Overcome difficult family dynamics with these tips.
In thinking back on the years spent with your sisters and brothers, you can no doubt recall a number of great memories: holidays spent as a family, childhood activities you treasured, milestones like graduations, birthdays, and weddings. However, if we’re truthful, there are also various hurts that occurred that commonly stay with us even into adulthood. It’s these challenging family dynamics that can interfere with our ability to offer the best senior care for our aging parents, as stress can cause those sibling squabbles to resurface and produce renewed tension.
Hearts at Home, providers of the top senior care Kansas City, MO families trust, has these tips to put aside sibling rivalry issues and place the focus fully on the requirements of your elderly loved ones.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate. It’s common to feel left out when one sibling makes senior care decisions independently, preventing the others from contributing any input. Successful communication should start well before a care need occurs, if at all possible. Schedule a time to meet with all of your siblings together and come up with a plan that details each person’s responsibilities when parental care is required, and how decisions will be made and communicated.
Be fair. Be mindful that each of you will have the ability to play different roles. While one sibling may live in the vicinity of your aging parents, another may have moved to another state, and it isn’t reasonable to think they can provide the same type and amount of care. Nevertheless, there are strategies to make sure that care is as evenly divided as possible; for instance, the long-distance sibling could provide more financial support, help with paperwork, and paying bills online, while those who live closer help with transportation, running errands, housekeeping and personal care assistance, etc.
Find a partner in care. Regardless if you and your sisters and brothers get along well, communicate effectively and have a working plan in place to meet senior care needs, stress levels are raised for all concerned when attempting to manage a healthy life balance between caring for aging parents and tending to the needs of yourself, your job, children, and home. The best answer is to partner with a professional in-home care agency, like Hearts at Home, to help with dependable, highly skilled care that allows family members to take much needed breaks.
Contact Hearts at Home, providers of the highest quality senior care Kansas City, MO has to offer, for more senior care tips and to request a free in-home meeting to see how we can help reduce stress and restore peace of mind with our high quality senior care solutions. Call us any time at 913-440-4209, or complete our simple online contact form and we’ll be in touch with you as soon as possible.