Successfully Navigating Your Parents Senior Years

No matter your parents’ age or stage of life, this comprehensive guide walks you step-by-step through developing a flexible, proactive plan that will allow you to make the most informed decisions for your parents’ well-being—and your own. Millions of Americans are in an active caregiver role or will be in one in the future, yet few have a solid plan for the inevitable challenges of aging. Whether your parents are in their 60s or their 90s, and whether they have years of health ahead of them or already need more support, Successfully Navigating Your Parents’ Senior Years provides the framework and information you need to prepare for and handle with confidence the changes to come. The responsibility of caring for an aging loved one is often daunting—and when trouble hits, the sudden barrage of questions you face can be overwhelming. Have your parents executed their Advance Directives? Do you know what to look for in a senior community (and how to ensure a spot is available when you need it)? If your parents want to stay in their home, what can you do to ensure their safety? Certified aging life care specialist and CEO of Senior Living Strategies Star Bradbury draws on her 25 years of experience in senior living to bring you an up-to-date, comprehensive guide to navigating the tricky waters ahead—starting with putting a plan in place now that maximizes your parents’ independence while providing them with the support they need. Successfully Navigating Your Parents’ Senior Years covers: How to bring up sensitive topics with your aging parents Steps you can take to keep your parents safely independent in their own homes for longer Red flags that indicate your parents may need more help Senior living options and the key questions to ask in choosing any kind of retirement community Alternative living arrangements to consider for aging parents, such as senior roommates, cohousing, and/or niche retirement communities How to get help paying for your parents’ medical care (you have more options than you think!) Legal and financial documents to have on hand in case of a sudden medical emergency Insider tips, helpful checklists, and more Don’t wait for a crisis to begin planning for the future. Successfully Navigating Your Parents’ Senior Years is an indispensable blueprint that will give you the tools and knowledge you need to advocate for your parents when they need you most.

Inside intelligence you will need to make informed decisions, financially and compassionately, when caring for aging loved ones—whether they are living at home, in a care facility, or in the hospital or hospice care. Do you have a parent or aging loved one nearing or in the most fragile years of life? Are you considering in-home care for them? Assisted living? A nursing home? Have they endured repeated hospitalizations, or are they facing major surgery? Are they refusing to give up their independence? Do they have adequate savings to pay for care? Are they getting the right Medicare, Medicaid, or VA benefits? This book by a veteran care management professional will help you secure the best possible care.

Practical, conversational and authentic, this timely book by Lorraine Morales, is a must-read for the increasing number of people with aging parents. The book partners Lorrie’s journey and real-life stories with essential facts, take-aways, and practical advice to help caregivers and their loved ones make realistic, knowledgeable, and simple decisions before they’re in a crisis. Focused on Alberta but applicable to all Canadians, Lorrie’s insights touch on everything from organizing medical information to choosing a nursing home. Readers will benefit from the wealth of knowledge shared by the author, and they will feel encouraged and equipped to do what needs to be done. We Can Do This! offers Lorrie’s personal story to help others realize that planning for later years in life can be a relatively stress-free process. A tribute to her parents and a guide to all those struggling with the “What do I do now?” questions associated with aging parents, We Can Do This! is one of the new generation of books in health care and senior communities containing indispensable information for all readers.

A USA Today BESTSELLER! "Informative. Complete. And practical. This book will guide family caregivers through the surprisingly complex world of senior care." —MEHMET OZ, M.D., New York Times bestselling coauthor of YOU: The Owner's Manual: The Complete All-in-One Care Guide Choosing the best care for your aging parents and other seniors in your life is not only complex, with multiple options available, it's also highly personal and often emotional. This essential resource—written by the founders of Home Instead Senior Care, the world's largest provider of nonmedical care for seniors—guides you through a comprehensive range of things to consider, step by step, so you can make better informed decisions and be confident that the senior in your life is receiving the best care possible. Checklists and diagnostics will help you: Decide if at-home care is the right choice for you and your loved ones Evaluate the pros and cons of retirement communities, adult care centers, nonmedical caregivers, assisted living facilities, nursing homes, and hospice Determine the costs of senior care options and find helpful support networks "This is not just another book about caring for aging parents. It's a great reference you'll use again and again. Stages doesn't shy away from the hard questions. Rather, it shows you how to confront them."—SUZANNE MINTZ, President/CEO, National Family Caregivers Association "Recognizing that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, this salient volume compassionately addresses a full range of hard-to-discuss subjects."--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY All of the authors' profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Home Instead Senior Care Foundation. Paul and Lori Hogan founded Home Instead Senior Care in 1994. Now with 850 offices in 15 countries, Home Instead is recognized as a global leader and authority on senior care. Visit them at www.stagesofseniorcare.com.

