The Caring Generation® Dealing With Stubborn Aging Parents

The Caring Generation® – Episode 2 July 31, 2019 On this caregiving radio program Pamela D. Wilson, caregiving expert, shares Tips for How to Deal with Stubborn Aging Parents. Special guest Dr. Allison Heide joins Pamela to share her research on this topic.

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My Parent is So Stubborn Show Transcript

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00:56 Announcer Caregiving can sometimes feel like an impossible struggle. Caregivers may be torn between taking care of loved ones and trying to maintain balance in life. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. The Caring Generation® with host Pamela D. Wilson is here to focus on the conversation of caring. You’re not alone. In fact, you’re in exactly the right place to share stories and learn tips and resources to help you and your loved ones. So now, please welcome the host of The Caring Generation®, Pamela D. Wilson.

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01:39 Pamela D. Wilson: Hello everybody, this is Pamela D. Wilson, caregiving expert, I am your host. You are listening to The Caring Generation radio program for caregivers and aging adults, coming to you live from the BBM Global Network, Tune In Radio, and beautiful Colorado, where it’s a little cloudy today. The Caring Generation focuses on the conversation of caring, giving us permission to talk about aging, the challenges of caregiving, health, and everything in between. You are not alone; in fact, you are in exactly the right place to share your stories and become more informed. Please invite your family, friends, co-workers, and others to join us each week on The Caring Generation, because needing care or becoming a caregiver can turn our world upside down.

02:27 Pamela D. Wilson This week we have a great show for you. We’ll be talking about becoming a caregiver for aging parents who adult children might view as a little stubborn. [chuckle] Based on my experience, aging parents have a totally different perception of their behaviors and may actually view their adult children as the stubborn ones. Why in some care giving situations is it so difficult for aging parents and adult children to get along? Stay with me for insight tips, how to have these caregiving conversations, and a little bit of laughter. In the second segment of this hour, we will visit with special guest, Dr. Allison Heid, about her article series, My Parent is so Stubborn.

03:15 PDW: Becoming a caregiver is not usually something that we plan. When we become a caregiver, feelings come up that we just don’t expect, like all those little disagreements with our aging parents. The life experience of caregivers and the person needing care can be so different. Because of these differences, there can be a high level of conflict between the caregiver and the care receiver. Most caregiving families I know want to get along and avoid conflict. Avoiding conflict isn’t always possible, especially when the number of people involved grows. I’ll share a story about how we think differently about caring for aging parents. Years ago, I helped several children choose a community for their father. Three years prior to this, I helped them first find an assisted living because their father had a little memory loss and it wasn’t so safe for him to live alone. So, we met to talk about a nursing home because his health had advanced, and the kids all had different ideas. One wanted a place that was close to her home, another one wanted something that was beautiful and updated, another one was concerned about money. At the time a person runs out of money and is in a nursing home, Medicaid takes over, and depending on where you live, it’s $250 to $500 a day. Really, truly shocking.

04:47 PDW: The concerns of all these children were valid. They all had very good concerns. In this situation, the family was really doing the best that they could. None of those children were really in a position to give up their jobs to care for their father full time, either in his home or in their home, but the good thing was they were very willing to share the responsibilities of visiting and making sure that their dad was cared for by the staff of whatever community they decided to choose. Their father, even with all of his health issues, his memory loss, he could understand the situation and all of the complications. While family, spouses, and others, may see nursing homes as a last resort, sometimes there really is no other option. My mother threatened us, there were five of us remaining at the time, to never ever put her in a nursing home. She even went so far as to threaten to come back and haunt us from her grave. Your parents may have made similar statements to you; no nursing home. The things that are important to aging children can vary greatly from the things that are important to aging parents, spouses, and other loved ones. My advice is to be very careful about making promises that you might not be able to keep. As time passes, it’s impossible to know what the care situation will be and who will be available to show up to be that caregiver.

