Help Your Parents Enjoy the Holidays - 6 Tips for the Season

The holiday season is a great time to get together with family to rekindle warm feelings and recall fond experiences from the past. However, family gatherings can also be stressful if we are not prepared or if we have expectations that cannot be met. As you prepare to gather with family this year, the staff of Helpwithmyparents.com offers some suggestions that will help you and the older members of your group have the best possible experience.

1- Be considerate
Remember that the older members of your group may not be able to maintain the same level of activity as the younger members, so plan activities that are suitable for all of the group. If an older family member suffers from memory difficulties avoid embarrassing them by asking them to recall an event from the past.

2- Be Prepared
If you are hosting the family gathering make sure that your home is accessible to older family members who may have limited mobility. Older members of your family group may not be as able to tolerate the noise and the strain of an extended gathering and it may be necessary to prepare a quiet room where they can rest.

3- Be Aware
If an older family member needs transportation make sure that it is arranged well in advance and that a suitable vehicle is available. If the older family member needs to take medication during the event make sure they bring it with them. Some medications will interact poorly with alcohol and it may be necessary to monitor the alcohol consumption of an older family member particularly if there is some loss of cognitive functioning.

4- Be Understanding
As we age our abilities and interests may also change, if an older family member cannot or does not want to engage in activities they may have engaged in in the past avoid attempting to persuade them to do so.

5- Be Open
Going into a holiday family gathering with expectations that are too rigid or inflexible will likely lead to disappointment for all, so try to open to the experiences as they occur and allow those present to be themselves.

6- Be…
Most importantly if we can relax and be our most warm, open and accepting selves, the holiday gathering can be a wonderful experience for all who attend.

Companion Site Launched

This week we decided to launch a companion site of HelpWithMyParents.com called HelpWithMyKids.com. In many ways this decision feels premature to me - the site still needs a lot of work on the topic pages and we have just begun to list providers who serve children and their parents. Nevertheless, the need is there, and the decision to publish the site now will spur us to action. It will also provide the opportunity for others to contribute as they see fit. The site is very similar in structure to the HelpWithMyParents site - it is in a wiki format so that those with expertise can contribute and providers of services can list themselves on the site.

Those of you, like me, who have young children and aging parents will quickly see why both websites are necessary. This point was brought home to me recently as I spoke at a conference on Multiple Sclerosis. I was demonstrating the information on the HelpWithMyParents site and a woman in the audience said that she thought the information was helpful, but that she would not have found it on her own because it was her child she needed help with not her parents.

I look forward to working with those of you who share my commitment to provide comprehensive and easily accessible information to people who are in need of services throughout the life span.

My Committment

In late 2006 after a visit from my good friend and colleague John Bowling I decided to start Helpwithmyparents.com. John and I have both worked for many years in the senior care industry - at first together as psychologists and later separately. John went on the work as an administrator and corporate officer for Silverado Senior Living and I operated outpatient psychiatric programs for seniors. John is now at Southern Oregon University where he continues to advance the cause of senior services and I am running a small outpatient mental health clinic in Salt Lake City.

When John and I get together we spend a lot of time talking about ideas and solutions to problems that we perceive. During that visit in 2006, one of the things we discussed was the difficulty the children of aging parents have finding comprehensive and coordinated information. It was shortly after this that I started working on Helpwithmyparents.com. My goal was, and remains, to provide a single website that can provide comprehensive informative content and information about all of the providers of services to seniors across the whole country. I want a person who lives on one side of the country to know all of the options that available to them, as they search for help for their parent(s), who may live on the other side of the country. I also want them to be able to access information about any situation, circumstance or illness that their parent may be dealing with.

This is an enormous task and it was two years before I felt ready to publish the site to web. The thing that finally allowed me to feel comfortable doing so was the decision to make all of the content pages into wikis (pages that can be edited by users), and to allow service providers to submit their own information to the site. In the 10 months since we launched the site we have made steady progress, but there is much that still needs to be done. Brent Pace has contributed significantly to the design and function of the site and Jeremy Rasmussen has worked wonders on the technical side. We are also now fortunate enough to have Carolyn Hunter whose knowledge of senior issues is proving invaluable to our ongoing efforts.

I made a decision early on that a website like Helpwithmyparents.com is only useful if it can provide free comprehensive and unencumbered access to users. Therefore we do not require people to log in to use the site and we do not charge providers to be listed on the site. I feel strongly that having free unencumbered access is the strength of Helpwithmyparents.com. My commitment to those who use the site is that we will never charge people to use the site and we will never charge businesses and organizations to be listed on the site.

It is my hope, and expectation, that we will be able to generate enough revenue through the banner ads that are available on the site to continue to fund the ongoing development and maintenance of the site, and that users will contribute to the content and provider information available.