Caring for the elderly at home is different from raising children in that plainly speaking; they are not children and are entitled to as much autonomy as they are capable of handling. Often this means that elderly parents will choose to remain in their own home for as long as they are physically able. This can lead to feelings of resentment and stress on either side of the fence.
You visit your elderly mom one day and open the fridge to find shelves full of rotting food. It's so out of character for your mom, you wonder what's going on.
“That's a pretty common scenario for the children of aging parents,” said Richard Nix, executive vice president of AgingCare.com, an online support and information website. “With people living longer, their quality of life sometimes goes down and they can't care for themselves the way they used to.”
The site gets about 8,000 questions a month on its caregiver's support forum, Nix said. Most of them are from adult children worried about what to do for their elderly parents. Many of them feel they are alone, but this is far from the truth. The National Caregivers Association estimates that nearly 66 million people care for someone in their golden years in at least some capacity.
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