How To Deal With A Difficult Elderly Parent

Aging comes with many challenges, including an increasing dependence on others. Many adult children look for ways to help their parents, whether this means providing support here and there or becoming a full-time caregiver. But, working out how to deal with a difficult elderly parent can be difficult.

Unfortunately, this is a challenge that many caregivers face.

What do you do when the person you’re caring for is never happy? If they’re always demanding more?

While there’s no easy way to fix the situation, there are approaches that you can take.

What is a Difficult Elderly Parent?

We’re talking about how to deal with a difficult elderly parent, so we first look at what a difficult parent even is. After all, no one is easy to be around all the time. Even the most wonderful person is going to have their bad days. That’s to be expected.

In this post, we’re not talking about bad moments or bad days every so often. We’re looking at parents who are consistently difficult to be around.

Some of the behaviors can include:

• Manipulation. Some parents emotionally manipulate their children. Guilt is a common tool, which can include claims like ‘you never do anything for me’ and ‘if you loved me, you’d do what I ask’.
• Excessive dependence. Some aging parents like being waited on hand and foot, regardless of their actual needs.
• Stubbornness. This can include parents who refuse help or won’t follow their doctor’s advice (like when they’re told to exercise more or improve their diet).
• High expectations. Some parents, particularly those who are emotionally immature, expect other people to fix everything. They’re looking for a perfect solution, even in situations where there isn’t one.
• Being abusive. It’s easy to see seniors as vulnerable victims and they often are. However, some seniors are also abusers. This can include emotional abuse, anger, and even physical violence.
• Gaslighting. When someone gaslights you, they’re devaluing your experiences, acting like what you feel isn’t relevant, and refusing to take responsibility for what they’re doing.

A difficult elderly parent won’t show all of those behaviors and won’t show them consistently. There may be many good moments, which can make the problems hard to spot.

To make matters worse, some difficult parents are only this way around their caregivers or close family. They may seem perfectly reasonable to other people.

How To Deal With A Difficult Elderly Parent

How do you deal with situations like this?

Well, not surprisingly, the answer is going to depend on the situation at hand. But, we do have some general strategies, along with links to more in-depth posts. This information should help you to get a sense of your options.

Tip 1. Think About the Underlying Cause

First off. The best way to deal with a difficult elderly parent will depend on why they’re being difficult in the first place.

Cognitive Challenges

In some cases, their behavior might be a symptom of cognitive decline or even dementia. If this is happening, the senior is probably confused and scared themselves. Their entire sense of the world and themselves is changing.

People facing these changes do often become more angry and irritable, partly because they are afraid. Trying to push them to do something can also be counterproductive, simply serving to make them more resistant.

If a cognitive shift is an underlying reason behind a person’s behavior, then you’re going to approach things differently.

In particular, you need different communication strategies with a dementia patient than you’d use with someone else. This is crucial, as someone with dementia won’t always be able to think rationally about the situation at hand.

There’s a fantastic book on caring for people with dementia called The 36-Hour Day. This provides you with specific ideas and strategies for responding to parents in this situation.

We also have posts that focus on family members with cognitive challenges:

• Managing Incontinence in Dementia Patients – Experiences and Advice from Real Caregivers
• Understanding Dementia and How Seniors Feel

Fear, Stress, or Something Else External

In other cases, your parent might be difficult because of an external pressure.

The loss of control is a common one. As people age, their control over their lives and even their own bodies tends to decrease. For example, seniors might not be able to safely drive and some may not be safe living on their own.

When people feel out of control, they often become reactive. This might include being aggressive towards their family members and stubbornly refusing help.

If this pattern is happening for your family member, then you can look for approaches that help to empower them. We talked about this topic in more depth in our post on Caring for Stubborn Aging Parents.

The Parent Themselves

We also need to think about a third situation, when the difficulty you have with your parent isn’t because of a medical condition or anything external. Instead, you’re simply dealing with them.

Many adult children find that their parent has been difficult in one way or another their entire lives. Some of those problems become even more pronounced as the parent reaches their senior years.

We’ve talked about this topic in two separate posts, one on abusive seniors and one on emotionally immature parents. There are other situations to consider too, such as narcissistic parents.

If the challenges with your parent relate to their personality, then you need to think seriously about your boundaries and your relationship to them. The book Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend is a good place to begin, as long as you don’t mind a strongly Christian focus. There’s also a book called Setting Boundaries® with Your Aging Parents: Finding Balance Between Burnout and Respect. The author talks about the book by Cloud and Townsend, but the focus is specifically on the situation of caring for aging parents, making it a powerful choice for caregivers.

