Ways to Improve Your Relationship with Your Aging Parents

This post is for anyone who has difficulty with their care recipient, regardless of whether the problems happen every so often or all the time. In it, we link to a variety of posts and resources that can help you. Some of these focus on specific challenges, while others look at steps to take to make things better.

Being in relationship with another person always comes with its ups and downs. This is true for friendships, romantic partnerships, and even casual acquaintances. The relationship between a parent and a child is even more complex, as it has been there for your entire life.

Your parents are the ones who taught you and nurtured you. Even though you’re now grown and are fully your own person, some aspects of your nature will have been directly influenced by your parents.

And, even if your parents were amazing, you probably carry some emotional baggage from childhood. We all do. After all, parents are only human and there’s no instruction manual for how to raise well-adjusted children.

The relationship between parents and adult children shifts and changes over time. It should be different now than it was when you were a child and than when you first left home.

The dynamic shifts again as parents head towards the later years of their life.

Sometimes a parent remains fiercely independent, seeing any need for assistance as a form of weakness. Such parents may not welcome any advice from them children and certainly don’t want their children caring for them.

Other parents may swing the opposite way entirely, sometimes becoming overly needy and wanting their children to drop everything and come running whenever they call.

There are other challenges too, such as:

• Manipulative parents, who may try to guilt trip their children into going above and beyond, often with claims like ‘you don’t love me anymore’ or ‘you never do anything for me’. Such parents may act one way when they’re with you alone and differently when other people are present.
• Parents who are abusive emotionally, physically, or verbally. This type of abuse isn’t talked about often, but is a serious issue.
• Parents who are toxic in some way. This includes manipulative or abusive parents, along with those who are narcissistic or refuse to see any perspective other than their own.
• Emotionally immature parents. Such parents have limited emotional development in some areas. This may have created distinct problems when you were a child, leading to a variety of coping mechanisms that you carried into adulthood.
• Parents with cognitive impairment. Any form of cognitive impairment, including dementia, may influence your parent’s ability to engage with you, to understand the environment around them, and to respond rationally.

What You Can Do

While some caregivers have good relationships with the people they’re supporting, many others don’t. You just need to glance at caregiving forums to see how many caregivers struggle in this way.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but there are things you can do to make things easier for yourself and for the person you’re supporting.

Take Care of Yourself

Sometimes you can’t change the situation at hand, but you can change your reaction to it.

While that statement might sound idealistic and perhaps patronizing, it is true. Caregivers vary dramatically in how they experience their role. Some find themselves overwhelmed, stressed, and always on the back foot, while others do surprisingly well – even when their situations and workloads are very similar.

The caregivers that do well are resilient, which is something that you can cultivate in yourself. Some important ways to do so include:

• Self-care. Self-care simply means that you’re meeting your own needs. This includes functional needs, like visiting the doctor and eating well, along with easy to miss needs, like the need to relax and have time to yourself.
• Self-compassion. This idea isn’t discussed as often as self-care, but it is is as important, if not more so. As the name suggests, self-compassion means that you’re being kind and compassionate to yourself, just like you would if someone you love was going through a difficult time.
• Positive self-talk. This strongly relates to the idea of self-compassion. Basically, we often give ourselves a hard time, thinking that we should do better and that we’re not good enough. Yet, no one gets it right all the time. Sometimes there isn’t a right solution to begin with. You’re doing well. Truly – and acknowledging that can help.

It’s also important to think about your reactions and to own them. Relationships are two-sided affairs and it’s rare for one person to be entirely right and the other to be entirely wrong. For example, in trying to protect and support their loved ones, adult children sometimes overstep the mark and fail to recognize the senior’s autonomy.

Address The Relationship

Sometimes you need to look more closely at the relationship between yourself and your parent.

Parent and child relationships are often filled with small and large unresolved issues. These can easily creep up on you, affecting the quality of your relationship and interactions in many different ways.

There’s immense power in taking a step back and looking at the relationship. This will often include looking at your childhood and thinking about needs that your parent didn’t meat them (and perhaps still doesn’t meet).

Looking back like this doesn’t mean that you’re trying to blame. Instead, the process can help you to understand more about yourself and where different reactions come from. Doing so makes it much easier to see how to resolve problems and gives you more confidence to create boundaries.

There are a number of books that can help you on this journey. We recommend the following ones, most of which we’ve read and worked through ourselves.

• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson.
• Our Mothers, Ourselves by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend. As the title suggests, this book focuses on the relationship between a child and their mother. It has the tagline: How Understanding Your Mother’s Influence Can Set You on a Path to a Better Life. Like other books by these authors, this one is easy to read, contains plenty of examples, and references Christianity and bible verses throughout.

Deal With The Situation

The previous two approaches focus on you. On changing your response to a situation and growing in yourself.

While the ideas are powerful, they sometimes fall far short.

This isn’t surprising, as a relationship isn’t a one-way street. To make it work well, you sometimes need to have difficult conversations, to find compromises, and to make sure your needs are met.

Thankfully, having those conversations isn’t as difficult as you might think. We have two upcoming posts on the topic. The first talks about why you need to confront your parent, while the second looks at how to do so effectively.

Dealing with the situation truly is important.

While caregiving does involve some sacrifices, it should never involve giving up all your wants and needs. Giving too much isn’t healthy and can leave you stressed and burned out. Sometimes, supporting yourself and your family member involves making some hard decisions and drawing boundaries.

Look For What Works

Caregiving is an unusual situation. It’s important to maintain your boundaries and meet your own needs, but you’re also supporting a person who mightn’t be able to care for themselves. You’re often also facing the complexity of a parent-child relationship or some other type of family relationship.

Every caregiver is in a unique situation, one that has its own specific quirks and complexities.

This means that you’ll need to find your own balance between your needs and your family member’s. You’ll need to work out where to draw boundaries and how to respond to the difficult things.

Doing so takes time, energy, and patience. Still, the more positive changes you make, the better things are for you and the care recipient in the long-term. The following tips can help:

• Try to see things from their perspective. Aging can be scary and overwhelming. Seniors are often facing a body that doesn’t work like it did, along with a loss of autonomy and challenges that are likely to get worse with time. It’s hardly surprising that they lash out sometimes, especially if your suggestions would make them more dependent on you.
• Respect them. Adult children often fall into the trap of deciding what’s best for their aging parent, then trying to make the aging parent follow that course of action. While there’s nothing wrong with wanting the best and suggesting this, remember that the senior is an adult who has the right to make their own decisions. Consistently pushing against what they want is often unreasonable and risks damaging your relationship with them.
• Choose the timing well. Most of us have more energy at some parts of the day than others. This is true for seniors too. Doing difficult tasks when everyone has energy and isn’t hungry makes life much easier.
• Prioritize. Take some time to think about what matters the most and prioritize those areas. For example, is it worth getting into a debate because the senior showers every second day instead of every day?
• Find your own solutions. It’s easy to get stuck on the way that things ‘should’ be, rather than what works. Sometimes you need to think outside the box to make your situation easier. For example, you might do dishes once a day, rather than after every meal, if you’re often short on time and energy.