Were there Warning Signs when you Saw Your Aging Parents Over the Holidays? (12:47)
For aging parents, questions and issues related to their physical, social, and psychological well-being may arise.
Broadcast Retirement Network’s Jeffrey Snyder discusses the warning signs for aging parents with Kim and Mike Barnes of Parenting Aging Parents.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
This morning on BRN, were there warning signs when you saw your aging parents over the holidays? We’re going to welcome back to the program, Kim and Mike Barnes of Parenting Aging Parents. Kim, Mike, great to see you.
Thanks for joining us on the program this morning. Glad to be with you. Yeah, it’s good to be here.
Well, you guys haven’t changed and I guess caregiving is treating you well. Tell us a little about, we were just talking offline about the Facebook group, Parenting Aging Parents. How’s it doing and how has it grown?
Mike Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
It’s grown a lot. We’re up to 23,000 plus in the group, which is represented all over the country because there’s so many people out there who don’t realize how much help that they need until they’re in it. And once they’re in it, they say, where can I get help?
Because I feel so alone.
Kim Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
And it’s unfortunate that in some ways we think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg because there are so many people that this affects. It really affects just about every family to some degree. And it’s a really tough and challenging stage of life, especially if you feel like I’m the only one going through it.
We see that when you can come together with others, you can really leverage others’ experiences and learn from each other, but also just makes you feel like I’m not the only one.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
And do I have to pay to join the Facebook group? How do I join it? How do I find you if I’m a caregiver or thinking about becoming a caregiver?
Kim Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
Yeah, really. It’s in any stage of that process of whether you are already caring, whether you’re doing hands-on caregiving or like both of us where we’re helping from afar, or if you’re in the thick of it. So it’s in that preparation phase or while you’re in the middle of it.
And the Facebook group is free. You can go to the website, parentingagingparents.com, and there’s a button to click on to join the community, or you can go straight and find it through Facebook. Yeah.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
There you go. There you go. All right.
Let’s kind of shift gears a little bit. Still caregiving, but maybe I’ll start with you, Kim. And we just rolled through the holiday season, fun times, get to be with family, friends, but maybe people were noticing that maybe a loved one was kind of suffering.
What are some of the key signs that a loved one, especially an older loved one, may be suffering or maybe having challenges that maybe you need to step in?
Kim Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
Yeah. I mean, I think that sometimes if we have a loved one who lives in a different city, so we may talk on the phone every single day, there’s still things that you’re not going to maybe pick up on. Some things you do when there’s cognitive challenges, or you’re realizing that they’re not remembering, or they’re getting really forgetful.
Some of those may be evident when you’re just having phone conversations, but when you’re in person, you can really see things more clearly. Okay. How do they look?
How are their eating habits? Are they losing weight that maybe they aren’t intending to? Are they forgetful?
Are they just having a hard time getting around? When you’re watching them walk, are they clutching the sofa? Are they clutching the wall?
Are they having a hard time getting up or getting down? Those are just some of the beginnings of some of those things.
Mike Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
Yeah. I think you just have to notice how they’ve changed since the last time you saw them. I watched my dad pretty closely because he just turned 87.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Happy birthday, dad.
Mike Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
He lives on the second floor of an independent living place. He’s proud of the fact that he takes the stairs every time. He goes up the stairs to go up to his room, takes the stairs down to go down to eat or if he needs to leave or anything.
I watch him just in case if he’s not going up the stairs very well. If he says, yeah, I’m riding the elevator now, that would be a red flag to me. When my mom, before she went into memory care a few years ago, I would talk to her on the phone and, Mom, what are you doing?
Oh, yeah, I’m just reading another book. My mom hadn’t read a book in 10 years, but she thought she had. But if I just talked to her on the phone, I’d think, oh, okay, I can see my mom.
She reads all the time. She’s reading a book. Everything’s fine.