06:30 PDW: Let’s talk for a minute about disagreements between adult children and aging parents. The best starting point in settling disagreements is really to understand the perspectives of the other person, because in caregiving, there are two lives that are changed; the life of the caregiver, the aging parent, sometimes a spouse. It depends on how many people are in those situations. The point is to agree that you will each be able to ask questions without anyone becoming defensive or angry. Set a few ground rules for the conversation. It’s so easy in situations where our emotions are running high to feel like we’re being attacked by somebody, or we say something that the other person feels is insulting or insensitive. Talk about putting your foot in your mouth. This is partly why families are so hesitant to talk about caregiving. All of these fears exist that these discussions will blow up and turn into battles. How many of you have families where these discussions do become heated? Having a different perspective is important in caregiving situations because we all have a very different outlook on life, on money, on not wasting things. Our parents may have lived very different lives from the way that we live today.

08:02 PDW: Coming up after this break, we’ll be talking about research about stubborn parents and how adult children can learn to manage through all of these situations. Dr. Allison Heid is going to join us. She has a PhD in Human Development and Family Studies, with specializations in adult development and aging and intervention science. She has co-authored over 40 articles on assessing the values and preferences of older adults. She currently serves as an independent research consultant in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. I’m Pamela D. ilson. You are with me on The Caring Generation live on the BBM Global Network and TuneIn radio. Helpful information for caregivers and aging adults is on my website at pameladwilson.com. Please share The Caring Generation and my website with others who are looking for hope, help and support. We will be right back after this break.

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11:51 PDW: This is Pamela D. Wilson, caregiving expert, I am your host. You are listening to The Caring Generation radio program for caregivers and aging adults, coming to you live from the BBM Global Network, TuneIn Radio, and beautiful Colorado. Follow me on Facebook at PamelaD Wilson.page where. I post a daily Facebook Live video. We are back with Dr. Allison Heid on the subject of, “My parents are so stubborn”. Dr Heid, welcome. How are you?

12:21 Dr. Allison Heid: Thank you, I’m doing well. Thank you for having me.

12:23 PDW: Perfect. So let’s get started with a few questions. Your research identified that adult children see aging parents as stubborn. Why is this?

12:35 DAH: That’s a great question. So let me start by saying that I actually first became interested in trying to understand older adult stubbornness from an empirical perspective because of my own family experiences. So I honestly cannot count on one hand the number of times I found myself saying, “Grandma is being so stubborn. She insists on shoveling the snow even when she has nowhere to go.” And when I actually started to look at the literature, we realized that the process as an empirical construct had not been studied. So my colleagues and I actually started our research agenda by asking how frequently does stubbornness occur. And I had the unique opportunity of partnering with Dr. Karen Fingerman and collecting data from a study called Family Exchanges Study that actually surveys both adult children and aging parents. And we found that yes, adult children and aging parents see behaviors that are commonly thought of as stubbornness, which includes things like insisting, resisting or persisting in an action. And it was happening at rates such that at over 75% of adult children we’ve interviewed actually reported them as happening sometimes. And in a given week, about a third of adult children were saying that they were happening. And these are findings that are within families that are not providing caregiving support.

14:00 DAH: So then we asked the very question that you asked me about why is this? And we found that what these behaviors are associated with is that with adult children that see their parents as stubborn, we found that perceptions of parents’ stubbornness by adult children are actually linked to how children see their relationships with their parents. So for example, if children think that they have a more positive relationship, they actually report fewer perceptions of parents’ stubbornness, but if they actually think that their parent is more disabled or they experience stress in helping their parents or report a negative relationship, they actually report more perceptions of parents’ stubbornness.

14:46 PDW: I can see that, ‘because even in myself with my parents, they’re passed on, but if I was having a bad day, I was certainly less patient with them and I saw them to be more resistive.’ So let’s talk about the aging parents. They might see themselves as, “I’m not being stubborn, I’m just being persistent.” Is that good or bad?

