The Hidden Challenges of Caring for Aging Parents

Conversations about caregiving often focus on the practical challenges of the role – and rightly so, as caregiving can be intense and exhausting. However, we can’t just stop with the practical side of things. There is also a variety of underlying areas to consider, ones that have dramatic impacts on seniors and caregivers.  

Some of these are a little like elephants in the room. They’re things that caregivers and family members are aware of, but avoid talking about. Others may be less familiar, perhaps things you haven’t considered before or ones that haven’t yet become relevant in your family. 

So, let’s look at some of these hidden challenges and what they mean for caregivers and seniors. 

Talking about these challenges in depth might seem like an incredibly negative approach, especially as caregiving has its positive aspects too. Yet, it’s only by talking about such challenges that we can start to find solutions. Understanding more about the challenges you face can also help you to be compassionate to yourself, potentially reducing caregiver guilt and making self-care a little bit easier.

Unexpected Challenges of Caring for Aging Parents

Loss of Control and Autonomy

Aging isn’t just a season of slowing down and physical challenges. It’s also a season of loss. Many seniors are losing capabilities they had in the past. They need to rely on people much more often. This can be both frustrating and embarrassing, especially for seniors who were once highly independent.  

Imagine how it feels to need help going to the bathroom or to be unable to drive yourself. Such losses can be extremely painful. Some seniors face them head on, while others do everything they can to avoid or deny the challenges they’re facing.  

Resistance to such challenges is often greater if it feels like someone is dictating them, such as an adult child telling the senior they can no longer safely drive or insisting that the senior needs to slow down. 

Resistance can also vary from person to person and be influenced by the type of loss. 

You’ll notice this most with seniors who highly value their autonomy. Such seniors may be resistant to any advice or direction you try to give them. Some may become frustrated or even aggressive. 

There are parallels for caregivers too. 

The caregiving role often involves a loss of freedom, especially if you’re living with your parent. Some seniors also become unexpectedly controlling, to the extent that it’s hard for caregivers to do anything for themselves. Not surprisingly, this type of loss has noticeable emotional effects as well. 

Emotional and Cognitive Shifts

For some seniors, aging is mostly a physical decline, where their cognitive abilities and personality stay much the same as it was previously. You might even see a mellowing out, where the senior becomes more appreciative of social connection and simple pleasures. 

Yet, some conditions bring considerable cognitive shifts. Dementia is the most well-known example and has severe impacts. However, decreases in cognition can occur in other situations too, each bringing its own challenges. 

We can’t forget about issues like depression and anxiety as well. These can be incredibly challenging for seniors and caregivers, alike.

Part of these issues is that these challenges can come out of nowhere. You might even move your aging parent in with you, then find that their cognitive abilities are much lower than you thought. 

Old Trauma and Dynamics Can Resurface

Even the best childhoods have some difficult and painful elements. Some may be tackled successfully, leading to resolution and forgiveness. Others may be ignored instead and potentially cause rifts later in life.  

There are many examples of such issues, including both small and large events. These include things like a parent missing an important event, not feeling supported by your father, or feeling that you were always the least liked sibling. Then there are the deeply traumatic events, like growing up with an emotionally immature or narcissistic parent, experiencing sexual abuse, or having an alcoholic parent. 

Large and small traumas tend to resurface during caregiving, which can make everything incredibly challenging. 

After all, you’re suddenly spending a lot of time with your aging parent, perhaps more than you have in decades. It’s no surprise that buried issues come to the surface.  

There are also parent-child dynamics to consider. 

For example, some adult children are still in the mode of trying to please their parents. This can easily lead to subservience and even identity loss in caregiving. 

Other times, parents may still be stuck in the patterns of the past – giving adult children constant unasked for advice or thinking that nothing they do is good enough. This one can be a huge issue if an aging parent moves in with you. You might even find them trying to dictate how everything is done in the home. 

Traumas and unhealthy dynamics may have stayed in the background for much of your life, then suddenly come to the surface with caregiving. This is especially true if you are providing full-time care, as you end up spending a lot of time with your parent, much more than you have since you were a child. 