Take a look at our post on caregiver guilt too. Guilt can be a powerful motivator, but it’s also an unhelpful one. Guilt is often misplaced and can make you put your attention in the wrong place.

Tip 2. Think About How You Approach the Situation

Adult children are often quite heavy-handed with their aging parents. For example, an adult child might try to pressure their parent to see a doctor or to move into assisted living.

Such approaches are well-meant. You probably want the best for your parent and your solution may offer the most benefits.

But, despite what some people claim, caring for your aging parents isn’t a complete role reversal. Treating them like children isn’t good for you or for them.

Your parents have lived a full life. They have their own experiences, preferences, and opinions. In most cases, they’re also legally entitled to make their own decisions, which includes making bad decisions.

This means that if your aging parent is of sound mind and wants to keep eating a high-fat diet – you can’t force them to eat differently.

With all of this in mind, here are some tips for more effective ways to deal with a difficult elderly parent.

• Be sensitive. Listen to what your parent has to say and take their concerns seriously, even if you don’t agree with them.
• Talk about your concerns without trying to pressure your parent. Tell them what you are worried about and why.
• Work together to look for compromises.
• Accept their decision. Your parent has the right to decide about their own life. Keeping the debate going will just damage your relationship with them and make them less likely to listen to you in the future.
• Pick your battles. Some debates simply aren’t worth it. For example, is it worth fighting if your parent changes their clothes a little less often than they should or every so often they don’t leave the house? You’ll need to work out where to draw the lines, but there’s little benefit in turning something minor into a huge debate.
• Choose your timing. If you’re going to talk about something serious, pick a time where everyone is fed, well-rested, and not stressed. External pressures just make difficult conversations more complicated.
• Don’t get personal. Discussions can easily lead to arguments and personal attacks, especially if your family member feels threatened. Keeping things friendly makes everything better. And, if your family member makes things personal, it’s often better to walk away, rather than returning the barbs.

For more information, take a look at our other posts on the topic:

• Guide to Caring for Stubborn Aging Parents
• Elderly Parents in Denial – What to Do When Your Loved One Refuses to Care for Themselves

Tip 3. Work On Yourself

Sometimes the best way to deal with a difficult elderly parent is to focus on yourself. Even if you can’t change what your family member is doing, you can change how you react to them. To do this, you’ll need to take a personal growth focus.

A key aspect may be working on the relationship between you and the person you’re caring for. Dig into this, including the old patterns and assumptions. Therapy can be a powerful tool here. There are also useful books.

We reviewed one that talks about emotionally immature parents, which refers to parents who never learned how to deal with their own emotions well.

The book focuses on empowering adult children, which includes teaching them about old patterns they may have developed and how to make new ones instead.

You can find plenty of other books too. It doesn’t matter if the book isn’t quite the right fit – anything that gets you thinking about the past and about your reactions may help.

Focusing on building resilience is another key approach. Resilience means that you respond well to difficult situations. You might even grow from them. Self-care and self-compassion are related approaches that can help too.

Tip 4. Learn When To Walk Away

We often think that we should support our aging parents no matter what. It’s easy to do so out of a sense of duty or social expectation. It might feel like your parent needs you and that there’s no one else.

Here’s the thing…

Your own needs are important too. Caring for your parent might be difficult at times, but it shouldn’t be constant torture.

Besides, walking away is sometimes the best thing you can do for your parents. This forces them to find their own solutions, rather than relying on you. Some caregivers have found that when they step down, surprisingly, everyone manages just fine.

If you need more information, take a look at our related posts:

• How to Combat Caregiver Guilt – Effective techniques for knocking guilt on the head and understanding when caregiver guilt isn’t relevant or helpful.
• Caring for my Elderly Mother is Killing Me – What to do when it all feels like too much.
• Stubborn Parents and Self-Care – How to meet your own needs when caring for a stubborn family member.
• How to Help Without Enabling – Looks at the fine line between helping a senior and enabling them, along with why this topic is so important. 

Final Thoughts

Aging parents can be difficult for many reasons.

Learning the underlying causes and finding good strategies can help you to get ahead with them. Focus on how to talk to them well, on drawing boundaries, and understanding their limitations.

Caregiver forums can be a helpful place to turn. Members often talk about difficult parents. You can even ask for advice yourself. The forum on the site AgingCare is a fantastic place to begin. There’s a detailed topic guide for the site too.

It’s important to think about yourself too.

This might include deciding to walk away. Sometimes caring for your family member will simply be too much, especially if they’re difficult.

And, honestly, walking away might be the best thing for them in the long-term too – even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment.