Aging Parents and Adult Children | Health Legal and Money Conflict
Aging parents and adult children who experience health, legal, and money conflicts when care needs arise. Learn about three surprises and conflicts between aging parents and adult children, plus a solution many people don’t know exists.
If you are a caregiver, you know that planning for events you can’t imagine is challenging. If you are an older adult who needs care, you may have cared for your elderly parents without any bumps in the road. Life is a little more complicated today than 30 or 40 years ago.
Aging Parent and Adult Children Care Relationships
When aging parents and adult children come together because of a care need, being objective and transparent about feelings, situations, conversations, and needs can be challenging because health and care, money, and legal matters are very personal.
Caregiving relationships between aging parents who want to remain independent and their adult children can be complicated for many reasons.
- There may be a lack of trust.
- Family secrets may exist.
- Adult children may not all get along.
- Parents may have a favorite child.
If you are an adult who values your privacy, you may not want to tell your children or your friends how much money you have or discuss your health problems with them. It may be more comfortable to confidently discuss your concerns and planning needs with an experienced eldercare advisor or power of attorney protector.
Based on my years of professional experience as a guardian, power of attorney, and care manager, the one thing I know for sure is that care situations can be unpredictable. Things you think will happen do not, and things you never imagined will happen.
To preserve family relationships, planning to prevent potential problems is essential. When problems exist, work to resolve them quickly rather than let them grow into problems that seem too big to solve.
Read Pamela’s article,
5 Tips for Avoiding Family Conflict, for more tips on avoiding conflict between aging parents and adult children.
Reasons Families Avoid Conflict
Experiencing emotional distress in a caregiving situation—whether you are the caregiver or the person who needs care—can result in mental confusion, distraction, and worry. There may be tasks to complete or conflicts that need a resolution that you lack the energy or experience to work through.
When decisions are made emotionally – without considering all the facts or options – the results may not turn out as expected.
Avoiding conflict in a family can make situations much worse, especially if you are the power of attorney agent for a spouse or aging parent. A lack of action or decision-making can cause others to view you as neglectful, lacking the confidence or competence to manage the situation.
How to Deal With Health Legal and Money Conflicts in Families
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Let’s look at three surprises and conflicts between aging parents and children to help you avoid these potential issues in your family.
1 The Effect of Lifelong Habits on Health
Individual health problems can arise from hereditary aspects but are more likely attributed to lifelong health habits. The challenge is that unless you are born into a family focused on health and well-being, you may not yet be aware of how your daily activities—nutrition, exercise, mindfulness, and self-care—impact your health.
There’s no time like now to take an interest and learn how to improve your physical and emotional health. People who proactively protect their physical and mental health more efficiently navigate the challenges of everyday life.
Aging Can Be Physically and Emotionally Exhausting
People who are aging share that it is physically and emotionally exhausting to have health problems and the energy to deal with them. Family caregivers become frustrated with spouses and loved ones who do not seem to care about or want to make changes to improve their health.
What caregivers lack is an understanding that dealing with health issues is stressful and worrisome. The person with the health issue is caught up in a mental whirlwind of worry that they may not be able to see a way forward.
Individuals who are depressed have a harder time making decisions, taking care of themselves, and being proactive. Navigating doctors, hospitals, and the healthcare system and managing money and family relationships can be complicated.
These challenges affect caregivers and care receivers.
For more tips on apathy and self-care challenges, check out The Caring Generation Episode 89, “My Mother Refuses to Take Care of Herself.“
It can be difficult for a family caregiver who has their own life yet feels pulled into caregiving a situation that requires a lot of time and effort. The caregiver has a long list of tasks to complete with limited time to fulfill these responsibilities.
An adult child or a spouse may want an elderly parent or spouse to commit to improving aspects of health. A loss of hope, lack of motivation, or uncertainty about the future can mean that a sick loved one is unable to wrap their head around taking action to improve.
At this point, the caregiver may realize the effect of lifelong habits on health, and a lack of desire to participate in care outweighs the likelihood of a loved one improving. Accepting a loved one’s ongoing health decline may be the only path forward.
Planning early for aging and potential health concerns can help avoid being in a situation never imagined.
2 Blended Families
Blended families are more common today than ever. According to
Sarah Sloan’s research, three out of four people who go through a divorce may marry again, and more than half of all marriages today are at least the second marriage for one partner.
Recent studies estimate that 65% of remarriages involve children from a prior marriage, creating a blended family or stepfamily during their lifetime.
Specific to planning for later-in-life care needs, what happens when you are the parent who needs care with two sets of children in the family who did not grow up together and who may not even know each other? What if you are an adult child with step-brothers and step-sisters you do not know at all or very well?
Questions for blended families around caregiving:
- Who will step in to provide care in addition to mom or dad?