But see her in person and realize she hadn’t touched a book. There’s dust everywhere on the books. Okay.
Red flag again.
Kim Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
So how have they changed? Well, and that was also a red flag too. Speaking of Doug, his mom was always a meticulous housekeeper, meticulous.
And we started noticing that there was more dust on the counters. And that was a red flag for her because that was out of character. So anything that is out of character for them, whether it’s how they keep the house, is it kind of a mess right now?
And they’ve always been really tidy and or clean. How are they carrying themselves? Do they typically always dress well?
Not necessarily fancy, but just like, are they always dressed in match and they always have their hair done or they’re wearing jewelry? Things like that. If you notice a change where all of a sudden now they look a little more unkempt, they’re not doing some of the things that they used to wear, whether it’s getting their, you know, painting their nails, wearing jewelry, those kinds of things can all just be okay.
Is that a physical challenge that they’re having or potentially is that something more cognitive where there might be some signs of memory loss?
Mike Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
Yeah. Don’t write off a change like, oh, well, it’s just, I haven’t seen them in a long time. Changes, when we’re talking about elderly people, changes usually are not good.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
And I mean, is it too, obviously you want to be close to parents. I mean, a lot of us are disparate. I mean, I live in Charlotte, North Carolina.
My mom and dad live in Baltimore. My brother lives in Massachusetts. I mean, is there a benefit in some way to being away?
Because you don’t see, so you can notice a change. If I’m involved with my parents or involved with a loved one every day, those changes are a little bit more incremental short of, you know, like falling or a gait change.
Kim Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
Yeah, sure. Absolutely. I mean, it’s kind of like when you’re around somebody all the time, you don’t notice five pounds or 10 pounds because it happens gradually or sometimes even on ourselves.
And then all of a sudden you see somebody you haven’t seen in a while and you’re like, whoa, you know, so similar that you’re going to be more likely to notice the changes because there’s going to be a bigger one since the last time you saw them. And I think that it might just jump out at you a little bit more. Now, certainly when you’re around them more often, you’re going to be more aware of the fact that they’re having the same conversations over and over where if you’re just, if you just kind of, you know, blow into town, spend a day with them, you may not pick up on some of the same, especially I think the cognitive challenges that you might, if you’re the more time you spend with them.
Yeah.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I mean, Mike, you talked about your dad, I think going and taking the stairs, which sounds great. Do you look at things like gait, balance? Look, and look, anyone who knows me knows that I trip and fall quite often, but it’s a lot easier, not often, but I mean, I, you know, I stumble like anybody else.
Mike Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
We all do.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah. How do you differentiate maybe between a stumble like, oh, shoot, that was a stare that I didn’t or a two by four on the ground that I didn’t see. How do you, how do you balance that with actual changes?
Mike Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
Well, I’d like to think that you, me, Kim, we all, we trip every so often. It’s not something that happens numerous times during the day where are you having trouble? Did you forget how to walk dad?
What’s going on here? My dad had COVID and was in the hospital back during the true COVID days, uh, about four years ago. And when he got out, he was moving really slow, had trouble, couldn’t go up the stairs at the time.
And I knew then, you know, things didn’t look good, but he went to physical therapy. He improved, things got better. But at the time, when we signed then we could tell there was a drastic change from before COVID to after he was in the hospital for three days.
And so it’s those types of changes that you have to watch for, because again, we all slip up. We all forget. Oh, we’re not paying attention.
We’re looking at our phone. What’s your name? Oh yeah, Jeffrey.
That’s right. You know, that type of thing. We all forget something, but, and we all trip every once in a while, but when it’s something that happens time after time after time in a short amount of time, that’s when it’s a red flag.
Kim Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
And sometimes I was going to say with the walking, sorry, sometimes with the walking, it’s, you know, are they sort of shuffling? Are they, uh, do they look unsteady? Do they, are they grabbing your arm when you’re going up a curb?