15:09 DAH: Well, we asked the same question and we went back to the literature to see what had been done, and what we saw is that prior work has found that older adults do persist in their goals. And then in some cases, this can actually be beneficial in achieving those goals, but other work had found that persistence can be less effective for older adults than it can be for younger generations. And so the act of persistence or the perception of such by the older adult may actually be good in some scenarios but not in others. And so what we actually found with our work though is that persistence is only termed stubbornness within families when there’s actually a conflict in goals on hand. So if an older person persists in his actions, for example, let’s use the example that he wants to continue to walk to the grocery store on his own, but that this goal is not a shared goal for that adult child and that older person, then his persistence is not actually perceived as concerning or as stubborn. But if on the other hand the adult child believes that the older parent should not be walking to the grocery store on his own, then this persistence may actually be labeled as stubbornness.

16:26 DAH: And so as a result, the self-perception or the action of persistence may be good or bad I guess depending upon the circumstances. And what we also do know is that not only is it circumstantial based upon what level of conflict there might be on hand, we see that older adults who actually perceive themselves as persistent may also self-rate themselves as more stubborn, because we found that older adults reporting more stubborn behaviors is actually linked to older adults reports of their personality. So if they actually see themselves as being a more neurotic person or less agreeable person, they actually report themselves as acting with more stubbornness.

17:09 PDW: I can see that, and I can see the safety concern of the kids too. If dad’s walking to the store and he gets lost because he has memory loss that’s a concern. So caregiving can feel like a battle between adult children and aging parents. So for adult children, how do they normally respond when parents are stubborn?

17:28 DAH: So as we found, the presence of stubbornness is apparent when there’s this conflict in goals. So like you describe, an adult child may be putting safety first and an aging parent putting independence first. And so when there is this difference in the way that they feel about the parent’s actions, we found that adult children report responding in a number of ways that we would classify as both direct ways and indirect ways. And so direct responses might include the child might get upset, the child might argue, the child might try to reword a request or try to reason with the parents. But also, indirect strategies may include just waiting, going to someone else for the request, so maybe asking somebody else to go ask the parent, or just letting it go. And the most common strategy that we found in our work is that adult children actually report just letting it go most frequently.

18:25 PDW: I can totally understand that. We are going to be heading out to a break so we’ll finish our questions after this. So listeners, we will continue our conversation with Dr. Allison Hyde about interactions between aging parents and adult children after we go out to this break. I’m Pamela Wilson, your host, please invite your family, your friends, your co-workers and others to join us each week on The Caring Generation live on the BBM Global Network and TuneIn Radio, to help me in my mission to reach one million caregivers seeking hope, help, and support.

Did you know that you can listen to replays of The Caring Generation on my website pameladwilson.com? Go to the media tab and then The Caring Generation radio page. Podcasts of this weekly program will be posted about one week after tonight’s show. Please share the details about the live program and the podcast replays with families, friends and everyone that you know, because we’re all going to be a caregiver or need care sooner or later. We’ll be right back.

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22:03 PDW: This is Pamela D. Wilson, caregiving expert. I am your host. You are listening to The Caring Generation radio program for caregivers and aging adults, coming to you live from the BBM Global Network, TuneIn Radio, and beautiful Colorado. The Caring Generation focuses on the conversation of caring, giving us permission to talk about aging, the challenges of caregiving, and everything in between. We’re back with Dr. Allison Heid. So Dr. Heid, before the break, you mentioned that adult children have this strategy of just letting it go, which I can see being bad and good. What is the emotional effect of adult children in these types of situations?

22:47 DAH: So great question. So we know that when we look at the occurrence of stubbornness on a daily level, we know that perceived parent insistent behaviors are associated with greater negative daily mood for adult children. It’s likely that the challenge of navigating the differences in goals is trying and may build frustration in a relationship, which then results in the experience of more negative mood for the adult child. And when we look specifically at that response of just letting go, we actually find that even though that’s the most common response, that might not be the most adaptive. Adult children that reported more letting go actually reported more depressive symptoms and less positive relationship quality with their parents, which may mean that the idea of avoiding the issue may actually lead to internalizing the distress. But on the flipside, we did find that there are positive effects if adult children use the strategy of reasoning with the adults, with the parent, when stubbornness is encountered. So reasoning may actually imply a rational discussion of needs and wants or values, and the use of it is actually linked to greater positive relationship quality between adult children and aging parents. And so we suspect that the use of reasoning may keep relationships maybe open to engaging, exchanging ideas, and end up supporting the relationship in turn.

