More effective senior care begins with overcoming sibling rivalry.
In thinking through the years spent with your brothers and sisters, you can probably recollect a multitude of great memories: holidays spent as a family, childhood activities you took pleasure in, key events like graduations, birthdays, and weddings. Yet if we’re completely honest, there are usually also numerous hurts that happened that tend to linger with us even into our adult years. It’s these challenging family dynamics that can conflict with our ability to provide the best senior care for our aging parents, as stress can trigger those sibling squabbles to resurface and generate revived tension.
Morning Glory Home Care, a provider of home health care in Alton, IL and nearby areas, offers these suggestions to set aside sibling rivalry issues and place the focus fully on the needs of your older loved ones.
Make Communication a Priority. It’s easy to feel slighted when one sibling makes senior care decisions without consulting everyone else, preventing the others from having any input. Successful communication should take place well before a care need occurs, if at all possible. Schedule a time to get together with all of your siblings as a family and create a plan that defines each person’s obligations when parental care is necessary, and how decisions will be made and communicated.
Remain fair. Be mindful that each of you will have the ability to make contributions in various ways. While one sister or brother may live in close proximity to your aging parents, another may have moved to another state, and it isn’t reasonable to assume they can provide the same kind and degree of care. Yet there are ways to assure that care is as fairly divided as possible; for instance, the long-distance sibling could provide more financial support, help with paperwork, and paying bills online, while those who live closer assist with transportation, grocery shopping and other errands, household chores and personal tasks, etc.
Find help. Whether or not you and your siblings get along well, communicate effectively and have a working plan in place to fulfill senior care needs, stress levels are heightened for all concerned when attempting to manage a healthy life balance between caring for aging parents and caring for the needs of yourself, your career, children, and home. The optimum remedy is to partner with a professional in-home care agency, like Morning Glory Home Care, to provide trustworthy, highly skilled care that allows family caregivers to take much needed breaks.
Contact Morning Glory Home Care, providers of the highest quality home health care Alton, IL and the surrounding areas have to offer, for more senior care tips and to arrange for a free in-home meeting to discover how we can help lessen stress and restore peace of mind with our high quality senior care solutions. Call us any time at 618-667-8400, or fill out our simple online contact form and we’ll be in touch with you as soon as possible.