PARENTING NEVER ENDS. From the founders of the #1 site for parents of teens and young adults comes an essential guide for building strong relationships with your teens and preparing them to successfully launch into adulthood The high school and college years: an extended roller coaster of academics, friends, first loves, first break-ups, driver’s ed, jobs, and everything in between. Kids are constantly changing and how we parent them must change, too. But how do we stay close as a family as our lives move apart? Enter the co-founders of Grown and Flown, Lisa Heffernan and Mary Dell Harrington. In the midst of guiding their own kids through this transition, they launched what has become the largest website and online community for parents of fifteen to twenty-five year olds. Now they’ve compiled new takeaways and fresh insights from all that they’ve learned into this handy, must-have guide. Grown and Flown is a one-stop resource for parenting teenagers, leading up to—and through—high school and those first years of independence. It covers everything from the monumental (how to let your kids go) to the mundane (how to shop for a dorm room). Organized by topic—such as academics, anxiety and mental health, college life—it features a combination of stories, advice from professionals, and practical sidebars. Consider this your parenting lifeline: an easy-to-use manual that offers support and perspective. Grown and Flown is required reading for anyone looking to raise an adult with whom you have an enduring, profound connection.

An essential guide to tackling what students, families, and educators can do now to cut through stress and performance pressure, and find a path to purpose. Today’s college-bound kids are stressed, anxious, and navigating demands in their lives unimaginable to a previous generation. They’re performance machines, hitting the benchmarks they’re “supposed” to in order to reach the next tier of a relentless ladder. Then, their mental and physical exhaustion carries over right into first jobs. What have traditionally been considered the best years of life have become the beaten-down years of life. Belle Liang and Timothy Klein devote their careers both to counseling individual students and to cutting through the daily pressures to show a better way, a framework, and set of questions to find kids’ “true north”: what really turns them on in life, and how to harness the core qualities that reveal, allowing them to choose a course of study, a college, and a career. Even the gentlest parents and teachers tend to play into pervasive societal pressure for students to PERFORM. And when we take the foot off the gas, we beg the kids to just figure out what their PASSION is. Neither is a recipe for mental or physical health, or, ironically, for performance or passion. How to Navigate Life shows that successful human beings instead tap into their PURPOSE—the why behind the what and how. Best of all, purpose is a completely translatable quality to every aspect of life, from first jobs to last jobs and everything in between.

“I absolutely loved this beautiful book! It's wise, wry, bracingly honest and so gripping I couldn't put it down. Clearly whip smart, Margaux Bergen has one of those rare voices that pulls you in and makes you want to keep reading.” — Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother An inspiring, piercingly honest user's guide to life, written for the author's daughter and given to her on her first day of college, reflecting tough lessons about family, work, and marriage. You learn a few useful things at school--the three Rs come in handy, and it's good to know how to perform under pressure and wait your turn--but most of what matters, what makes you into a functioning human being, able to hold your own in conversation, find your path, know what to avoid in relationships and secure a meaningful job, no teacher will ever tell you. This diamond-sharp, gut-punchingly honest book of hard-earned wisdom is one mother's effort to equip her daughter for survival in the real world. Margaux Bergen began writing this book when her daughter Charlotte turned nine and gave it to her right after graduation from high school, when she was setting off for her first day of college. "I am not writing this to groom or guide you to professional or academic success," she writes. "My goal is rather to give you tools that might help you engage with the world and flourish. . . . Think of this as a kind of developing bath-time wisdom." Wise, heartbreakingly funny, and resonantly true, Navigating Life has invaluable lessons for students of life of all ages. It will challenge you to lead a more meaningful life and to tackle the bumps along the way with grace, grit, style, and ingenuity. What The Blessings of a Skinned Knee did for the early years of parenting, Navigating Life does for the next, far more perilous chapter, when new graduates are cast out on the high seas and have to learn to swim and find their way by themselves.