Caring for your Parents

While surfing the web this morning, I ran across a link to a PBS documentary called “Caring for your Parents”. As most of you have seen and hopefully watched, I have posted a link to another documentary on my blog called “The Sandwich Generation”. That video chronicles one family’s struggles with the issues of caring for children while taking on the responsibilities of caring for aging parents as well. The PBS documentary takes us into the lives of five families all from different socio- economic backgrounds, cultures, financial circumstances and medical/aging related issues.

I took the time to watch the entire video which lasted about 90 minutes. The nice thing about the way PBS has the website set-up you can watch the video in chapters. So, if you don’t have the time to watch the entire documentary, you can watch chapters at your convenience, a few minutes at a time.

As the population ages, adult children of aging parents are struggling with how to deal with the unprecedented social, economic and personal issues surrounding being a caregiver. “Caring for your Parents” is a moving film that draws attention to the emotional and universal reality we are all struggling with.

There are many relevant issues covered in the documentary like struggling to keep parents at home, tension among adult siblings and the complexity of changing the caregiver’s role as the health of the parent changes. Additionally the impact of care-giving on marriages and the importance of taking care of the caregiver are important topics covered in this documentary.

I find watching films and documentaries like this help me to understand how to better respond to the needs of my aging Mom. I’m also learning the importance of my own health and well being in addition to the needs and feelings of my siblings as we are working through helping our Mom.

To watch the video on-line just follow this link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/caringforyourparents/watchonline/index.html