Advice for Navigating Caregiving Strains

Caroline, I'm wondering what advice do you have for aging parents who might need support but feel abandoned by their adult children? Well they're probably not going to like this . Oh the table yeah, I think these feelings of poor me are some of the least constructive ones we have in our menu. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luc, and you're listening to It's Ben A Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident . What do we owe our parents? For those who may have had a complicated, fraught, or even abusive parent child relationship, you may be wondering how to approach elder care for someone who didn't take great care of you . So I called up two people who know this struggle pretty well. Today on the show, I'm joined by columnist for the Washington Post and Syndication Carolyn Hacks , and Dr. Alexandra Solomon, a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice, adjunct professor at Northwestern University, and the author of Love Every Day. Caroline and Alex andra walk me through how to approach tough parent child relationships and the path to finding agency through care. Alexandra, Carolyn, welcome to It's been a minute. Thank you. Glad to here hear you. How have cultural narratives around parent child relationships changed in the last fifty years? Alexandra, we'll start with you. You know, I think what's so interesting is that we are living in a cultural moment right now where I think there are two equally strong competing cultural narratives. One is that traditional duty narrative of honor thy mother and thy father , and the other is this very modern narrative where the family system is much more democratic than it used to be and family systems are much more individualistic where there's less duty and more choice and both narratives are strong. What changes have you seen in the last fifty years and how we think about or how we experience parent child relationships? I'm seeing it more as the democratic version is really taking hold and the hierarchical one or the people who embrace the hierarchical one are very confused at what's happening and angry actually. There's a lot of anger that I'm seeing You heard saying hierarchyperstring meaning like the p arent is always above the child. Yes, yes. Yeah. And that system really is getting pushed out in favor of one where look, you can't abuse that to treat me poorly and expect that just because you are above me in the hierarchy that you can expect me to just be there for you no matter what. And a lot of people don't understand that a lot of people who were raised on the hierarchical model and in fact treated badly under the hierarchical model are expecting their turn to come and it isn't there and they're very upset about it are expecting their turn to come. So it sounds like in the past it was kind of accepted that there was always going to be a hierarchy between parent and the child that was going to continue on into adulthood in some cases . And now that's kind of been upended. Right. For example, they were going to age into being at the top of the pyramid just like their parents were and their grandparents were . And then now that they're at the top of the pyramid, their kids are like, yeah, you're pretty awful to me, you know . Peace out . I see you nodding, Alexandra . Yes, I definitely see it. And it is, you know, it's easy, it's not easy for either generation because when Carolyn says the older generation is confused and angry, that is really authentic, right ? It does feel like it feels like the rug being slipped out from under them. It feels like the paradigm that they knew is truly been shaken up. And then for the younger generation, you know, I think the younger generation feels this inner turmoil of it is really difficult to know when to step in and when to step back and just because you didn't receive care that you feel like you should have received doesn't mean that then it's easy to withhold care, right? It's an uneasy spot for the adult child to be in either. Yeah, that's a really, really, really good point. Speaking kind of like withholding , I want to go back to something that you said, Carolyn, when you were talking about kind of the way that difficult parent child relationships can progress with time. I wonder, what do you all think about the rise of no contact relationships, really non relationships and or like, you know, adult children who are estranged from their parents. Like, why does it seem like we're seeing that now more than ever. Now I will say first of all, the whole shift to no contact seems to be I mean, it's putting a technical name on it. So I guess it makes sense to just say, this is what I'm doing and instead of calling it a strangement sort of informalizing it. This is just what I'm doing because I'm done . But you can you can change the dressing. It's really just it's really just a strangement in the same old form. I don't like it except as an absolute last resort. I think it's more just because it really denies people any opportunity to remedy things . So I just anyway, but again, that's the whole point. It's I'm denying you access to me because you hurt me too much. That's really what to me, that's what estrangement is and should be. It's the last resort of, I can't stop you from harming me anymore, so I have to remove myself completely. Interesting, interesting. What do you think about that Alexandra ? You know, I think that we are in a complicated moment. It is why you know, I'm a systemic therap ist. I work with couples and family systems primarily and I train therapists to do the same . And we're in a moment where there's we've destigmatized therapy, which is wonderful, right? It used to be that if you