When parents need nurturing

Growing old is not for sissies.” I hear this often and have said it myself. Among the many challenges of aging is knowing when to seek help and how to accept it graciously.

Most often, the source of help is an adult child who may not be in a position to satisfy all the physical and emotional needs of an aging parent. Advanced old age can create a role reversal: children who once required a nurturing parent must now nurture their parents.

Moral obligations to assist one’s aging parents are commonly felt. They can leave adult children feeling overburdened and neglectful of their own families, personal needs and goals.

If the older parent is overly demanding, hypercritical or unappreciative, his child may become angry, resentful, depressed, even abusive to the parent. If the aging adult was neglectful, abusive, emotionally distant or self-absorbed as a parent, children are more likely to turn away when physical, financial or emotional support is needed. Those without siblings to help share the burden of parental care can become especially resentful.

Intensifying the challenges is the fact that people are living ever longer, often for decades, with one or more chronic ailments, including dementia. And many older people exact promises from their children that they will be kept at home indefinitely and never placed in a nursing home, even when home care becomes physically or financially overwhelming.

Maud Purcell, a psychotherapist and executive director of the Life Solution Center of Darien in Connecticut, offers a laundry list of emotions that adult children are likely to experience when parents age and their health declines:

* Fear, when you realise that the roles have reversed * Grief, as a parent’s ability to function independently declines abruptly or little by little * Anger, frustration and impatience, when a parent’s needs interfere with your life * Guilt, in response to the above feelings or because you are unable to spend enough time with your parent because of distance or other life demands Purcell suggests that you accept these feelings as normal and not fight them. Rather, recognise that you cannot change what your parents are going through beyond providing help and support.

Ken Druck, a clinical psychologist based in San Diego and author of The Real Rules of Life: Balancing Life’s Terms With Your Own, urges adult children to act out of love, not guilt or resentment, and to live and give within your limits. To avoid burn out, make an honest assessment of what you can and cannot do, then lovingly communicate your limits to your parent.

It helps to try to put yourself in your aging parent’s position and think about what you might need under similar circumstances. Also helpful is to sit down and have a heart-to-heart talk with your parent about expectations, deciding which you are able to meet and which might require outside assistance.

Experts do warn, however, against promising never to place a parent in a nursing home, which may be the only reasonable and affordable source of care for someone in an advanced state of decline. And it is unreasonable to expect those who had a neglected or abusive childhood and were never close to their parents to suddenly act like loving, caring children when parents become old and infirm.