If a Parent Won’t Move, You Might Have to Let Them ‘Fail at Home’

Financial planner and author Elliott Appel was our guest on The Long View recently. The founder of Kindness Financial Planning provided some great tips for people helping their aging parents. In the episode and his book, How to Help Your Parents As They Age: A Financial Planner’s Guide to Caregiving, he’s very open about his father’s last years and the lessons he learned along the way.

We invite you to enjoy to the full episode, and we’re also highlighting an excerpt below in which he talks about housing decisions and setting boundaries for yourself as a caregiver.

What to Do If an Aging Parent Won’t Move

Christine Benz: For a lot of older adults, staying put in their homes is the default. I know that for adult children, that can be a source of a lot of frustration, especially if the home doesn’t seem like a safe or appropriate place for the parent to be. Do you have any advice for adult children navigating this particular situation?

Elliott Appel: I’m going to go back to just encourage as much conversation as you can early on and see what the qualities are at home that are important to them. Because I think it’s important to figure out what it is they enjoy about living there to see if those qualities can exist somewhere else or at a different time in the healthcare journey. And maybe opening the question of under what scenarios would they be open to moving to a different place? If they say never, and that’s the end of the conversation, you might just have to figure out for yourself, “OK, I’m going to set the boundary that I’m willing to help them, but they’re going to figure out how to live at home.“ And a lot of this comes back to: How do I set these boundaries?

In my dad’s situation, this was really, really hard to do, and we just kept trying to get him to move for as long as possible, but eventually we just ran out of energy, and we let him fail at home.

That’s something the eldercare consultant helped us with, sort of reconciling that it’s hard to do, but at that point, your loved one will reach out. And that’s what ended up happening to my dad; he failed so badly at home. He called me in tears, and my dad never cried, asking me to help him find a place to live. So, it can be effective, and I know it sounds cruel, but you also can’t burn yourself out trying to get them to do something that they don’t want to do. You can’t care about it more than your loved one.

Managing Caregiver Stress and Burnout

Amy Arnott: I wanted to follow up on that issue of burnout. The whole caregiving journey can be both physically and emotionally draining. The book includes some tips for making caregiving slightly less painful, whether it’s taking time out to laugh or trying to enjoy quality time with your parent, even if they’re declining in health. Can you share any other ideas for things that people can do to protect their own sanity and happiness while they’re also advocating for their loved one?

Appel: This is a really challenging one to do. I think as much as you can hire and outsource certain things, which usually, when you start, you don’t want to do any of that, but as you get farther along, you realize it’s just a reality that you’re going to have to do. If you can do that earlier, it hopefully will give you more energy. And that could be as simple as hiring an attorney, hiring a financial planner, an eldercare consultant, a daily money manager, nursing aides—whatever it is, whatever your pain points are, or things that you don’t like to do and that your loved one’s willing to accept help with, hire. That can be helpful. Also schedule time for yourself. I know that’s easier said than done, but I think it’s really important, as you go along in your journey, that you have to take the time that you outsource for yourself and set those boundaries with your loved ones.

I know I’ve said that a lot of times, and I will just continue saying that to as many people as will listen, but you have to set the boundaries that you are comfortable with. Your parents don’t, or your loved ones don’t, get to set those boundaries for you. You get to set those boundaries, and they may need to change over time. I know they certainly did for my mom and me, for what we were willing to do at the start versus at the end of my dad’s life, just because we were so burned out by that point.

In terms of happiness with your parents, just figure out what they like to do and what qualities are there. I’ll give the example that my mom took my dad for drives. He didn’t necessarily want to go on the drives, but my mom would just show up and say, “OK, hey, we’re going for a drive.” And my dad would always perk up when that happened. For me, it was taking him to the grocery store for the longest time, but even that, I got burned out near the end.

Benz: The whole boundary-setting discussion I thought was very helpful. What I liked was that you talked about long-term boundaries. From the beginning, you might say, “Well, I don’t want to help with showering and bathing,” or something like that, but also kind of daily boundaries. On a given day, you might say, “You know what? I don’t have it in me to do that thing.” Can you talk about that, how they can be very short-term as well?

Appel: For me, and I gave the example of taking my dad to the grocery store, most days I was perfectly fine with that, but there were some days that I showed up that I just couldn’t do it. Imagine a feeble man walking around a grocery store who can’t see well, who’s bumping into people and other objects; he doesn’t make a list, and he doesn’t know where he wants to go in the store. A trip that might take someone 15 minutes is now an hour and a half, and he’s having trouble standing.

I think it’s important to be mindful of how you’re showing up that day, what energy you have available, and having that outsourced. If you’re hiring an eldercare consultant, I could then say, “Hey, I can’t do that today, Dad, but I will make sure that our eldercare consultant does that tomorrow or the next day or whoever that is, or hey, we’ll order groceries.” I think it’s important to just be upfront with your loved one when that may come up so they’re not surprised by it. But if they are surprised by it, still set the boundary. I think that’s perfectly fine.