were in therapy, you'd only whisper it to a select few people. And now people are chatting about their therapists that run chatting about it all the time. Yeah . So I love that, I love that. And what I know to be true is that individual therapy is a deeply intimate experience . The relationship between one client and one therapist is a very deep intimate relationship. And it is the responsibility of that individual therapist to always be thinking about the client's whole system and to be knowing that they're only hearing one part of their clients' story. And if the client's mom was in the room with them, mom would fill in the other part of the story. If the client's partner was in the room, the part, you know, so it is so I do worry that some of what's happening here when is when we've, you know, basically atomized family systems and everybody has their own therapist unless every therapist is thinking systemically , we're creating the conditions for relationships to polarize even further. So that's one thing that I spend some time thinking about is how can the therapists of the land beholding the whole family system in mind and maybe doing a bit more family based therapy. You can do family therapy with adult children and aging parents. That is a really appropriate use of a family therapist, for exam ple. That is really interesting. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about it from that sort of clinical perspective before. It's interesting hearing both of your opinions on this because I mean I am in extremely close contact with my parents , so I am not in no contact. You're the opposite of I'm the opposite. They are contact . They want exactly they probably wouldn't go no contact with me . I definitely got a dry face time yesterday face time then yesterday to show them my nick's bucket hat and they were like, okay girl, like we're done here. Stop you. I mean, what you're saying, though, it's interesting to hear these reflections, like both from your sort of professional perspectives on what you've seen in the way sort of no contact family relationships go and sometimes people go low contact and you know so on and so forth. Like if you felt like you were under someone's boot for eighteen, twenty, twenty five, maybe thirty , forty years, yeah, you might want to yank back some power. It's interesting to think about it in that sort of way, like as a part of like a power dynamic within the family. So many people probably feel reallys right. One of the things that children bring with them when they grow into adulthood is the recognition that yes, parents have so much power and what they start to see when they're adults is that often what they took as their regular child hood is actually an understanding later that their parents abused that power when they were as parents. And that's the thing that a lot of them can't abide with their parents in that adult relationship that they then have. They look back on their childhood and they say, Wow, you didn't have to do that, like you were you could have just been you could have been a good parent, you could have been an authoritative parent without really just tightening the screws all the time and constantly showing me that I was lower down. And I think that's one of the important parts of the shift that I think that has made this not so much . Why don't it's one of the reasons I don't think this is just going to stay a split where there's the hierarchical and then there's the more democratic. I do think the democratic is going to win out because I think you have this whole these younger generations coming up and saying why you, don't have to just push that power in my face. You can use that power judiciously and humanely and with love . And it's still power. It's still authority It's just not this , as I said, it's just not this, you know , boot in the in the neck. Well, I agree totally that in the next twenty five years, we should see this going differently as Jenna X gets older as Millennial parents get older, certainly, I think that that's really helpful. And in the meantime, you know, Brittany, as you were talking about that sort of flip of the power paradigm, you know, the thing we know to be true, whether we're talking about politics or family systems is that like one hundred eighty de andgre es doesn't tend to be the answer, right? So then doing two parents what was done to us doesn't tend to be the answer and it leaves then the adult child you know in that in that awful spot of being again too powerful. So I think the middle path is how is for the adult child who had an inadequate parent, for the adult child to say, how do I want to show up not in reaction to how I was treated, but in reaction to my own understanding of my values and my boundaries and my integrity. So it's like I'm not going to do to my parent what was done to me. I'm going to relate to my parent in a way that aligns with my the way that I'm choosing to live my life, which might be some amount of boundaried contact that allows that adult child to feel like they're living within their set of values . You know , don't go anywhere . You know, one of the strongest markers of emotional health is the ability to sit with paradox, the ability to sit with two things that seem like they're opposites and hold them both at the same time without collapsing on one or the other . You've got more coming up after the break . I think that many people are just living in like this gray area where it hasn't been one hundred percent rose in sunshine, and it hasn't been a situation where there absolutely is no path forward other than cutting someone off. And now there are so many people who are tasked with caring for these aging parents that they have very complicated