Parenting Your Parents: Support Strategies for Meeting the Challenge of Aging in the Family

Sarah Robertson is the editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

More and more baby boomers—members of the so-called sandwich
generation—are facing the daunting challenge of ensuring the
well-being of aging parents who are no longer able to care for
themselves due to declining mental and/or physical health. This timely
book by business author Bart Mindszenthy and Michael Gordon, head of
Geriatrics and Internal Medicine at Toronto’s Baycrest Centre for
Geriatric Care, offers encouragement without glossing over the harsh
realities of elder care.

Fifteen real-life “family stories” explore the role of siblings in
elder care and parental issues such as denial, substance abuse,
independence, depression, and dementia. Each case study is divided into
two parts: “The Challenge,” which describes the family dilemma or
crisis, and “The Health Care Professional’s Point of View,” which
offers tentative solutions—“tentative” because, as Mindszenthy and
Gordon keep reminding us, there are no easy answers. Next, the authors
recount their experiences with their own aging parents; among the
book’s many distressing stories, the most harrowing by far is
Mindszenthy’s chronicle of his Herculean struggle to hospitalize his
mother, who was suffering from dementia and acute paranoia. The latter
half of the book comprises a Personal Parenting Planner, which helps
boomers prepare for an emergency or a family crisis, and a Resource
Guide, which provides a brief guide to health professionals and a
comprehensive directory of federal and provincial/territorial resources.

There’s little evidence that the book was subjected to editorial
scrutiny; typos, redundancies, missing words, grammatical/punctuation
errors, and infelicities like “try and” abound, as do incoherent
sentences like the following: “But just as hard to bear for Ivan and
Sophie is that their two granddaughters are completely alien who show no
interest in or respect for them.” Despite these shortcomings,
Parenting Your Parents is an essential resource for boomers with aging
parents. If you have the luxury of time, read it well in advance of that
broken hip, stroke, or other potential catastrophic event. As the
authors make clear, assisting aging parents who are in crisis takes a
tremendous emotional and physical toll on adult children. Be prepared.