Worse than taking away your parents' car keys? Taking away their cell phone. How to protect your aging parents.

By Beth Pinsker

Worse than taking away your parents' car keys? Taking away their cell phone. How to protect your aging parents. Parental controls aren't just for kids anymore

There are two main approaches for families to help aging loved ones who are having trouble with technology: Roll into it slowly, or just do it.

When the time came for Elliott Appel's dad to stop driving, he willingly gave up his car keys. But when Appel told him it was no longer safe for him to have unmonitored access to a computer or phone, it was a much bigger deal.

"The phone stuff was about a year and a half later than the car," said Appel, who at that point was already handling a lot of his father's financial and medical affairs, in conjunction with his mother, even though his parents were long divorced. Appel said he made the jump to restrict access to internet-connected devices because he saw some alarming irregularities: random withdrawals on his father's bank account that looked sketchy, and a check to a neighbor for $1,000. In addition to cancer and dementia, Appel's father had mental-health and addiction problems.

"I figured he's buying drugs or other things are happening, and I thought, 'How best can we prevent this?'" said Appel, who was in his 20s when he had to start taking care of his father. An opportunity came up when his father lost his phone during a hospital visit. Appel replaced it, but under his own plan, and handed it over with child-protection monitoring software installed.

"It doesn't feel good in the moment, but this was the lesser of all evils," Appel said. "It meant that we could block a number if we needed to. Then [his health] declined so much that we didn't need it later on."

Appel's father died in 2023, in his mid-70s, after about seven tumultuous years of challenging health problems. Appel is now in his mid-30s and works as a financial planner based in Wisconsin who specializes in helping families with transitions like the one his own family faced. He recently published a book on the topic titled, "How to Help Your Parents as They Age: A Financial Planner's Guide to Caregiving."

There are two main approaches for families to help aging loved ones who are having trouble with technology: Roll into it slowly, or just do it.

Appel is for doing what you have to do. "You just jump in," he said. "It's like any other caregiving task. It feels less bad the further you go along. He was actively hurting himself. He had over $1,000 in insufficient-funds fees because he wasn't keeping track of his spending."

Jen Eaves has been taking a slower approach to her mother's cognitive decline, even though she's the vice president of marketing for Aura, a family online safety company. It's one thing for people to sign up for preventive monitoring of their own accounts, and another thing for an adult child to do that for an aging parent who is trying to maintain their independence.

"Her device is how she stays connected to the world, so taking that away is the most terrifying thing," Eaves said. But the reality is that her mother had had a stroke and a series of other health problems and wasn't being safe with her internet access. There were worries about scams. There were problems with spending on suspicious health supplements. Her mom even took out a new credit card simply by inadvertently checking a box when putting through an Amazon order.

Eaves's question to her mom was: "How do I make sure you're still in control, but also talk about how you can be safe?"

The answer was monitoring software for now - and no, Eaves does not feel bad about it. "My brother is the other caregiver, and he's a lot more sensitive. I'm just like, oh, no, you need me. I'm going to make sure you're OK," she said. "Maybe at first it felt Big Brotherish, but my mom realizes now that she needs to hand this over to me."

The key to family harmony with either of these approaches is to maintain the person's dignity as much as possible, said Kate Nattoli, a certified dementia practitioner with Crescent Grove Advisors. Most of the products a family may look at are labeled as "child protection," and that brings home the role reversals involved in parenting your parents. "It's wonky territory to try to navigate," said Nattoli. "You want to make sure everyone knows you're coming from a place of love and care and concern. Say, 'I want to be a support to you, not control you.'"

Most families are able to work through these issues without involving the courts. While having a power of attorney designated for a person who is suffering cognitive decline is an absolute necessity, having them declared incompetent by a court is not. The monitoring of and restricted access to devices instead should come through negotiation, even when you are dealing with someone who is very recalcitrant.

Appel thought about pursuing guardianship over his father because his situation was so complicated.

"We paid an attorney for a consult, but in the end, nothing would have changed other than a lot more bureaucracy. He was going to do whatever he was going to do," Appel said. They also thought about video monitoring in his dad's apartment when he insisted on living alone, but that was a bridge too far for all of them as far as dignity and privacy were concerned.

Surveillance may be less of a concern in other families where divorce and estrangement aren't part of the equation. Family dynamics run deep, and sorting through the complications involved in restricting a connection to the outside world or keeping tabs on an older person will look different for every household. And the icky feelings about the intrusion may persist until you have transparent conversations about it.

Just keep at it, Nattoli advises. "Be up front and forthright and make sure your intentions are well known," she said. "And the earlier the better."

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-Beth Pinsker

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10-08-26 1655ET