Aging: The Sandwich Generation - Heather Suri

Heather Suri owns a Care Management Practice called Pathways In Aging. Care management involves helping families create teams. Their specialty is working with aging people.

Older adults, in general, tend to have a different calculation of personal risk. When you’re in the closing chapters of your life, your risk is different from when you are a teenager. A lot of times, adult children just wish their parents would go into assisted living because of the risks associated with aging in place, but the challenge comes in finding the intersections between what they want and what their parents want.

One of the roles of a therapist is not to tell you what to do, but to find the answers that are already inside yourself and be willing to listen to and sit with those answers no matter how uncomfortable. You are not responsible for your parents and all of their choices. People who have capacity have the right to make decisions that we don’t agree with. Boundaries are important to be able to find peace in whatever situation you’re in.

Everybody’s boundaries are going to be different, but you have to be healthy yourself before you can take care of anybody else. You get to decide what your boundaries are. Define what’s right for you and respect and honor the boundaries that you set.

One of the ways we can effectively work with our aging parents is by building a team. Figure out who the team is that will help with your parents. As the “sandwich generation,” we make everything our job, and it’s exhausting. Having a team will ease the stress and exhaustion.

What is it that most families think they’re “alone” in? Is your parent safe to drive? When do we know when cognition changes are actually dementia, and how do you navigate getting them help? The answers aren’t ever black or white and it always depends on the situation and the family.

Sometimes the kids aren’t the best messenger when it comes to having those hard conversations with the parents. Sometimes there are other people involved in the older parent’s life that can help when there could be a contentious relationship between a parent and a child. Sometimes there’s a lot of frustration and resentment between siblings because each member of the family has their own individual boundaries and bandwidth and the care will never be distributed evenly. Be able to articulate what you need and understand the talents and gifts of the other siblings.

We need to prepare our own kids for our own aging. It’s important to have the hard conversations with our own kids to prepare them.

Heather outlines some of the ways we can get started.

Finally, remember that doing the best you can do is enough and it’s ok to get help.

Heather Suri can be found at:

pathwaysinaging.com (phone, email, or book a consultation)