24:09 PDW: You know, It’s my opinion that caregiving is this huge life transition, and so the caregiver and the aging parent may be at very different life stages. How does that come into play here?

24:22 DAH: So in terms of our work on stubbornness, being at different life stages may mean that adult children and aging parents have different goals in life and in the care that’s being offered to each other. So an adult child, as we mentioned earlier, may find that safety is their most paramount goal for their parents, but the aging parent may value independence above all else. So as I talked about before, in this instance there’s likely to then be a conflict in goals that is termed stubbornness.

24:51 PDW: Well, and what I’ve seen and what I have tendency to do myself is caregivers want to just take over because it’s so much easier and it’s more time efficient. How does that cause conflict?

25:05 DAH: So some of our other work has actually examined how older adults can influence their care within the family context with an adult daughter caregiver. And what we found is that when parents and daughters have a shared goal, then the request of the older person is honored through collaboration. Makes sense. They both want the same thing. But if you consider the grocery store example that I used before, the gentleman wanting to walk to the store by himself, when there’s that difference in goals then parents’ active attempts to achieve a goal were often met with reasoning by the daughter for why their behavior should be reconsidered, and parents faced choices in those instances whether to actually continue to act on their goal or just step back to avoid further conflict. And in such instances, parents actually more frequently described a process of actually stepping back and letting their request go. So while the caregiver’s tendency to want to take over may cause conflict in goals, and this may cause a conflict with the parent, we’ve actually found that parents tend to walk away or let go when the child takes on that role.

26:11 PDW: It seems like there’s a lot of letting go on both sides. How can the adult children, when there are differences and somebody says, “Oh, just forget about it,” how can the children close those gaps with the parents?

26:25 DAH: So what our work suggests is that understanding the older adults preferences in care may help families to navigate conflicts. So by knowing what the older adult prioritizes as most important, the adult child can try to determine ways to honor those values and goals. And having transparency about his or her own goals as an adult child with their aging parent may also help to avoid conflicts where stubbornness is supposedly happening. As I shared before, even using reasoning strategies when conflicts do occur may also prove meaningful to the relationship.

27:02 PDW: What skills can adult children get better at to kind of help these situations be better?

27:12 DAH: So really, based on our work, what we’ve been able to kind of step away from at this time is just developing strategies and skills for opening up the communication with their parent to better understand goals and communicate goals, would certainly be meaningful. And finding ways to compromise and meet in the middle on goals will reduce the conflict and instances where stubbornness is ultimately perceived.

27:34 PDW: Oh, thank you so much for joining us tonight. I think this information has been very helpful. And like you say, I think we all have stories about situations where we’ve been trying to work with aging parents and it hasn’t quite worked out. Thank you for being with us.

Coming up after the break, we will continue talking about being a caregiver, and how our perceptions as a caregiver sometimes can be very different from what our aging parents and our spouses and our loved ones might want for their care. Like we talked with Allison, going to the grocery store by themselves as a parent may be a good idea, it may be a risky proposition. If you’d like to share your story about this subject or if you have any questions, you can call in after the break. The number to call is 866-451-1451, 866-451-1451. I’m Pamela D. Wilson, I’m your host. Please invite your family, your friends, your co-workers and others to join us each week on The Caring Generation live on the BBM Global Network and TuneIn Radio. I want to  send out a hello to all of my friends on Facebook, on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram who might be listening tonight. Helpful information for caregivers and aging adults is on my website at pameladwilson.com, where you will also find my free caregiving library. There are two sections, one for family caregivers and one for professional caregivers. We will be back after the break.

