Learn to overcome sibling rivalry for better senior care from our experts in home care.
In thinking back on the years spent with your siblings, you can likely recall a number of wonderful memories: holidays spent together, childhood games you enjoyed, milestones like graduations, birthdays, and weddings. Yet if we’re honest, there are also plenty of hurts that occurred that tend to linger with us even into adulthood. It’s these difficult family dynamics that can interfere with our ability to provide the best senior care for our aging parents, as stress can cause those sibling squabbles to resurface and create renewed tension.
Absolute Companion Care has some helpful suggestions to put aside sibling rivalry issues and place the focus fully on the needs of your senior loved ones.
Communicate. It’s easy to feel slighted when one sibling makes senior care decisions independently, preventing the others from having any input. Effective communication should begin well before a care need arises, if possible. Set a time to meet with all of your siblings together and come up with a plan that outlines each person’s responsibilities when parental care is needed, and how decisions will be made and communicated.
Be fair. Keep in mind that each of you will be able to contribute differently. While one sibling may live in close proximity to your aging parents, another may have moved across the country, and it’s unreasonable to expect them to provide the same type and level of care. Yet there are ways to ensure that care is as equally divided as possible; for instance, the long-distance sibling could provide more financial support, help with paperwork, and online bill paying, while those living closer help with transportation, running errands, housework and personal tasks, etc.
Get help. Even if you and your siblings get along well, communicate effectively and have a working plan in place to meet senior care needs, stress levels are elevated for all concerned when trying to maintain a healthy life balance between caring for aging parents and taking care of the needs of yourself, your job, children, and home. The best solution is to partner with a professional in-home care agency, like Absolute Companion Care, to fill in the gaps with reliable, highly skilled care that allows family members to take much needed breaks.
Contact Absolute Companion Care, providers of home care and memory care in Towson, MD and the surrounding areas, for more senior care tips or to arrange for a free in-home consultation to discover how we can help alleviate stress and restore peace of mind with our high quality senior care solutions. Call us any time at 410-357-9640, or fill out our simple online contact form and we’ll be in touch with you right away.