For instance, are they having to really, you know, make it a conscious effort to get up there? Uh, you know, how are they doing when they’re getting in and out of the car? Those are things that you can watch for that can be signs of physical weakness.
Can, you know, do we need to try to bring in physical therapy? That’s something that we’ve done for my mom recently. What are the things that, that maybe are different than the last time?
And some of that is even looking in their house to see what are the things that we can look at for kind of, let’s, let’s try to hedge our bets here and take away some of the, the, the potential risk factors that may be in their house that they may, you know, maybe have never been an issue before, but now maybe you need to be more concerned about.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Is there a case where you have to balance denial, denial? Um, you know, uh, we all kind of have this image of our parents or our loved ones and, uh, you know, we’re fine. How much does that play into this evaluation?
Because, and, and also selfishly, we might be in denial because we don’t want to, maybe we don’t want to deal with it. Uh, you know, I’m not, I’m not, not expressing that’s my perspective, but I mean that some people are saying like, oh, you know, I can’t, I got kids, I got a job. I don’t want to have to deal with this.
And they deny it. How do you, how do you balance that deniability?
Mike Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
You just have to be honest with yourself, which can be tough to do. My mom, as she started showing some signs of Alzheimer’s several years ago, uh, she would actually say something every once in a while, like, I’m just glad I don’t have that thing my sister had because her sister passed away from Alzheimer’s and she would be in denial about it. And as I’d watched my mom and I would see her holding, uh, the newspaper every morning, like she had Sudoku and she was going to be playing it, but she wasn’t filling it out.
And I was like, okay, there’s must be a problem there because you used to do the crossword every day and the Sudoku every day. And now you’re just holding it and you’re acting like you’re doing it, but you’re not. And it’s one of those things where you don’t want to admit that mom or dad, they’ve fallen that far and they can’t do what they used to do, but you have to open your eyes and see and admit to yourself, okay, that is a change.
And that’s something we need to take care of.
Kim Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
Well, and I think even with your parents that we started seeing signs and it took a while before your dad was willing to admit it and share it with us.
Mike Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
You know, dad came to me, you know, this was several years ago, but he came to me and he said, I think your mom’s having trouble remembering things. It’s like, dad, you’re just now noticing this. I noticed that a couple of years ago.
It’s like, yeah, she’s really forgetting things.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
And maybe that’s deniability as well.
Mike Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
Sure. Yeah, it is. And that’s where y’all have to help each other.
It’s a, it’s a family thing. It’s a team thing where you have to work together on something like that to where I have to help my dad. My dad helps me in other things, but, but help him understand that, that the woman you’ve been married to for almost 65 years is not what she used to be.
And here’s what we need to do about it, because it can be hard for, for all of us to take that big step to, to do the care that they really need.
Kim Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
And it’s, and in some ways too, it’s not being overly look, you know, like looking more for something that’s not there too. I mean, I think that sometimes we can be at the other extreme of, oh gosh, you know, she had a little stumble. And so that must mean this when it really just means that they just had a little stumble, like we all might do.
It’s, it’s balancing not being extreme on either. And, and really, you know, what are, what are, what’s a one-off versus this is maybe a symptom or a continuous issue.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Well, great. Well said, Kim, Mike, that just begs the question, what do you do? And for that, we’re going to hold off till tomorrow morning.
We’re going to bring you back to talk about that very important topic. How do you respond when you notice someone declining or a change in behavior? Mike, Kim, great to see you.
And we look forward to having you back on the program tomorrow morning.
Mike Barnes, Parenting Aging Parents
Thank you.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
And don’t forget to subscribe to our daily newsletter, The Morning Pulse, where all the news in one place. Details, of course, at our website. And as I said, we’ll pick up the conversation tomorrow morning with part two and talk about what you need to do if you notice a slight decline in your aging parents.
Until then, I’m Jeff Snyder. Stay safe, keep on saving, and don’t forget, roll with the changes.