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31:55 PDW: This is Pamela D. Wilson, caregiving expert, I am your host. You are listening to The Caring Generation radio program for caregivers and aging adults, coming to you live from the BBM Global Network, TuneIn radio, and beautiful Colorado. Caregiving conversations should be a two-way street. Let’s start the conversation. If you do have a story to share or have a question, call 866-451-1451, 866-451-1451. Help, hope, and support for caregivers is available on my website, pameladwilson.com, where you can subscribe to my free caregiving library. There are two versions, one for family caregivers and one for professionals who work in healthcare, law, financial planning, banking. Please share information about The Caring Generation in my website, pameladwilson.com, to help me in my mission to reach one million caregivers. Earlier this hour, we were talking about parents who have lived through hard times. The Great Depression, maybe the loss of jobs, closing of factories and businesses, and parents who had to do really whatever it took to care for the family. Many of us have lived through similar but different circumstances. These life situations, these changes, make us who we are. Living through difficult situations affects our beliefs, how we make decisions, and really, how we live our lives.

33:25 PDW: Question for you, how often do you visit the home of your parents? When was the last time you looked in their kitchen drawers or took a peek in the basement? What do you find? In my parents’ home, one would find balls of string made from hundreds of short pieces of string tied together, plastic butter containers filled with rubber bands, button jars, canned goods. My mother canned tomatoes and jam, she grew cucumbers, all to save money. When my parents were alive, they didn’t buy things that they absolutely didn’t need. They fixed everything rather than buying something new. Using credit cards? Absolutely not. My parents paid cash for everything. Your parents may be similar, they may have similar habits. If my parents didn’t have the money, they didn’t buy it. I can fairly say though that I did have the best parents in the world. I won the parent lottery. And before I forget to mention this, when you visit your parents’ homes, find a way to go through their cupboards. I cannot tell you the number of times I would find canned goods and other foods that were expired in my parents’ cupboards, in the refrigerator, spoiled or dated food not good for anyone, especially older adults.

34:45 PDW: Let’s continue talking about the differences in opinion between adult children and aging parents. As adult children, as we talked with Dr. Heid, it can be really difficult to understand and accept the ideas of our aging parents and how they think. Let me share an example of taking away the car keys. This is one of those hot potato subjects that you really don’t want to talk about unless it’s absolutely necessary. Asking your parents how much money they have in the bank, another hot potato subject for another show. There are two sides to giving up the car keys. One is having a son or a daughter be concerned about an aging parent driving after dark or taking long trips. The other side though is the aging parent saying that he or she feels badgered by their children about driving. So the question is how serious is a driving issue? How capable is the aging parent of making his or her own decisions? Have there already been car accidents, dents in the garage door?

35:48 PDW: If driving is really a safety concern, then it is time to have this conversation. All I can say is be prepared for resistance and have a plan. Think about when you were 16. You had a driver’s permit, you wanted to drive more than anything. Your parents were probably mortified, worrying about car accidents, insurance premiums, all valid concerns. Today the roles are flipped. You have the same fears. Your parent may not drive safely. You don’t even want to get in the car with them. You’re worried about harm to your parent, or even worse yet, your parent harming somebody else. How do you have these conversations? If you use this example, so something like, “Oh, Mom or Dad, remember when I was 16 and you were scared to death about me driving? Today, I’m the one that’s concerned about your driving skills.” Give some examples. And more importantly, if you are asking them not to drive, does this mean that you’ll become their chauffeur? Be careful what you ask for. If driving is a no-go because of safety, it’s a no-go, but do you have a plan.

36:57 PDW: As adult children, we want safety, we want comfort for our parents. We don’t want to worry about a car accident, a fall, or something worse. These concerns have a price. That price is responsibility and time for us to devote to helping aging parents. There are also times when we can just worry too much. Sometimes we have to trust that our parents will do what they say they will do, like taking medications, eating right, and all of those other things. We continue talking about being a caregiver and how aging parents can also have unrealistic expectations coming up. Being a caregiver is really a major life change for the caregiver. Aging parents who need help, they want to hold on to their independence, they want to maintain a sense of control. Even the most well-intentioned suggestions from us as children can be met with anger, alarm; aging parents can feel like we’re trying to take over, like we’re trying to get into their business, step on their turf. How many times do we feel the same way when aging parents try to tell us what to do, or try to interfere in our lives. Having these conversations and expressing concern from a point of love, from a point of concern goes further. Our aging parents want to be cared about, but they don’t want us taking over or controlling their lives. They also don’t want to feel judged.

