By Nanette Lavoie-Vaughan - January 2008
As a military officer and leader, planning and preparation are essential components of your daily operations. Those skills now are needed to complete a new, more personal mission: to prepare mentally, emotionally, socially, and financially for your parents' aging.
Each month in this column, I will share with you essential information and resources that will help you toward the successful completion of this personal mission. You might not need this information now or even tomorrow, but you almost certainly will need it one day, and it's better to be prepared.
Americans plan for births, the education of their children, vacations, careers, and retirement. But the thought of planning for growing older seldom goes beyond establishing a retirement account. This is a shortsighted view of aging. Every stage of life brings its own unique challenges, and preparing in advance for those challenges will enhance the quality of your life and that of a parent or other aging loved one.
Reluctance to address these issues is understandable. Most adults don't want to picture their parents old and frail, chronically ill, or in need of full-time care. However, the natural aging process tends toward these eventual scenarios.
If you think you're alone in these concerns, you're wrong:
- According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there will be more than 1 million Americans over the age of 85 in 2010.
- In 2005, 26 million American families were full-time caregivers for an adult family member, and in 2007 that number jumped to 39 million. Five million were caregivers for a person with Alzheimer's disease or another form of dementia in 2005, and last year that number grew to almost 9 million. An additional 7 million were informal caregivers (whose duties were less than 20 hours a week).
- The U.S. Administration on Aging reports more than 50 percent of caregivers are employed full-time and that the same number experience a conflict between work and caregiving duties. Experts recognize that unpaid family caregivers are the largest source of long term care for the elderly.
So my mission is to share with you my expertise and insight as an advanced practice nurse in geriatrics with more than 25 years of experience and a full-time family caregiver. As I do with my patients and their families, my friends, and my own family, I will do with you. I like to call it "anticipatory guidance." Take the expert information, reliable resources, and access to professional advice and formulate a contingency plan for the future.
With this as a starting point, each month I will examine a specific topic to help you develop a strategy for your parents' futures and the possibility of long-distance caregiving imposed by your military service. In coming months, look for columns about how to choose a caregiver, recognize depression in an older person, know whether your parent has dementia, discuss advanced directives, deal with family disagreements about decision making and practical tips for managing parents with chronic illnesses and dementia.
I welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions for future columns. Feel free to contact me via e-mail at rolereversal@moaa.org.
Nanette Lavoie-Vaughan is an adult nurse practitioner and professional consultant. She is a featured speaker at national professional conferences and writes about geriatrics for multiple publications.