Jane Wolf Frances - Parenting Our Parents: Transforming the Challenge Into a Journey of Love

Praise for Parenting Our Parents

A must-read for children of aging parents. Jane Wolf Frances writes from a firm base of empathy and knowledge about a situation thatsooner or lateraffects us all. Her book provided me with trustworthy companionship and practical guidance in just the right amounts. Extremely useful and highly recommended.
Darcie Sanders, trustee, Lyons Regional Library District; coauthor of Staying Home

A brilliant, heartfelt, and very personal book that I believe will become indispensable to a great many people. It is filled with important information from a woman who has gained this wisdom the hard way. If you are in this parenting role or about to be, this is the place to start. Rick Moss, PhD, minister of religious science; developer of Awakening to Our Greatness

As a caregiver for ten years and a gerontologist, I wish I had had this book at the beginning of my journey. Reading this was highly comforting and made me consider the honor it gives me to take care of my father. I feel blessed that I have the opportunity to savor it. Maria Siciliano, MSG, MPA, principal and founder of Gerontology in Action

Parenting Our Parents takes the guesswork out of parenting older relatives and loved ones by helping the reader make informed decisions and offering both tools for communication and plans for going forward at a time when confusion and denial can run rampant. Her how-to guide offers a process and understanding that can make this daunting journey not just bearable but truly an act of love. Patricia Mitchell, broadcaster, life coach, and consultant, Certified POP Family Coach

This book is a revelation, a generous, comprehensive, and wise guided tour of all the issues we confront in struggling to meet the needs of aging and increasingly dependent parents. Its loaded with wisdom, practical advice, and inspiration on everything I and my family faced as our parents aged, got sick, and faced death, needing their kids more and more. Holly Knox, instructional designer (retired)

Frances has written an extraordinarily valuable book for so many people who currently or will eventually care for their parents. She is an empathetic instructor who can help others with the difficulties of recognizing the signs that our parents need help and following through with those decisions that affect the lives of both parties. People need to read this book and keep it closeit will aid their hearts and minds and enrich their lives. Rikki Klieman, attorney and legal analyst

Parenting Our Parents

Parenting Our Parents

Transforming the Challenge into a Journey of Love

Jane Wolf Frances, JD, MSW

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom

Copyright 2019 by Jane Wolf Frances

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Family photo of Dads four living Wolf siblings and families, including my childhood close cousins: Rick, to my right, later to become my adopted brother; Dick, to my left, later to create Law & Order.

Why I Wrote This Book

That Christmas vacation, when I first caught sight of my folks and saw how much they had aged, and then saw the dirt and disorder that had taken over their formerly immaculate home, I knew two things. The first was that my parents needed assistance. But almost as clearly, I saw that I, too, would need help, and lots of it.

Although I had no idea then how much help Id need or where that help would come from, I did sense that something very different was happening and that major changes were ahead. As events unfolded, that prediction proved alarmingly accurate. It was a life-changing moment, and neither I nor Mom and Dad would ever be quite the same again.

My parents, Lillian and Jack Wolf, were then eighty-five years old and living as they always hadin their home, independently. But I was no longer their teenage daughter doing my homework down the hall. Id grown up and moved a continent away many years before. Recently, in midlife, Id returned to graduate school in order to begin a second career. Earlier that winter, I was very busy building my new practice as a psychotherapist, working with seniors and their families. Id been excited to share all about that with my parents.

You might imagine that someone with my background would have been better at predicting that my parents and I would have some accommodating to do as we all aged. Somehow, Id managed to plan ahead for very little of that and instead lived with, in hindsight, a surprising level of denial. The bald truth was that I was an only child and my folks were octogenarians who lived thousands of miles away from me. What could possibly go wrong?

Although it seems unimaginable that my parents would conceal their health or other problems from me, its not at all uncommon for older parents to do so. Like Jack and Lillian, many of your parents might have fears of the unknown consequences of inviting their family in to help them and, instead, resort to hiding things from you. Once I saw for myself what was really happening with my folks, I had to play catch-up, not having planned as well as I could have nor dealt with my nagging concerns for their health.

When I got past my initial reaction I was able to take a breath. By doing that, I found I could respond rather than react: one of the first tools of good parenting, as it turns out. Then I was able to look more deeply. I discovered that my parents needs were vast and pressing. It became apparent that I would need to not only make sense of what was happening medically but also step in to deal with a whole laundry list of nonmedical issues for them. Before long, I was wishing I could have taken care of things earlier, but I at least recognized that I now had to try to solve problems that, even a day before, I hadnt considered to be mine.

When I found a few moments to come up for air, I instinctively turned to books and the internet, my usual sources for comprehensive information and perspective. I was searching for an expert to tell me how to become a more caring and involved daughter at this time of my parents life. As a specialist myself in the field of geriatric psychotherapy, I was familiar with the literature on aging, death, and loss. Id always regretted that there wasnt a really good booknot even a helpful magazine article on raising older parents, nothing useful on television or the webto recommend to my patients as they traversed the journey my parents and I now apparently had begun. In the past, Id wanted to offer