Set sibling rivalry aside for better senior care.
In thinking back on the years spent with your sisters and brothers, you can certainly recollect a plethora of wonderful memories: holidays and vacations spent with each other, childhood games you enjoyed, key events like graduations, birthdays, and weddings. However, if we’re completely honest, there are also various hurts that occurred that are inclined to stay with us even into our adult years. It’s these complex family dynamics that can impact our ability to offer the best senior care for our aging parents, as stress can cause those sibling squabbles to resurface and produce revived tension.
Grace Home Care’s senior care experts offer some helpful suggestions to put aside sibling rivalry issues and place the focus fully on the requirements of your older loved ones.
Keep Communication Lines Open. It’s normal to feel offended when one sibling makes senior care decisions alone, preventing the others from providing any input. Good communication should start well before a care need comes about, if at all possible. Schedule a time to meet with all of your brothers and sisters together and develop a plan that details each person’s obligations when parental care is necessary, and how decisions will be made and communicated.
Be fair. Bear in mind that each of you will be able to contribute in various ways. While one sister or brother may live in the vicinity of your aging parents, another may have moved to another state, and it’s unreasonable to think they can provide the same means and amount of care. Nevertheless, there are strategies to assure that care is as evenly divided as possible; for example, the long-distance sibling could provide more financial support, help with paperwork, and paying bills online, while those who live nearby assist with transportation, grocery shopping and other errands, household chores and personal care assistance, etc.
Engage help. Even if you and your brothers and sisters get along well, communicate properly and have a working plan in place to fulfill senior care needs, stress levels are increased for all concerned when attempting to manage a healthy life balance between caring for aging parents and tending to the needs of yourself, your career, children, and home. The ideal answer is to partner with a professional in-home care agency, like Grace Home Care, to provide trustworthy, highly skilled care that allows members of your family to take much needed breaks.
Contact Grace Home Care, experts in Alzheimer’s care in Topeka, for more senior care tips and to arrange for a free in-home meeting to discover how we can help alleviate stress and restore peace of mind with our high quality senior care solutions. Call us any time at 785.286.CARE, or fill in and submit our simple online contact form and we’ll be in touch with you right away.