Discover how to overcome family dynamics for better senior care.
In thinking through the years spent with your brothers and sisters, you can very likely recollect a multitude of incredible memories: holidays and vacations spent together, childhood adventures you took pleasure in, landmarks like graduations, birthdays, and weddings. Nevertheless, if we’re completely honest, there are also various hurts that occurred that have the tendency to linger with us even into adulthood. It’s these tough family dynamics that can hinder our ability to deliver the best senior care for our aging parents, as stress can cause those sibling squabbles to resurface and create renewed tension.
Compassionate Nursing Services offers these tips to put aside sibling rivalry issues and allow you to focus on the needs of your older loved ones.
Make Communication a Priority. It’s common to feel slighted when one sibling makes senior care decisions without consulting everyone else, preventing the others from giving any feedback. Effective communication should start well before a care need develops, if at all possible. Schedule a time to meet with all of your siblings together and create a plan that defines each person’s commitments when parental care is necessary, and how decisions will be made and communicated.
Stay fair. Take into account that each of you will have the ability to play a role in various ways. While one sibling may live in the vicinity of your aging parents, another may have moved across the country, and it’s unreasonable to expect them to provide the same type and amount of care. Nevertheless, there are strategies to assure that care is as fairly divided as possible; for example, the long-distance sibling could provide more financial support, help with paperwork, and online bill paying, while those living closer assist with transportation, grocery shopping and other errands, housekeeping and personal tasks, etc.
Get help. Regardless if you and your siblings get along well, communicate effortlessly and have a working plan in place to cover senior care needs, stress levels are raised for all concerned when seeking to maintain a healthy life balance between caring for aging parents and caring for the needs of yourself, your job, children, and home. The most effective solution is to partner with a professional in-home care agency, like Compassionate Nursing Services, to help with reliable, highly skilled care that allows family members to take much-needed breaks.
Contact Compassionate Nursing Services, a top-rated provider of senior home care in Frontenac and the surrounding areas, for more senior care tips and to request a free in-home assessment to discover how we can help relieve stress and restore peace of mind with our high-quality senior care solutions. Call us any time at 314-432-4312, or fill in and submit our simple online contact form and we’ll be in touch with you as soon as possible.