38:32 PDW: This is Pamela D. Wilson, caregiving expert. I’m your host. You are listening to The Caring Generation radio program for caregivers and aging adults, coming to you live from the BBM Global Network, TuneIn Radio, and beautiful Colorado. You’re not alone, you’re in exactly the right place to share stories and become more informed. Caregiving conversation should be a two-way street. Let’s keep that conversation going. We’ll be right back after this break.

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42:43 PDW: Caregivers, how are you doing this evening? I am so excited to be here with you. This is Pamela D. Wilson, caregiving expert. I am your host. You’re listening to The Caring Generation radio program for caregivers and aging adults, coming to you live from the BBM Global Network and TuneIn Radio. Help, hope, and support for caregivers is available on my website at pameladwilson.com. Expectations are one reason that we become disillusioned by caregiving. There are times when we assume that our parent can read our mind and knows what we expect and vice versa. Even in conversations, we might be saying one thing and our parent might be hearing totally something else. I’ve had this experience and I’ll share what you can do to close this type of what I call a caregiving gap. My suggestion is to do what I call a teach-back. I’ve used this in my professional work and it goes like this: “Mom or dad, I’m trying to work on my communication skills for my job. Would you do me a favor and repeat back to me what I just said or what I just asked?” If you ask that way, it takes away the possibility of your parent becoming defensive because they think that they’re being helpful to you. Asking questions also gives you the opportunity to explain again if anything that you said wasn’t clear.

44:10 PDW: And if your aging parent has any type of hearing loss, communication can really go sideways. Communication gaps happen when we’re not thorough, when we don’t ask enough questions, when we’re not detailed in the questions that we ask. So for example you say, “Oh, mom or dad, I’ll call you and follow up.” You might be thinking that you’re going to call in a week. Your aging parent, they may have heard that you are calling tomorrow. When your call doesn’t come tomorrow, your parent’s upset. Instead of saying, “I’ll call you and follow up, mom,” add to the end of that conversation by Saturday, or give a specific date. The more specific you are, the better your parent can expect when your call is going to come. It helps avoid your parent becoming really impatient and waiting for you to respond.

45:05 PDW: Talking about times and time frames helps aging parents avoid unrealistic expectations about time commitments. If you are the caregiver, you know that the time commitment devoted to caregiving can expand, I like to say like the size of a wet sponge. At first the time commitment is small; think of a dry sponge. You add some water, you add some care giving projects and that sponge starts to grow in time and in size. That’s the time in caregiving where you add a few more tasks and it really doesn’t make that big of a difference, but the sponge represents the idea of how caregiving responsibilities expand over time. You keep adding water, keep adding tasks, that sponge gets bigger. Keep adding caregiving tasks and your caregiving stress increases.

45:57 PDW: When that sponge is soaked, it’s heavy, it’s wet, it’s like you as a caregiver. You’re feeling like you are drowning in caregiving responsibilities, because at first you only devoted a little bit of time to caregiving. Now you are receiving more requests, you’re adding time, you could be committing your evenings, your weekends. All of a sudden, this caregiving, it’s taken over your life. You feel heavy, you feel overwhelmed, stressed, you are like that sponge who has soaked up everything. And I call this caregiving creep because caregivers will ask me, “Well, how on earth did this happen without me even noticing?” Well, it’s pretty simple. Caregiving creeps up on you and before you know it, it takes over your life. It’s like the weeds that take over a garden. You’re out there one weekend, you go out the next weekend and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, how did this happen?” [chuckle]

46:51 PDW: My advice is to learn how to set boundaries. Discuss expectations early so that you can avoid being in that position. These early conversations rarely happen, so sometimes we have to backtrack. Backtracking can feel uncomfortable, but it sounds like this: “Mom, in wanting to be available to you and help you, I over-committed myself. I didn’t mean to do this, but it happened. We have to talk about other ways to have you participate more or to ask other family members to help, or find some paid caregivers. I’m sorry, but I can’t keep committing all this time. I’m open to any ideas that you might have to make the situation better.” And then kind of expect that your mom or dad might be taken aback because you’re being so honest, but these are the conversations that we have to have in caregiving. The big idea is don’t press for a solution right there. As Allison Heid said earlier, kind of let it go for a little bit. Come back to it, bring it up again, but think back to our discussion about commitments, setting expectations, being specific with your parents so that they’re not expecting you to call or show up on a day when you have other plans. All of these skills are so important for caregivers to acquire so that we can balance caregiving situations and feel more in control versus more out of control.

