because it curtails their independence; for men, it also threatens their masculinity.
“My mother was in her late seventies and having memory problems, but she refused to stop driving,” says Julia Campbell. “I live in New York, she lived in Cleveland, and finally she promised to stop driving at night. But one evening she went out to get cigarettes, got lost in a bad neighborhood, and called the police to escort her home.
To read the whole article, click here.