Adult Children & Their Elderly Parents

October 19, 2012

Interview with Dan Taylor, author of the book The Parent Care Solution: A Legacy of Love...

________________

Mike Carruthers:
It's inevitable that parents grow old, require more care, and eventually die. And the vast majority of elderly parents and their baby boomer children are completely unprepared for that.

Dan Taylor:
What happens is you get the phone call in the middle of the night that dad's walking down the street in his pajamas trying to give away the dog and mom's cooking eggs on the front lawn and then you have to figure out what you are going to do and you don't have the documents, don't have the authority, you don't know where the assets are, but you have to spring to action.
 

Dan Taylor, author of the book The Parent Care Solution, says it's important for children to talk to their elderly parents about what will happen should they become ill. Where their important documents are and where their assets are.

The goal of this talk is to let your parents design their care future instead of letting them default and you default to a situation that neither party has planned for. You see, this is not a situation that we have the option of dealing with. We either have to deal with this situation with our parents or as parents either by design or default.

A lot of elderly parents will go to great lengths to avoid this conversation. It's just not something they want to talk about, and unfortunately most people never have this conversation.

But the fact of the matter is if you don't have this conversation, you get to have lots of unpleasant conversations because of it.