48:23 PDW: We are heading into our last break, where we’ll finish talking about being a caregiver and setting expectations. I will also share information about our program for next week. This is Pamela D. Wilson, caregiving expert, I am your host, I’m so thrilled to be here. You are listening to The Caring Generation radio program for caregivers and aging adults, coming to you live from the BBM Global Network and TuneIn Radio. Visit my website, pameladwilson.com for helpful information about caregiving, aging, and everything in between. Help me make these programs valuable, interesting, and entertaining for you. If you’re listening on the BBM Global website on The Caring Generation page, you can scroll to the bottom of that page and you will see an area where you can leave me a comment or an idea about a subject for a future program during, why not during this commercial break that’s coming up? I would love to hear from you, I would love to hear your ideas. And as always, I include questions from caregivers in these radio programs and in my social media posts. So if you have a question, find me on social media, my Facebook page is PamelaDWilson.page  We’ll be right back after this break.

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53:33 PDW: This is Pamela D. Wilson, caregiving expert, I am your host. You’re listening to The Caring Generation radio program for caregivers and aging adults, coming to you live from the BBM Global Network and TuneIn Radio. We’re about talking about setting boundaries and expectations, things that we have to learn as caregivers. Let’s use an example from our childhood. How many of you received an allowance? How many of you asked your parents for more money and they might have said, “No”? You might have been disappointed, but absolutely, you survived. In caregiving, there are times when saying no can be positive because we have to learn how to set boundaries. There are times when parents want something and it’s just not possible or practical, or whatever they want might be harmful or unsafe.

54:27 PDW: In caregiving, sometimes we feel exhausted, we become overextended, and it is documented that the health and well-being of caregivers declines from caregiving because of all of the responsibilities, the worries. Sometimes as caregivers we get sick, we don’t feel well. There are times when we forget what it’s like to feel good, what it’s like not to have your phone ringing all day because your aging parent keeps calling. We forget what it’s like to have a single entire day all to ourselves. [chuckle] Caregiving can be crazy. Sometimes we just want to sleep late, take a nap, go to lunch, see a movie, binge-watch a Netflix series. Those days of pre-caregiving can seem like a totally other world. I don’t know how many of you remember the television program The Outer Limits. There was a saying in the introduction that kind of went like this: It said that for the next hour, sit quietly, we’ll control everything that you see and hear. You’re about to participate in a great adventure. Caregiving is this great adventure. So much is out of our control. It’s okay, I’ve got you. I know what happens in caregiving, I can help you. Next week, we’ll answer two questions: Are you a helper or a caregiver? And what is really making you sick? Dr. Robert Kellum, a naturopathic physician, joins us.

55:53 PDW: Listeners, if no one has told you this week that you are amazing, or if they haven’t thanked you for everything that you do as a caregiver in helping others, let me say thank you. Together we can work through the changes that caregiving and needing care brings to our lives. Every caregiver faces a different challenge, whether you are a family caregiver or a professional, maybe you’re a CNA working in a care community. Sometimes caregiving your aging can feel like a struggle or be difficult to manage. Help and hope are on my website, pameladwilson, and are here every week on this program. This is Pamela D. Wilson, caregiving expert, I am your host, thank you for joining me on The Caring Generation Radio program for caregivers and aging adults, coming to you live from the BBM Global Network. God bless you all, and sleep well tonight, sweet dreams, so that you can wake up and get back at caregiving tomorrow. We’ll see you next week.

56:52 Announcer: Thanks for joining us on The Caring Generation with Pamela D. Wilson, come join the conversation on Wednesday evenings and see how Pamela can provide solutions and peace of mind for everyone. Here on Pamela D. Wilson’s The Caring Generation.

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