feelings about. And I imagine that people write to you, Carolyn or, come to your off ice, Alexandra . I wonder how do you go about advising people in this situation? Carolyn, let's start with you because I know you get letters about this all the time. All the time. Yeah, it's actually Alexandra touched on it earlier . It really has to become something within your own conscience because and in fact that is an extension of this whole model of the sort of democratizing of the family is you instead of doing this, I'm taking care of my parent because that is the hierarchical order of things and this is just the duty and this is what you do. It's working from your own conscience and your own sense of responsibility . And I actually think it's so much healthier because if you just do it because you feel like you're forced into it by the order of things , then there's just so much resentment to it and there's so much sense that it's being forced on you. Whereas if you choose it from within then it's even if it's really hard and awful , then it's still something that's coming from inside you. It's like, okay, my parent did not give me the childhood that I thought was humane and safe and supportive , but this is what I feel I need to do to be able to live with myself, to feel like a good human, to be again, not to do to my parents, what I feel like my parents did to me , which was take this incredible power that they had over me and sort of rub it in my face. I'm not going to do that to my parent. I am going to be the kid who takes care of my parent this way. And again, it may not be that loving care that they think they deserve just because they're at the top of the pyramid, but it's going to be something , you know, humane and from the heart. Or again, it's going to be okay, here , here I'm paying the bills and here's a very nice center or here's here's state care because I'm out I can't do I mean there are the whole array of choices is there and, of course the choices are terrible. That's a whole other thing. We will get to that. The choices are terrible. We'll get to that. But I mean , there are like eighteen answers here and I've just popped on three, but there you go. But again, it comes from within. Absolutely. The two things that I'm thinking about in response to what Carolin's saying, one is, I'm thinking of how Kamala Harris reminded us that none of us fell out of a coconut tree, right? Our parents cannot be understood outside of their contexts. So it's I think it's less about I'm going to forgive my parents and more I'm going to contextualize my parents. I'm going to see their limitations as a reflection of their context in which that shaped them , my one of my mentors, Mona Fischbain, says if you view your parents as your grandparents' children , that can sometimes be a compassion opener, you know That's a doozy . That's yeah. Now that you said something, I've like, repeat that one more time because I feel like people really need to hear it. If you view your parents as your grandparents' children , it can sometimes open up some compassion. Now compassion doesn't equal now the entire center of my world is caring for you, but compassion equals making choices from a more grounded centered place , you know, and accepting and maybe making peace with and grieving that your parent wasn't able to be who you needed them to be and they did the best they could given set of constraints and challeng es. Oh my gosh, that is deep. That's deep. There's a lot of people that are going to be bringing that to therapy this week. Thank you so much for bringing that up. And you know, the other sorry one more thing about that I was thinking about is sometimes the sometimes it's not about your parents, it's about your siblings . It's like I will step into providing care to these aging parents of ours because I love you, brother and I love you, sister and I want to protect our relationship . Sometimes the shift also goes back to your siblings and how to protect you guys through this chapter. I completely agree with you on the contextualizing. I mean, I will say that in my column and then I'll get people writing to me and say, well , how can you keep excusing people like this? I'm like, No, it's not the same thing. It's not excusing. Or like, well my parents did it to me. So their parents did it to them and their parents did it to them, but they did it to us and I didn't turn out this way. And like at a certain point with all of this sibling crossover and all of this parent contextualizing, at some point, one of you has to say I am not going to continue this and just being the one who stops it and it's like it's it's a really tough place to be because sometimes you're the only one who's choosing to stop it. It's a tough place to be, but also what a lot of this is making me think about is how and I say this as a person of sibling experience. I'm married to an only child, so sometimes I have to clarify, let people know I'm not only child that you also have as a sibling, have a different relationship to your parents. You've had different parents than your other siblings. One of my one of my sisters is sixteen months younger than I am . And our parents different to they were at different places in their lives. They were at different we were at different places in our lives and our development, even when we're all living in the same house. We've been discussing parent child relationships as if it's like a one race street, but really it's like a spaghetti junction of all of these different people having these like simultaneous experiences. That's right. And I imagine that all must be just coming up to the surface when all this is happening as well , including relationships that siblings may have