How to get through to your aging parents without arguing

Thursday, May 25, 2023 - 20:32 in Psychology & Sociology

'You don’t want to rub their nose into their incapacity.'. DepositPhotos This article was originally featured on KFF Health News. It was a regrettable mistake. But Kim Sylvester thought she was doing the right thing at the time. Her 80-year-old mother, Harriet Burkel, had fallen at her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, fractured her pelvis, and gone to a rehabilitation center to recover. It was only days after the death of Burkel’s 82-year-old husband, who’d moved into a memory care facility three years before. With growing distress, Sylvester had watched her mother, who had emphysema and peripheral artery disease, become increasingly frail and isolated. “I would say, ‘Can I help you?’ And my mother would say, ‘No, I can do this myself. I don’t need anything. I can handle it,’” Sylvester told me. Now, Sylvester had...

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