Does Dad Have Dementia? Ten Symptoms to Watch For

The onset and development of memory loss and dementia can be your biggest concern as a child and caregiver for your parent. Sometimes taking care of the physical and organizational aspects of your parent’s aging process are tiring, but the idea of losing that person cognitively can be almost unbearable. Unfortunately, many of us have [...]

Advance Directives For Health Care Explained

Advance Directives is the term given to legal documents that detail a person’s preferences regarding health care treatments and decisions, should he or she be unable to make those decisions due to such conditions as unconsciousness or loss of mental capacity. Advance directives typically include at least two documents: the living will and the durable [...]

Caring for Aging Parents: Family Meeting

Coordinating family caregiving responsibilities for aging parents
The Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving is dedicated to providing family caregivers with the support, training and resources they need to ensure quality care for their aging loved ones. Yet, most caregivers continue to enter the caregiving process with little or no knowledge of what comprehensive geriatric care entails. [...]

Finding Ways to Care for Your Parent at Home

For many Americans, placing an aging parent or relative into a nursing home is simply not an option. Adult children feel a responsibility and obligation to provide home care for aging or ailing parents or relatives. In addition to working a full-time or part-time job and caring for their own children, these adult children caregivers [...]

August is National Immunization Awareness Month

If you’ve got kids, make sure they have their necessary shots before starting the school year. Adults, we’re not completely off the hook either. August is recognized as National Immunization Awareness Month. The goal: To increase awareness about immunizations across the life span, from infants to the elderly. Parents are enrolling their children in school, [...]

Mom, Dad..You’re Getting Old

Perhaps not the best way to breach the subject of aging with your parents, but at some point the subject must come up and trying to do so artfully without offending them (because they will have no such belief that they’re getting old) can be delicate.
Real Simple has some great ideas on how to broach the [...]

Helping Out Mom and Dad

More often than not, my conversations with girlfriends tend to focus on our parents. The most devastating of the economy’s havoc on all of our parents has been the wiping out of retirement savings and jobs. Financial security and employer-provided health care have given way to pushing off retirement (if fortunate to still have a [...]

Looking For Ways to Cut Elder Care Costs?

Having friends currently going through this situation with their own parents makes this article all the more timely. It is difficult enough to cope with parents in failing health. It is even more difficult when you are putting the care of your parents into the hands of strangers. It is not a time when you’re thinking about getting the “best deal.” However, whether we admit it or not, finances play a major role in determining the type of care we are able to provide. Smart Money outlines 5 ways to cut costs without feeling like you’re sacrificing the care of your parents.

Parents in Crisis: Find the Right Adviser

Finding the Right Adviser is the first in a series of Smart Money articles on helping your parents through the financial crisis:  As money evaporates from their retirement savings, many parents are turning to their kids for help. SmartMoney Senior Editor Beverly Goodman, an expert on investing and personal finance, embarked on “Parents in Crisis,” [...]

What are the Medical Wishes of your Parents?

Even tougher than talking with your parents about money is talking to them about their “medical wishes.”  If they’re alert, able and active, they’ll tell you” that’s not something you need to worry about.”  And if they are currently in the midst of medical maladies, they aren’t even able to communicate them.  And if you’re [...]

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