with each other, whether it's jealousy or jealousy about even how they were treated by the parents or their own rivalries or, you know , differences in resources, time who lives near them . It's bringing everything up and it's not just so cut and dry as to be this relationship that's between just one like, you know, one parent or two parents and one child. Yeah, right. And things that have been lying dormant for many years. You know, there's for lots of us, there's some years when we are adults and our parents are healthy. So it's like during those years there might be a bit more ebb and flow and then you hit this point where parents are aging, you know, we talk about the sandwich generation. Sometimes as our parents are aging, we are also raising our own teens or emerging adults. And so that sandwich generation is often where all the stuff you're talking about, Brittany really starts to come into the foreground. The issues that had maybe been lying dormant, old resentments , old pain kind of comes back full force. And even though it's all normative stage of life stuff, this is the circle of life it does not mean that it's easy. I wonder like what in broad terms are parents expecting from their adult children in terms of being cared for in their older age? Like what are their expectations and what's informing those expectations? I mean, it varies by the parents, certainly. I mean, I had two parents . My mother used to tell us when we were when we were obviously years ago , when she was young and healthy and fit, she used to pull us aside. She says, you know, I just want to make sure you understand this. Put me in a home She didn't want to be a burden. She did not want to be a burden. She had taken, she had been the caregiver for three basically the three matriarchs you know, her. And so it was just they just after we all went off I have three older sisters and so she just raised four children and then became the caregiver for the old ladies and then just spent all this time on the road and she just would do, oh and by the way, put me in a home . And well, bad luck for us in so many ways, but she got ALS and didn't make it to sixty two. And my father survived her by quite a bit and he didn't agree with that whole thing and he wanted he wanted the full age in my home age in place with all of his daughters around him taking care of everything '.s That a lot of that 's what a lot of parents want. I'm not gonna exactly I'm not going to see how I know this, but that is . Right, right. I think it was just he thought it would be lovely to have all of his children around him taking care of him. To Carlyn'so point, I think a lot of what informs is what parents have seen before. I'm thinking about my own aging mom, who's eighty two , and she oftentimes makes my caregiving job harder by trying to do things that I have to undo and redo, and I'm just like, Mom, let go of the reins. Like, let me make the appointment, let me coordinate this. It just is easier. If you want to lighten my load, then let me do it because I have developed my own systems for how I manage your life at this point, you know, and she'll kind of resist and struggle with it. And I'll say to her mom, you never had the experience of watching your own mother age. Like she her own mom died in her early seventies. So she doesn't know what it is to be a caregiving daughter. So I say to her, like, I'm figuring this out as I go and you don't know you never had the privilege of being in the spot that I'm in. So I think oftentimes what's informed it is their own lived experience. And then just the discomfort, right? If you were a vibrant, like, you know, Carolyn's mom was, like my mom was , you know, if you had it, if you were vibrant and independent, this aging thing is not easy for them either, right? They're in the self consciousness and the fear of being a burden. We don't always handle neediness or dependence with grace. Sometimes we go when we are dependent, we become angry rather than grateful, which does not excuse it, not an excuse, but the idea of being dependent of being old. You know, we live in an aged society, right? Yeah. So we've we've all internalized the messages about what it is to be an old person . And so that's not necessarily a comfortable place to be. Not just excuses, but you know , but no, but some context, some context. I mean , it sounds like you mean to both of your points, right? Like a lot of what parents want is informed by or what they're expecting. It's kind of informed by their desires , right ? But also like religion, gender, the traditions may be regionally of where you're from . I am aware of plenty of people whose parents are aging and like maybe they're a sister with a brother and a sister's doing it all. We don't know where that brother is. don't We know where the brother is. The brother comes home once a year if everyone is so happy . Yes there's so much in here also like who has resources? Who does it? Do the parents have resources or not ? There's so, so, so much all wrapped up in that that kind of makes it so , you know, like, like I said, some of these expectations are going to come from the parents. Alexandria, you talk about a distinction between abusive parents and limited parents . The latter suggesting that maybe they loved and cared for their children, but they had some circumstances that made it , you know, so that they made it hard for them to be the type of parents that their kids needed or even adequate as parents. But talk to me about this sort of limited parenting where it sounds like maybe through not the parent's choice and not the child's choice, they're just not able to show up in the way that might be best for the child. You know, one of the strongest markers of