While caring for aging parents may offer opportunities for closeness among siblings and other family members, caregiving can also present challenges. The relationship between adult children and aging parents has decades of history – good times and struggles – between parents and children and siblings. As a result, caring for an aging parent often surfaces unresolved family issues from many years ago. Geographical distance, emotionally fractured families, and difficult family histories and relationships are probably the reasons that most families claim unequal participation and involvement among all siblings when caring for aging parents. Although the ideal is for each adult-child to offer his or her particular strengths and participate fully in the care of an aging parent, allowing decisions to be made collaboratively and peacefully with full input from all, this is seldom easy to accomplish.
This program is designed to help adult children and their families learn to communicate more effectively so they may express their concerns, more appropriately share the workload, make decisions collaboratively, and, in general, care for their aging parents as a more balanced family unit.