- Before they re-married, did your mom or dad set up a prenuptial agreement to separate pre-marital assets?
- Will one spouse pay for the other spouse’s care?
- What marital assets exist?
- Which adult children are involved today?
- Did the parent and step-parent appoint a power of attorney and successor power of attorney agent, and if so, who is appointed?
Blended family care situations can become complicated when one spouse needs care before the other and one adult child steps forward to assist. If prior discussions or arrangements have not occurred about planning for care, this event is an opportunity to bring both sides of the family together to understand the wishes and plans of a parent’s and step-parent’s care.
3 A Lack of Care Between a Parent or Step-parent
In addition to one parent not caring for their spouse, this scenario can include an adult child appointed as a power of attorney agent who neglects the responsibility of caring for a parent or both parents.
Let’s begin with one parent being unable or refusing to care for a sick spouse due to physical health issues or the emotional stress of the care situation. As a result, the caregiver parent neglects care or abuses the sick parent.
Spousal caregivers are some of the most committed caregivers, yet they become physically exhausted and sicker than their spouses. Due to the emotional stress of being a caregiver, spouses do not always make good decisions, especially if they are depressed and are managing their health problems.
Learn more about the challenges of “Caring for a Chronically Ill Spouse” on The Caring Generation Episode 82.
How Lifelong Habits Affect Caregiving Relationships
From the perspective of lifelong health habits, a husband or wife may have never been attentive to their health. Maybe they had no interest in being physically active, hobbies, or maintaining friendships. A lack of outside interests may have been a lifelong habit unlikely to change.
Today, this person who needs care sits in a lounge chair in front of the television and expects to be waited on. This scenario is NOT how the healthy spouse imagined their retirement years.
The sick person’s apathy can be frustrating for adult children. The caregiver may also become apathetic because they may feel their efforts are wasted or unappreciated.
If the sick spouse is your birth parent, you may feel that your mom or dad is being neglectful. If the sick spouse is your birth parent and your stepmom or stepdad is ignoring your parent, you may be angry.
Put yourself in the shoes of the married couple for a moment. If this was happening, what would you want?
- Would you want your children to intervene and do something if your husband or wife neglects your care?
- Would you want your children and spouse to respect your lack of interest in helping yourself and stop nagging you to get better?
- What if the person you appointed as your power of attorney agent ignores a poor care situation and does not follow your wishes to advocate for care?
These are all questions to ask when creating estate planning documents because these scenarios are common in care relationships.
The Duty to Navigate Family Caregiving Conflict
If you are an adult child caregiver and you take action against a neglectful parent in favor of a sick parent, you may be worried about stirring up a hornet’s nest of conflict.
Yet, if you do nothing, your sick parent may be neglected and harmed if they have a fall or some other type of injury in the home, do not receive appropriate medical care, or if they have Alzheimer’s or dementia and wander out of the home.
What do you do as an only child or a group of siblings?
Do you act or wait for disaster to strike? Many children are emotionally torn about how to manage these complicated situations. In my experience, it can take an unfortunate event to force the caregiver and the person needing care to make a change.
While these situations seem like they may never happen, they do, even in the best of families. I know because I have witnessed them and many others that were preventable if only someone moved past fear to take action.
When the Impossible Happens
Conflict between aging parents and their adult children caregivers happens when there are gaps of understanding about what is important to each person or when family members do not consider potential scenarios.
A person who is sick with multiple health issues may have different priorities than a caregiver working full-time and married with children.
It may be impossible to imagine that your healthy mom or dad would neglect to care for your sick mom or dad. It happens, and even though it may be unintentional because your parent has their own health issues or is overwhelmed, this is a harmful situation.
As a responsible child, you have a duty to help your ailing parent, who can no longer help themselves.
Additionally, it may be impossible to think that your brothers or sisters may disagree about mom or dad’s care or not agree to support their care wishes. Maybe your sibling places the importance of preserving money instead of paying for a parent’s care.
Families can be embarrassed to share conflict and internal disagreements. Unexpected situations are manageable if you know how to plan for them in advance.
The Benefits of Using a Power of Attorney Protector or Power of Attorney Advisor
If your parents are hesitant to plan, it may be because they are unsure how to make a health, legal, and financial plan. Working with a power of attorney advisor or protector can reduce hesitance or procrastination about planning.
It can be difficult for a parent or anyone to appoint an adult child or another person to help them who lacks experience in health, legal, or financial planning. A power of attorney advisor or protector can assist in advising or overseeing health, legal, and financial issues.
This power of attorney protector can serve as a contact if there are concerns about neglect, abuse, or incompetence in a care situation. The protector can be the first option before making a formal elder abuse claim with the police or adult protective services.
Looking For Help Caring for Elderly Parents? Find the Information, Including Step-by-Step Processes, in Pamela’s Online Program.
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