4 Things to Do When Your Parents Are Resisting Help...

Taking these steps can reduce frustration and stress — for all of you “Doctor, my mom needs help, but she won’t accept it and she won’t listen.” Sound familiar? It’s a complaint I hear all the time from families worried about older parents and aging relatives. And it’s a very real issue that we must address. For better health and wellbeing in older adults, it’s not enough to identify the underlying health and life problems — although that is a key place to start. Because even if you’ve correctly identified the problems and learned how the experts recommend managing them, older parents often seem, well, resistant. Understandably, this causes families a lot of frustration and stress. Here are four actions I always recommend that families take when older parents are resisting help. Consider the possibility of cognitive impairment In other words, is a problem with brain function contributing to this resistance? Now, let me emphasize that you should not assume that your parents are in their wrong mind just because they are making health or safety decisions that you don’t agree with. That said, because it’s very common for the brain to become vulnerable or damaged as people age, decreased brain function is often a factor when an older person resists help. This can affect an older parent’s insight and judgment and can also affect how well they can process your logical arguments. It’s important to spot such cognitive impairment. Some of the impairment is often reversible. For example, older adults frequently develop delirium when ill or hospitalized, and an older person may need weeks or even months to recover to their best thinking abilities. Cognition can also be dampened by certain conditions, like hypothyroidism, or by medication side effects....

When Your Adult Child Chooses Another Spiritual Path...

What to do if your adult child has a different spiritual path than you Are we in the midst of a great religious recession? A number of recent studies show that younger people are less religious than older people, and religiosity has declined with each successive generation. In the 2012 Pew Research Centerreport on religion and public life, one-fourth of 18- to 29-year-olds are classified as unaffiliated, a far higher proportion than among their parents (15 percent) or grandparents (9 percent). In extensive interviews with parents and their 18- to 29-year-olds for our book, Getting To 30: A Parent’s Guide to the 20-Something Years, we found that religious questioning is part of the identity explorations woven into this life stage. Most emerging adults feel that it would be wrong for them simply to accept what their parents and others have taught them about religious issues. Their inquiry sometimes leads to a confirmation of their childhood beliefs, but more often to modifying them, and sometimes to a wholesale rejection. Rather than holding to traditional beliefs, the majority of twenty-somethings typically have a vague but inclusive belief in a God who watches over the world and wants people to be good to each other. For some parents, their children’s religious choices are a hot button topic; for others, the subject is almost a non-issue. If parents don’t have a strong religious affiliation or commitment to spiritual seeking, then what their twenty-somethings believe is of little interest or concern to them; they may not even know. But when parents’ religious beliefs are central to their worldview and daily lives, their emerging adult’s beliefs may be one of the most important measures of their success or failure as parents: success if their children...