Apparent Role Reversals

Caregiving brings with it a kind of role reversal, where the child is suddenly caring for the parent. This is a strange situation for everyone and takes time to get used to. 

There’s an emotional toll and even a sense of grief in this, as it may feel like your parent is no longer able to support you – almost as if you’ve lost part of the relationship. The dynamic can be tough for seniors too, as no adult wants to be treated like a child. 

Adjusting to this new dynamic can be a dance for everyone. 

It’s also worth recognizing that this isn’t a true role reversal. 

When you raise children, you’re teaching them how to be successful in the world. They’re growing, learning, and getting more independent over time. Aging parents are in a declining stage instead. 

Beyond this – you shouldn’t ever treat an aging parent like a child. 

When children are young, telling them what to do is essential. They don’t have the knowledge or skills to be safe in the world on their own. 

Your parents aren’t in that situation. They’ve lived a full life and been independent for much of it. You can’t simply try to control what they do in the interest of keeping them safe and healthy. After all, few of us make the healthiest decisions every single time. 

Things may be different for parents in the mid to late stages of dementia, where they can’t understand the world well enough to keep themselves safe. But, even then, there’s power in helping seniors to retain as much autonomy as possible.

Coming to Grips with Mortality 

Caregiving often begins when aging parents start losing some of their abilities or when there’s been an accident. Either case is a sudden reminder that your parents are mortal – and their death may be closer than you expect. 

We all die – that’s no secret. 

This is also a topic many of us avoid talking about and thinking about as much as possible. So, when it is suddenly staring us in the face, the emotional impact can be tough. 

Adult children react to this in a variety of ways. 

Some are able to accept and work with what’s happening, allowing them to support their parent effectively and adapt to changes as they occur. 

Others may be in some form of denial. Here’s a few ways that this can present: 

• Regularly downplaying the senior’s symptoms, insisting that nothing is wrong or that the caregiver sibling is exaggerating. 
• Constantly looking for a cure or fix, for ways to get the senior better, even when it’s clear that they’re nearing the end of life. For example, appetite tends to decrease in the final states, yet some adult children may believe that if their parent would just eat more, they would recover their strength. 
• Trying to control every aspect of the senior’s life and the care provided, with the hope that doing so keeps them alive as long as possible and ‘protects’ them. 
• Blaming the aging parent or caregiver for health declines and insisting that issues would reverse if changes were made. 

Now, there is a lot that can’t be predicted and some conditions can be treated. This means that a senior may get badly sick, seem like they’re on death’s door, and then recover. Such a pattern could even happen multiple times. 

However, there is still generally a decline. 

Despite these temporary wins, aging is still fatal

The Impacts Vary Among Family Members

The areas we’ve talked about thus far impact most family members, but often not in the same ways.

For example, one sibling might deal with fear and grief by trying to control as much as possible. This could involve being the senior’s full-time caregiver and doing everything possible to project the senior (even at the expense of the senior’s autonomy). 

This can sometimes lead to the issue of caregiver martyrdom, where the caregiver is burning themselves out trying to prevent the inevitable. Such caregivers may also refuse help because the help on offer isn’t exactly what they think it should be. 

Another may pull back instead. This could be because they recognize the issue and don’t have the capacity to get involved or because they’re in active denial. 

Such differences in behavior often lead to family drama and heated debates between siblings. Siblings may also be locked into their own perspectives, making it more difficult to find middle ground with family members. 

Getting Help Can Be Difficult

The responsibilities of caregiving often increase far beyond what one person can handle. This makes finding extra support essential. 

Doing so in practice is surprisingly difficult. Part of the problem may be that caregivers struggle to ask for help early in their role. Here, you’ll often feel like either you can or should be able to handle it on your own. 

You may find that you first start looking for support when you’re overwhelmed and possibly resentful, at which point it’s hard to get people to actually get involved.  