emotional health is the ability to sit with paradox, the ability to sit with two things that seem like they're opposites and hold them both at the same time without collapsing on one or the other. So Brittany, what you're talking about is this idea of either my parent was the best and I can't be critical or my parent was terrible and and I, you know, am nothing but a helpless victim here. And the truth, what you're talking about is the truth being in the middle. My parent tried the best they could given their limitations and I didn't get everything I needed. And both those things can be true at the very very same time. I didn't get what I needed and my parent tried hard. And then from that place the healing journey is to parent ourselves , to give ourselves what we didn't get, to validate the pain ful experiences we had as a kid and to tend to the inner child, the young version of ourselves that we carry with us every day of our lives. And sometimes also it is then in how we show up in the work that we do . It is then how we show up in our own parenting journey. So sometimes I give my kid that which I didn't get from my parent and that experience heals me. I heal myself through the way I care for the people around me. So it's like loop, you know, by giving you what I didn't get, that helps me give it to myself and it affirms that that is possible. Hm m. I wonder like what might help an aging parent of an adult child, how might the parent be a good member of this relationship dynamic? Brittany, your question makes me think about colleagues of mine, Paul Brody and Hetty Schleichly are just launching this new e course and it's about the art and science of eldering . So I think to be a good, I think to be a good parent in this situation is to learn how to be an elder, you know, to know that you haven't been here before. And what does it mean to be here? And Hetty said something really important , which is she said she's eighty one and she said, What I'm learning about being an elder is that I'm a sacred witness. I can't keep up with the flow of conversation in my family , you know , but I can sit there and be really present. And so that was for her, that's become for her the heart of what it means for her to be an eighty one year old elder and her family system is she's a witness and that is actually a really sacred role. You know, that there needs to be talkers and there need s to be listeners at all times in every conversation . So I think there's something there about the sacredness of being elder and you haven't been here before and you maybe haven't known people who've been here before, but you can figure out how to belong and how to fit . Don't go anywhere . We could ensure care our elderly so that it wouldn't fall on the next generation so hard. And the thing is, of course, it's ridiculous to expect the families to do it because not everybody has a family . I mean, duh We've got more coming up after the break Yeah, it's like navigating a new way of fitting in that I mean yeah to think about what I said earlier how every old person knows what it is to be young but young people don't know what it is to be old but also old people don't know what it is to be any older than they already are . To your point, it's like they're kind of always on the frontier . And that in and of itself is like you're saying, your colleague said it's like an opportunity to kind of find a new way to fit in or a new way to belong. But what were you going to add, Carolyn? Well, I was just, I mean, I think about this a lot because I just went through this with my dad and I'm talking about it a lot with my cohort we're looking at how we want to do things when we get there. And some of us have parents who are who are aging like hard . Yeah. Like aging resistant. And I get it. I want to take good notes for myself so that I remember what was so hard , not just for me as the younger person in this, but I want to take notes for what my dad made hard for himself . So many times I wanted to just get into my dad's head and saying, No, no, no, look what you can have . Look what is available to you if you just if you just uncl ench on these things and let go and I just want to write down and actually said it to my kids too. Like I'm going to write these things down so that you can hand them to me in I hope a lot of years , but like, you know, it handed them to me in twenty years , twenty five years so that I can see these were the things that were so that my dad was so resistant to that got in his own way. That is and I think yeah, I think I might be the only one who can who can talk me into it. Again, I don't think my kids might be might have the same trouble that we all did with my dad. Oh my gosh, that is that is such an incredible perspective. I'm so glad you share that y'all giving me so much to think about today. You know, I wonder like when it comes to caring for parents, money and ources are a huge issue for everybody . But kids of difficult parents still don't want their parents to age in squalor or in subpar conditions or in a facility that's not up to their standards or is not going to be comfortable for them. But our society doesn't guarantee safe quality care for seniors . I mean, it doesn't really ensure safe quality care for anybody for anybody . But this sort of like safe quality, dignified care for elders is something that we are crucially missing and it's so key to this conversation . It kind of seems like everyone is looking for individual solutions to a structural issue. So I'm wondering how do we address the structural problem here . Well, I don't know how to address the structural problem. That's not my that's less my lame, but what I do know Brittany, as you spell that out , is that when