One possible solution is to build and essentially train a support network early on, so that when there’s a crisis, everyone is ready to go. Of course, doing that adds yet another task onto your to-do list. And, if you’re already past that early stage, knowing what you could have done doesn’t help anything.  

It’s also worth noting that some people are less able to help than you might imagine. There are a host of reasons why, including challenges in their own life, limited emotional energy, financial struggles, and the like. As a result, you might find that those who do help aren’t the ones you expected to at all. 

It May Last Much Longer Than You Expect

The various challenges we’ve highlighted wouldn’t be a huge problem if caregiving was a fairly short experience, like perhaps a few months or perhaps a year. Most of us have pools of strength we can draw on to see us through the different times. 

The problem is when the experience starts to extend. 

Caregiving can easily become a marathon rather than a sprint, where you’re potentially providing care for years and years. You may even find that one caregiving role quickly follows another, leaving you little time to recover.

The potential longevity of your role is one reason that it’s crucial to be as gentle as possible and make time for your own needs. Pacing yourself is the only way through a marathon. There’s no way you’ll reach the end if you try to sprint the entire thing.  

Different Values and Perspectives

The next area to talk about is a little more complicated. We’re looking at the way that values and perspectives often differ. This includes differences between aging parents and their children, as well as differences between individual siblings. 

This topic area is incredibly important, as values strongly influence caregiving decisions. Even more crucially, it’s easy to assume that everyone has a similar set of values or that the things that matter to you are inherently right and true. 

To find their way, families often need to find a middle ground between the different approaches, rather than assuming one person is entirely right and another wrong. 

To explain the topic further, let’s consider some examples. 

Flexibility vs Order

Some people prize flexibility and the ability to make decisions in the moment based on what’s happening and what they need. Others have a much stronger focus on organization and planning, which could include making appointments, maintaining calendars, and even planning out entire days more than a week in advance. 

Needless to say, differences in these styles can be frustrating for everyone. 

Autonomy and Independence

Some family members value autonomy and independence..

This may mean they’ll seek to help their aging parents live as independently as possible, stepping in only when assistance becomes essential. People with strong values in this area may also be unwilling to help aging parents who can care for themselves, but refuse to do so.   

Children with a strong interdependence or supportive focus may provide much more help and do so much earlier. 

This distinction can also influence how adult children see their own roles. For example, those with a strong supportive focus may be willing to give up a large amount to support their parent. They may even see such sacrifice as part of their identity as a good person or good son/daughter. 

Those with a stronger independence focus may not see providing care as an obligation in the same way (especially if the aging parent could have saved for retirement and chose not to). Children with this value set may spend more time weighing up when to provide help and when not to. 

While children with an independence focus can seem more selfish, they do often have better boundaries than their more supportive siblings. 

Amount of Support Needed

Adult children often differ in their views about how much support the aging parent actually needs. This can be influenced by a few factors including: 

• How well the child understands the parent’s current health and prognosis. 
• What the child believes the parent is and isn’t capable of on their own.
• The child’s values around independence vs safety. 
• Fear or denial about the parent’s death. Sometimes this may make a child controlling, in an attempt to protect the parent as much as possible. In other cases, the child might ignore any signs that there’s a problem. 
• The parent’s behavior. For example, some parents may be up-front with one child, but hide signs of poor health from another. 

Different views in this area can lead to siblings providing varying levels of support. If not discussed, such differences can easily lead to resentment.

Incorrect assessments can happen in both directions here. For example, an adult child might grossly underestimate their aging father’s needs, perhaps due to denial or not being aware of all the facts. In another family, an adult child might grossly overestimate their parent’s needs instead, risking the aging parent becoming overly dependent and the child burning out.

Final Thoughts

Let’s be clear. 

These challenging things aren’t all there is to caregiving. They won’t even be the most significant aspects much of the time. 

We’re talking about these challenges because they’re easily missed and need to be acknowledged. 

I firmly believe that understanding the challenges we face is one of the biggest solutions to caregiver guilt. Understanding the nature of our struggles can help us to better understand how well we’re doing – and start to find solutions to the challenges we face.