the adult children feel shame about what they can't do, I think it is helpful to remember the brokenness of the macrosystem, right? To depersonalize. This is not a me thing or an us thing, the system is broken and that then we move from shame to anger and maybe activism , right ? And I also when it comes to money, it makes me think about that sometimes siblings come up with these divisions of labor where we don't need everybody to be doing the same thing. And so maybe there is a sibling who's not able to drive mom or dad to the doctor's appointments, but the sibling can contribute financially or can manage financial resources. So sometimes yeah, that sometimes that's how siblings can protect their relationship with each other is to create a division of labor where people are doing different things, but everybody is giving everyone's trying to give something to carry this forward. And I think that is that's great. I'm with Alexandria here. This isn't my lane . I can fulminate as well as the next person over the fact that we have the ability, we have the wealth as a nation to solve a lot of this. If we had good structural systems in place , a lot of this stress wouldn't happen . We could we could ensure care for our elderly so that it wouldn't fall on the next generation so hard. And the thing is, of course, it's ridiculous to expect the families to do it because not everybody has a family. I mean , I mean, this is just like this just like definition of a crappy plan is like why are you having this as our plan when not everybody has it? But we do have we do have a tax structure and we can just chip in a little and we can make sure that every body ages into this thing that takes decent care of people. We probably all agree on it if we sat down and talked outside of like a political like echo chamber. But I think everybody would probably agree to it. Like',s here the dollar figure. This was what it would buy. Are you in? I bet everybody would be. Carolyn, I'm wondering, what advice do you have for aging parents who might need support but feel abandoned by their adult children . Oh, they're probably not going to like this. Oh it's able yeah , I think these feelings of O Pour M are somee of the least constructive ones we have in our menu . I think it's I think it's it's so easy if you're just thinking about your immediate that I mean the idea of systems is also applicable within yourself and you can you can say, well, I'm feeling like nobody's caring for me butter have you put yourself in everybody else's shoes like these you know you're all people the in your family probably have forty different things that they're trying to balance and you're pouring me yourself into this into probably ruining those relationships. You can also say, okay, the care situation in this country and the care situation in my home and in my family right now is not ideal for me. So what's my plan B? If you go in that direction, you have a good chance of setting up a care situation and keeping preserving the relationships with your family. But if you start boohooing yourself, then you're going to start straining what relationships you have with your family . So I'm not big on the whole self pity as an avenue to anything useful thought process. What advice do both of you have for adult children who feel obligated to care for their parents , but are feeling the st rain on their emotional and financial resources. What words can you leave them with today ? I would want that adult child to be in community with other people who get it. And maybe it can't be your siblings, but is there a friend or is there a support community where you can just vent and be witnessed because maybe your siblings can't witness you and maybe certainly your aging parents can't wit ness you, but who in your world can get it? You know, who can pour in to you ? Who can resource you so that then you can do what you need to do around caregiving? And Carol,ine what do you think? No, I agree with Alexandria. It's one of those where you just I think need to first of all, you don't have to go far at least in my experience to find your people on this one and just talk about it. And I think it's one of those where you just need to take a deep breath and figure out your realistic priorities and recognize that it's not something where any realistic expectations can be met . You know, it's it's nobody can do everything in this situation . And I think once you realize that what you're being asked to do is just impossible , like you can't be a full time caregiver and a full time employee. And you know, you can't, you just can't do this. And so when you add the emotional layering on top of that, you just have, again, you have step away from it and you say, This is not tenable . And then you say, okay. And now I just have to take care of what I what I can take care of, and I have to let go of the rest. This was such a great conversation. Thank you both so much. You've given me a lot to think about , give me some things to bring up to my parents I'm sorry. I want to be like, all right . Why we're all here together . What's the why doing? What's going on? What are we doing? But thank you both so much for this conversation. This was very needed. Thank you. Thank you, Brittany. That was advice columnist for the Washington Post and Syndication, Carolyn Hacks , and Dr. Alexandra Solomon , a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice, adjunct professor at Northwestern University, and the author of Love Every Day. And to all of you watching, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Be sure to come back to this feed every Tuesday for a fresh video episode. You can watch these episodes exclusively on Spotify, YouTube, and the NPR app.